Democrats are spending tens of millions of dollars to answer a simple question: Why don’t men like them? After black, Hispanic, and white men all swung toward President Donald Trump in the 2024 election, those on the Left have at least pretended to start soul-searching. Have they been successful? Hardly.
Leaders of the Democratic National Committee recently began using “gender equity” rules to dump DNC Vice Chairman David Hogg, who suggested that members of his party don’t want men to “have fun.”
Liberals have also launched the search for “the next Joe Rogan,” despite the fact that the wildly successful podcaster, who endorsed Trump in 2024, was once a Democrat.
“They had me,” Rogan said of the quest for a media personality more sympathetic to Democrats’ schemes. “I was on their side.”
Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN), the vice presidential candidate who infamously fumbled football lingo by posting the phrase “run a mean pick 6,” suggested during an election retrospective this spring, “I was on the ticket, quite honestly, because I could code talk to white guys watching football or fixing their truck.”
Suffice it to say, most Democrats have learned very little from 2024. But some claim to be interested in winning men back. Their findings, should the intrepid researchers choose to accept them, are telling. Democratic strategists’ much-maligned $20 million project to understand the minds of males, known as Speaking with American Men, released its initial findings. As it turns out, men don’t think the Democratic Party has much to say to them at all.
One member of a focus group complained about former Vice President Kamala Harris’s celebrity endorsements: “What does that have to do with me? I’m trying to move up in life.” Another contrasted “the fluid masculinity” of the Democrats with “the traditional masculinity of a provider, strong, and the machismo type” of Republicans. This echoed findings from another researcher, who learned from focus groups of swing voters that “Republicans are seen as ‘apex predators,’ like lions, tigers, and sharks — beasts that take what they want when they want it. Democrats are typically tagged as tortoises, slugs, or sloths: slow, plodding, passive,” according to the New York Times.
Democrats have almost fully severed themselves from anything associated with traditional masculinity, and now they want to know why men aren’t interested in their candidates. (Former President Barack Obama waved these concerns away even before the election by saying black men were afraid to vote for Harris because she is a woman.)
Ultimately, as Democratic strategist Ross Morales Rocketto suggested, men can tell when they’re only wanted for their votes.
“The Democratic Party is missing that we’re not going to be able to message our way out of these deep problems men are facing, starting with the fact that they know the Democratic Party doesn’t really like or respect them,” he said.
THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS A MAN PROBLEM
The Democratic problem with men runs much deeper than the party may realize. Democrats have recreated masculinity in their own image, and they’re not going to have any success with men until they stop trying to “fix” them, conditioning them to feel appropriate shame for their toxicity and privilege. They have prescribed what C.S. Lewis illustrated in The Abolition of Man: “Traditional values are to be ‘debunked’ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it.”
This “fresh shape” may be palatable to the Democratic establishment, but it has no resemblance to actual men.