The Suffering of Young Men Undid the Democrats

While many of us are angry, and some of us are putting down Trump voters, it’s time to open up the party's “Big Tent” to support young men, both black & white, who need help in tough financial times.

Get a grip, folks!

I know you’re angry that we didn’t win, but Trump voters aren’t necessarily “massively stupid” nor did they simply “decide to choose evil,” quoting just two of many similar comments I’ve seen on social media since the election.

The voters that took Trump beyond his base simply chose what they saw as their own self-interest, a factor the Democratic Party needs to get a handle on as it moves forward. Let’s look more closely at one segment of this group, white males between the ages of 19 and 34. In 2020, this group favored Joe Biden by 9 points; in 2024, they favored Trump by 18 points, a tectonic shift in a short amount of time. 

Scott Galloway is an NYU professor who hosts The Prof G Show, a popular weekly podcast that offers financial and life advice to an audience that's three-quarters male. Galloway discussed these voters in a talk with CNN's Michael Smerconish on Saturday.

According to Galloway, these young men are largely supportive of gender equality. But he said many of them believe that the Democrats have no room for them inside the so-called “Big Tent” they like to boast about. They feel “abandoned,” he explained, by a party that’s quick to support every other struggling minority group in America.

“Did anyone onstage at the Democratic Convention mention the very real issues young men are facing?” he asked, clearly seeking to make a rhetorical point. The general feeling among Democrats, he said, is “screw these guys,” believing they must be among the privileged because they’re white and male.

But the truth is very different.

While the Biden/Harris team has made impressive gains against inflation, that progress has been undercut among young men and women by a dark economic undercurrent. The election came at the end of a two-year period when more than 5,000 companies announced large-scale layoffs, affecting every aspect of society. This year’s list includes CVS, Walmart, IBM, and Nike, among many others.

As you know, the last people hired by a company are always the first to be left go in these situations. The cuts eliminated jobs for both college-educated young adults and those without college. Those with college, of course, survived better. But the scarcity of available jobs for those without college has left about 3 million men between the ages of 25 and 34 in a situation where they are no longer even seeking employment.

Many of these men have no girlfriends, Galloway says, and still live with their parents at a time when the average age of a first-time homebuyer is 54, compared with 36 forty years ago. For the first time, he said, a 30-year-old man in American isn’t doing as well as his father did at the same age.

Honestly, I don’t know that to be true, given this country has gone through a civil war and a great depression, but I get his point. And I wonder if that’s why we’ve seen females in their 40s and 50s voting for Trump as well, hopeful for a change in direction for their sons, even as they voted against right-wing abortion bans in the states they live in?

“The question is: do we believe empathy is a zero-sum game?” Galloway asks. “Gay rights didn’t hurt hetero-normative marriage, civil rights didn’t hurt white people. Should a 19-year-old with fewer economic and romantic opportunities pay the price for the privileges” enjoyed by older men?

Yeah, I have three sons, so I’m not the best one to answer this. I’m pretty convinced they’re set up to compete against mostly anyone in the work place. But for the Democratic Party to compete against the Republicans moving forward, they need a plan to address this in a strong manner.

First off, it seems as if we need to actively acknowledge that young men have fallen faster than any other demographic in America over the last 40 years, particularly during a time when Trump will likely be more concerned about what he gets as a result of his election than what anybody else might get.

And, frankly, we need to better promote what Democrats are already achieving. I remember Joe Biden saying proudly that 70% of the jobs created by the infrastructure act is going to be among men who don’t necessarily have college degrees, but I don’t remember it being an issue in a campaign that seemed scared to death to even mention Biden’s name.

Kamala Harris did say she would eliminate the college-degree requirement for federal workers, which could be a big deal if it was better sold, but that idea kind of fell into the void afterward, right?

With these young men increasingly depending on the internet for their information, rather than newspapers or TV, we also have to establish a better alternative to the wise-ass, far-right bloggers who have gained an outsized dominance there. As a group, Democrats still depend on TV folks like Colin Jost or Jon Stewart or the various late-night hosts to turn the tables on the nation’s right wing in any sort of captivating way.

But while Stewart’s show averages around a half-million viewers and Saturday Night Live gets around 3 million viewers, the Joe Rogan Experience on the Internet boasts 14.5 million followers on Spotify, with an average age of 34, and 17.9 million YouTube subscribers.

It’s an uphill battle, folks. There’s no doubt about that, but it’s a battle worth taking on as we move toward the 2028 election. What do you think we should do?