To foreigners, the fact that so many millions of Americans are buying the used and poisonous goods that Donald Trump is selling is an unfathomable mystery. However, some clues to the allure of Trumpism can be found in the gender gap of unprecedented size that has opened up between those in the 18-29 age group.
As this NTY podcast explains in depth, just over half of young men – and especially those without a college degree – intend voting for Trump, while two thirds of young women are voting for Kamala Harris, whatever their educational background.
The youth vote hasn’t always been progressive. In the 2000 election, the youth vote split equally between George W. Bush and Al Gore. Under Barack Obama, under Hillary Clinton in 2016, and in 2020 under Joe Biden, the youth vote was decidedly liberal.
According to a recent Economist/YouGov poll, the gap has narrowed but the youth vote is still breaking 55- 39 % in favour of Harris, despite widespread disapproval among young voters of the Biden administration’s handling of climate change, gun control and the war in Gaza. (Incidentally, Biden’s steadfast backing of Israel’s actions in Gaza and Lebanon has seen the previous overwhelming support for Democrats among Arab-Americans plummet to a 50/50 split in recent polls.)
But here’s what’s interesting about the youth vote. As mentioned, American men and women under 30 have recently tended to be similar in the generally progressive bent of their politics – but reportedly, their allegiances are now more divided than those found among any other age group of voters.
Why do so many young men identify with the messages that Trump and J.D. Vance are promoting? In the NYT podcast, the data analyst Claire Cain Miller cites (a) the increasingly academic nature of education from first grade onwards and (b) the changes in the job market, which have seriously undermined men’s self-image as earners and providers.
As Miller says:
School has become much more academic, much earlier, starting at five. Kids are expected to sit still for longer to learn, to read earlier, to do assignments. And this has really ended up benefiting girls more than boys because girls tend to mature earlier than boys. So they’re more able to act like this in kindergarten. And that continues through school.
Result: significantly more young women report having positive learning experiences at school. The girls and young women raised in a positive environment during the 1990s and 2000s, have gone on to embrace the widening of their social and career horizons:
Girls are outpacing boys in school. It’s true in high school and college. It’s true as early as kindergarten and their opportunities in life, the roles that they can play really opened up from just a couple generations ago.
The reverse has been happening for many boys and young men – both scholastically and within a deteriorating jobs market. Young men have been dropping out of high school and college at the same time as the market economy has been destroying the sort of manufacturing jobs that used to support the families headed by their fathers and grandfathers. Moreover, as Miller adds, much of the job growth for relatively unqualified workers has been occurring in the so-called “pink jobs” (hospital nursing, home health care, hospitality sector) traditionally associated with women:
So in this same time period, it’s become much harder to earn a middle class wage without a college degree. That’s particularly true for men because the jobs that men without college degrees used to do that earned them enough to support a family were largely in manufacturing. And these are the jobs that since the 1980s have really disappeared from the United States in large numbers. Right? They have either been replaced by robots or they’ve been sent abroad.
Trump as solution
Culturally, these trends have been corrosive for working class male identity. Enter Donald Trump and J.D Vance. The Republican duo is promising to reverse the trends, recreate the jobs – and crucially, restore the ability of young men to be the breadwinners and main providers within the households they aspire to lead. Unfortunately, these male aspirations for their traditional role in society are in conflict with economic reality, and they would entail actively reversing the socio-economic gains made by women.
Trump and Vance have been skilled at exploiting these hopes and fears, while laying the blame for this male identity crisis squarely on the Washington elites who support Kamala Harris:
The expectations that these young men have are the same as previous generations. But the reality is different. Their reality has changed. They can no longer meet those expectations. And as we know, unmet expectations are a principle ingredient of political change.
As one young man told the NYT analysts:
I feel like Trump’s going to really be able to fix the issue he has been having with trying to spend millions of dollars elsewhere financially supporting Ukraine. I feel like he’s gonna really turn around and focus on America when it comes to tax breaks, cutting more taxes. I know, especially for corporations, [but] I really believe that it [cutting taxes] opens up a lot more people to open up more business. So bring a lot more jobs over here.
Trump’s macho swagger on the world stage also feeds into these young men’s faith in Trump having the strength to restore better times. “I feel like we were super strong under Trump,” one of the NYT’s male informants said, adding that Vladimir Putin hadn’t dared to invade Ukraine while Trump was President.
Women for Harris
Exactly the opposite vision of the future has been opening up for many young female voters. These advances are now at risk because the situation facing young men and women is being treated by the Republican Party as a zero sum game – whereby any ground that young men regain will be at the expense of the socio-economic gains made by young women, many of whom now earn more than their male contemporaries.
For some of the NYT’s female respondents, their progressive awakening began with the defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, and with the toxic way she was vilified during that campaign. As one respondent put it:
Seeing Trump elected made me realize, oh no, this is how most people feel about, you know, women and people of colour in our country. And that was really dis-illusioning.
The Me Too movement provided young women with further evidence that their personal experiences of sexual harassment were not an isolated occurrence, and that denigrating attitudes to women were being socially endorsed. Reportedly, the Dobbs case that overturned Roe v Wade marked the moment when many young women also realised that American history could go backwards – and that Trumpism poses a comprehensive threat to all women, and puts all their rights at risk. As one women told the NYT:
The political climate towards women is scary. I feel like it’s an attack on women to be completely honest with you… And it also made me think, wow, if we can roll this back, what else could change? I really do think like if we give them room to make more decisions, they’ll come after birth control… As much as I believe women are equal – does the rest of the world, do the people in power, feel that way? Because it doesn’t feel that way right now.
For many of the cohort of American women under 30, the old maxim that they will get more conservative as they grow older no longer rings true. If anything they are moving further to the left on every issue, from reproductive rights to climate change to race relations to policing, to gun control, and labour rights. Many of the activist movements on those issues are headed by women.
As Claire Cain Miller summed up her research:
Young men and young women are moving in different directions, diverging from one another. In a lot of ways. It’s politics, it’s education, it’s religion. Men are more likely than their female peers to go to church now, which is a surprising new development. It’s media. They’re consuming, you know, sometimes entirely different media from different sources. And so they’re really beginning to live sort of different lives in a lot of areas.
In the light of all this, the growing reluctance of under 30s to date people with whom they disagree politically, should hardly come as a surprise. Given the existential threat that Trumpism poses to women’s basic rights, any compassion felt by young women over what the market economy has done to male self-esteem has had to be tempered by self-interest.
To repeat: the Trump cult’s recovery plan for young male Americans is directly premised on reversing the advances made by young women in their reproductive rights, in their career prospects, and in their pay and seniority in the workplace.
Footnote: There is plenty of evidence that the status quo is not working for young voters. Reportedly, Gen Z are spending over 30% more on housing, almost 50% more on health insurance, and twice as much on car insurance than millennials. Unlike the situation in 2020, the Democrats are now the White House incumbents, with all the disadvantages this brings in its wake.
Basically, it is very hard to motivate Gen Z to vote for more of the same. Harris has recognised that she may not be the most effective person to sell the administration’s track record to young voters. Belatedly, she has called in Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. AOC is about to campaign for Harris in swing states like Wisconsin. Star power though, may not be enough.