The Patriot Post® · Men Vote Too

The media has talked at length about the women’s vote and for a couple of key reasons. Abortion is the major one, whereby the media fans the flames ignited by the Dobbs decision in order to goose Democrat turnout. The other is the opportunity to finally break through the glass ceiling that Hillary Clinton cracked her head on eight years ago. And with the accidental candidacy of Kamala Harris, this will also spur their female-centered get-out-the-vote efforts.

On the other hand, men have been forgotten, and they take that in their usual stoic fashion. Their silence in the political world hasn’t been without a big stick, though: Young men are far more likely than their female peers to support Donald Trump — a gap that continues to widen. As FrontPage Magazine’s Daniel Greenfield opined:

Gen Z has the largest gender gap of any age group with young men supporting Trump by margins similar to those of older men. Black men and Hispanic men have been the hardest minority groups to persuade into the Kamala camp. …

Why is Kamala doing so poorly among men? One hint comes from polling numbers showing that white men went from supporting Trump by 13 points before the DNC convention to 21 points afterward. “Joy,” “brat summer,” and all the efforts to brand a presidential campaign like the Barbie movie backfired, making Kamala into “Barbie” and Trump into “Oppenheimer.”

Generation Z, defined as those born between 1997 and 2012 — meaning many of them have now reached voting age — are also the ones who have seen a lifetime of increasing social media influence and endless strife in the post-9/11 world. Many also endured a year or more of remote schooling thanks to the pandemic, missing out on the social events many of us older folks took for granted in high school or college. And while their women are celebrated, the young men in that cohort are having a much more difficult time progressing to adulthood.

A Wall Street Journal story detailing a Florida family noted that, while their one daughter finished college and is now engaged, their three young adult sons still live at home. Two of the three started college but didn’t get far, and all three are finding work in the family business. As the WSJ story points out, “While women now expect to have more and better opportunities than their mothers and grandmothers, men are in some ways bracing for the opposite. Researchers say that has created a crisis of purpose, especially for men at the entrance to adulthood.”

Given that widening gender gap, it was no wonder that the “White Dudes for Harris” campaign fell flat as a pancake. “The only men who would proudly and publicly join that group are men who have no self-respect left because they’ve spent much of the past decade apologizing for their existence and de-centering themselves from the narrative, all the while getting a pat on the head from the women in their lives,” said writer Sasha Stone, who describes herself as “a former Democrat and Leftist who escaped the bubble to get to know the other side of the country and to take a more critical look at the left.” That’s what Gen Z men have been force-fed as they grew up, leaving them unsure of their gender role.

And while The Babylon Bee makes light of how the guys perceive Harris when it comes to her campaign, it brings up a good point: She’s not talking about the things that men — Gen Z or otherwise — care about. (Plus, let’s face it: Calling Tim Walz “a giant fruitcake” is humorous because guys really believe it.)

Last week, our Emmy Griffin noted that women have particular triggers that Democrats take advantage of every election: “The sad thing is that as emotionally intelligent as many women are, they can’t see through Harris’s fakeness,” she wrote. “Harris is a bad boss who is terrible at her job. But men make fun of her laugh and attack her for sleeping her way up the political ladder. Does it then follow that she must be defended at all costs?”

While Donald Trump may not exactly be the man every mother wants her son to grow up to be, Stone writes, “He offers necessary masculinity at a time when it is most desperately needed.” Because of this, many Gen Z men — some of whom have often grown up without a father figure because men were deemed disposable by “grrl power” — have found a surrogate in Trump, and they’re closing ranks to vote for him.