Democrats Sound the Alarm on Disengaged Male Voters
Rahm Emanuel joined Gavin Newsom and Tim Walz in warning the party that it is losing a generation of men, urging new outreach before 2026 and 2028 elections.Democrats have worried for years about shrinking support among men, yet the concern has rarely broken through the daily news cycle. That is changing more so following the party’s 2024 loss to President Donald Trump, particularly this month as three high-profile Democrats delivered almost the same message in separate forums: Young and working-class men are drifting away, and the party cannot win future national elections without them.
Former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel was the latest voice. On a podcast hosted by Megyn Kelly, he said the party “lost it with young men” after years of “walking on eggshells” about cultural issues. Emanuel argued that voters, especially men, want a sense of “strength, confidence, and optimism,” and he blamed his party for spending more time “focused on bathroom access rather than classroom excellence.”
California Gov. Gavin Newsom raised a similar red flag in a four-hour interview on the Shawn Ryan show released this month.
“We’ve got a crisis of masculinity, a crisis with young men,” Newsom said. “Suicide rates, deaths of despair—in every category, our men are just getting crushed, and my party needs to own that.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, who was the 2024 Democratic vice presidential nominee, echoed the theme on the “At Our Table” podcast. Recalling a conversation with his son about male classmates, Walz said many young men are drawn to “the thrill and the excitement” of Republican politics because Democrats “fail to offer men a compelling sense of direction.”
Those warnings land as data trends show a widening gender gap. Nationally, Pew’s 2024 National Public Opinion Reference Survey finds men now favor the GOP 52 percent to 42 percent, a seven-point swing toward Republicans from the 48–45 split Pew recorded in 2020.
Pew’s validated-voter analysis of 2024 shows that 55 percent of men voted for Trump over former Vice President Kamala Harris, up from 50 percent in 2020.
Taylor Rathus, a professor and author who studies masculinity and youth development, told The Epoch Times the shift is less about policy and more about identity.
“Many young men feel politically invisible—unseen by a Democratic narrative they perceive as focused on others’ struggles, and courted by conservative narratives that offer belonging, status, traditional masculine signs of strength, and certainty,” she said in an emailed statement.
“We also see signs that many young men are supporting anti-establishment figures (on either side) or dropping out of civic engagement altogether. In that sense, the shift isn’t only to the right; it’s also toward disengagement and distrust, seeing no place for themselves in the current conversation.”
She said that the risk is trying to win these men back with “reactionary messaging that reinforces outdated ideals of manhood.”
“A great opportunity is to offer boys and men a meaningful, future-oriented vision they can identify with—one that emphasizes contribution, emotional strength, and social connection,” she added. “That’s not just good politics; it’s good for young men’s mental health, healthy relationships, and society overall. Republicans have been more direct and aggressive in courting the men I describe by leaning into narratives of anti-wokeness, personal freedom, traditional gender roles and norms, and overall the restoration of lost statuses.”
She said Republicans have been successful at framing masculinity as under attack and position themselves as defenders of men, offering a clear “sense of belonging and purpose.”
“This messaging taps well into economic frustration, cultural resentment, and fears about social change—and it’s resonating with young men,” she added.
Democratic strategists see practical risks, too. Max Weisman, a Philadelphia-based communications consultant, told The Epoch Times that Democrats carried young women by wide margins in 2024 but lost ground with their male peers—a trend he noted had been “going on for years.”
“The issues the Democratic Party pushes and the communication strategies the party employs has left young men feeling unrepresented or spoken to as Democrats,” he said. “There is a risk in aggressively pushing to win back young men, as it could alienate women and minorities. This strategy is also important as it is a large voting bloc that could make it difficult to win without them.”
He added the party needed to clearly audit why men left as well as “add messaging and policy proposals that speak to this demographic, and talk to young men directly in spaces where they are.”
Adin Lenchner, a Brooklyn-based Democratic strategist with 15 years of experience, said groups in the field are broadening their universe beyond “likely voters” to include disengaged men.
“Republicans are offering easy answers,” Lenchner said. “Democrats need to offer meaningful ones, backed by real organizing and policy.”
“There’s growing concern in Democratic circles about erosion among male voters—especially younger men who feel politically homeless,” he said in an email to The Epoch Times. “But what we’re seeing now isn’t just about men leaving the party; it’s about a vacuum of purpose and identity in politics that Republicans are actively filling with grievance, masculinity politics, and authoritarian vibes. Democrats can’t meet that with vibes alone—we need a proactive, grounded message that speaks to work, community, and is backed up by real organizing and policy.”
A fresh look at the same voters reinforces the warning. A July 2025 focus-group memo from the moderate-leaning Democratic think-tank Third Way and pollster HIT Strategies interviewed soft-Trump-supporting black, Latino, and non-college white men, 18–29, across seven battleground states.
Participants said Democrats had become “the anti-male party,” picked “dumb hills to die on” in culture wars, and failed to speak to their day-to-day costs. Yet their backing for Trump was far from enthusiastic—several called his tariff strategy “aches and pains” and balked at mass deportations “without due process.” The memo concludes that most are “persuadable swing voters” if Democrats can marry a working-class economic agenda with “mainstream” positions on culture.
Republicans welcome the trend. Tony Fabrizio, senior pollster for the Trump 2024 campaign, said that “the place where we made up the most ground is men under 35,” describing them as “a lot more economic-sensitive” and more likely to say their personal finances have worsened.
Emanuel, who served in the House of Representatives, as White House chief of staff under President Barack Obama, mayor of Chicago, and later as U.S. ambassador to Japan under President Joe Biden, argued in another podcast this month that Democrats can’t win men back without fixing the pipeline that turns boys into wage-earners.
“We’ve gotten focused on bathroom access rather than classroom excellence,” he said on the New Democrat Coalition podcast, saying the party has “lost it with young men.”
His prescription is what he calls a “T-A-R-T” agenda—“T for technology, A for attendance, R for reading, T for truth”—meant to put AI skills, strict truancy rules, a national reading drive, and full test-score transparency at the center of Democratic policy.
“The moment our democracy becomes unstable is exactly simultaneously the same time that the American Dream becomes unaffordable,” he said.
Emanuel said that in 2015, he dedicated his mayoral reelection speech to the “unseen and forgotten men” in Chicago, adding, “they’re not seen, they’re not heard, and the biggest thing to me is they have internalized this sense of failure, and it manifests itself in this rage and anger at the system and they have every right to be angry because they are swimming upstream.”
When asked what kind of Democrat could win them back, the young men mentioned in the Third Way memo praised Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s push to hire non-college workers, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore’s focus on “investing in men and boys,” and Pete Buttigieg’s call for civil dialogue with conservatives—clips the group described as “honest,” “genuine,” and “straight-shooting.” Whether the broader party will tolerate that approach, one participant said, “is a great thing in concept, but good luck getting the whole party to agree.”
Whether those messages land will be tested first in next year’s congressional races, but the long-term test arrives in 2028, when the party hopes to win back the White House with the help of newly recruited male voters.
If Emanuel, Newsom, and Walz are right, Democrats have little time to spare. As Newsom warned, “If this was happening in any other group, we’d be yelling and screaming about it.”
The Democratic National Committee declined multiple requests to provide a comment or conduct an interview with The Epoch Times for this article. The Republican National Committee also did not respond to requests for comment.
Reuters contributed to this report.
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