There’s a lot of talk about young men in politics. Two weeks ago, John Della Volpe wrote an article in the New York Times about Donald Trump’s supposedly unique appeal to dudebros. Just four days later, Jay Caspian Kang replied in the New Yorker. The underlying theme through many of these pieces is despair: young men are lonely, depressed and uncertain, and this alienation is what pushes them towards Trump’s GOP.

A few days after Della Volpe’s opinion came out, I went canvassing for Kamala Harris in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. One conversation I had there suggested a different story. I talked to a guy in his early twenties who was a long-haul trucker — at least, was one until diesel prices forced him out at their peak in 2022. Nevertheless, he had found a good job since, had a restored Corvette in the driveway and generally seemed to be thriving. He was also planning to vote for Donald Trump. If my canvassee was not lonely, depressed or uncertain, what could motivate that choice? Moving past the latent condescension there — “my political opponents must be mentally unstable” — the answer was that he thought Kamala Harris was weak on the world stage and at home and that weakness was more compromising than any of Donald Trump’s defects. 

That’s obviously anecdotal evidence, but I think it bears out a truth in our politics: Republicans are seen as the party of strength and Democrats as the party of weakness. That’s importantly untrue on foreign policy. The Biden administration has been strong on Ukraine; it’s Trump who cravenly appeases foreign dictators. But in many ways it’s the driving ethos of the Democratic Party. The Democrats are the party of people who need help: old people who need Medicare and Social Security, poor people who need Medicaid and SNAP benefits, DREAMers, women who need the freedom to make their own healthcare choices.

The GOP presents itself as the party of masculinity and strength. To some degree, that’s been the case since Richard Nixon ran on “law and order” in 1968. But there’s been a shift in the past several years. The Republican Party, in the name of projecting strength, has increasingly embraced outright cruelty. You can see it on the border, on foreign affairs and in the latest news cycle: Tony Hinchcliffe’s disastrous set at a Trump rally in which he seemingly thrilled at mocking as many electorally important ethnic groups as he could.

Some of that might stem from Donald Trump’s character and the departure from political norms that he represented. Trump isn’t actually like the tough guy from an old Western; he breaks his oaths, lies constantly, and cravenly hides from all responsibility. Instead, he papers over his own faults with bluster and vitriol and an incredible talent for getting away with things. For the Republican Party, those Trumpian idiosyncrasies mean a kind of political tradeoff. The GOP chose to prioritize the votes of young men, who are largely attracted to that kind of masculinity, over the votes of suburbanites — who shifted blue after 2016 and have remained largely Democratic despite several years of high inflation. And it isn’t news that young men are attracted to the kinds of aggression that Trump and JD Vance LAW ’13 represent. One of my takeaways from reading the Iliad this semester was that young men have reveled in having power over others for thousands of years. What’s changed is that fact is now an electoral strategy.

The Democratic Party is partly going to have to put up with the loss of young men. Its opposition invested political capital in courting those votes; it is just going to be more expensive to get them back. Every minute Kamala Harris spends talking about the “Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America,” as Della Volpe writes she should, is a minute she could be winning over voters more naturally inclined to vote for her.

On another level, though, Democratic messaging towards young men is hilariously bad — and relatively easy fixes could have an impact. Tim Walz’s favorability has declined since its mid-August peak, and his rollout as the icon of progressive masculinity has mostly failed. Part of that failure is his terrible social media outreach. One recent tweet referred to a “final quarter” comeback. People who watch football — unlike the staffer who was Walz’s Twitter login — know that it’s called the fourth quarter. That’s not a major mistake, but it immediately conveys to the target audience that Walz, or at least his social media team, doesn’t speak the language. It discredits Walz’s “man’s man” persona. And Republicans notice. Tommy Tuberville, the senior Senator from Alabama and former Bama football coach, quote tweeted Walz, saying “we call it the 4th Quarter, ‘Coach’.” Young men don’t vote for Trump because Walz is lame online. They don’t vote for Trump because the boxer Dave Bautista makes corny, long-winded Jimmy Kimmel appearances about him. But it doesn’t help, and all the Harris campaign would have to do is hire a couple of interns who spend their Sundays watching RedZone.

The right-wing shift of young men isn’t reducible to depression, anxiety and loneliness. The consensus that self-confidence is the central cause is a little infantilizing. It’s also not a useful one for people trying to reverse that shift. Male Trump supporters vote for him because they like the aggressive strength he aims at. They’re wrong, but they don’t do it because they’re deeply troubled people.

TEDDY WITT is a first year in Berkeley College. He can be reached at teddy.witt@yale.edu.