They voted for their sons

I knew the discussions at the Denver retreat left out something really important around gender. I couldn't quite articulate what it was until I heard Scott Galloway say it to Trevor Noah.

Bottom-half women voted for Trump because they thought he would help their bottom-half sons. Bottom-half Black women stayed home for their bottom-half sons.

The polls and vote counts are showing that the Democratic Party has a young, bottom-half male problem.

“The data is clear: young men across racial lines were key to Trump’s victory,”

Young Men Research Initiative

just wrote.

The gender gap among young voters widened from 8 points in 2012 to 17 points in 2024. This is the widest gender gap we’ve seen in recent cycles and the largest gap among the generations polled.

But not across educational lines. Polling firm Catalist described “supercharged education polarization” as “a defining feature of electorates in the Trump era” in a just-published report. Before 2016, college and non-college voters moved in the same direction between elections. Since 2016, the gap between college and non-college voters has widened substantially.

So we’re not talking about all young men here. We’re talking about young men in the bottom-half of income and education.

But this problem has to be bigger than just these men. Women without degrees also moved toward Trump.

I already assumed many bottom-half women were voting Republican because they’re mad about the bottom-half men around them sucking too much ass at life to be worth dating, marrying, or having kids with. After all, growing up, I was a bottom-half woman who was unenthused about her options.

I hadn’t thought about the moms. My sons are two orange cats.

I did know that people vote to benefit others. Researchers call how people choose which communities to prioritize when voting “linked fate.” So if I voted for the candidate I thought would be best for women, for example, rather than for, say, whites, then I would consider my fate to be more linked with other women than with fellow whites.

Linked fate is why living in a community with declining economic prospects better predicted Trump support than a person’s individual income.

Marriage changes women’s linked fate.

When the average woman marries, she starts to prioritize her husband over the candidate that promises to benefit women broadly. Again, I’m not a (human) mother, but I’d imagine most moms feel their fates are much more linked to their kids than their husbands.

I think these moms are learning, in real time, that they got the question of which candidate would have been better for their sons very wrong. An economic recession, which the Trump admin is barreling us into at astonishing speed, will only help investors who are shorting the markets.

Slow economic growth will hurt young, bottom-half men most. They’ll make less money for the rest of their lives. And since male earnings are highly correlated with marriage, fewer of them will ever marry. And since marriage benefits men tremendously and disproportionately, they’ll have shorter, much worse lives overall.

According to Galloway, most young men are currently on track to have worse lives than their fathers. I’m not sure that’s literally true. But it is undeniably true, based on the data, for a very large portion of bottom-half young men. Until and unless that changes, bottom-half women are going to keep voting for whoever promises to fix that.

If trends continue, these moms are a lot more likely to change their minds about who to vote for in terms of party than who to vote for in terms of linked fate.

Which means that if Democratic candidates want to have any chance of winning, they must effectively convince these moms that they care about their sons. They need to have plans for improving their prospects.