Carry The News: How to Stop Losing All the Young Dudes

Politics is relational – Democrats need to build a relationship.

Take a scroll through social media, spend a day at a left-leaning think tank, or flip through the pages of a high-brow magazine, and you’ll quickly come to see that a lot of young men in America are broken, lonely, hurting, and lost. They aren’t hopeless—but they don’t trust Democrats to actually help improve their lives.

Into this void have stepped conservatives. And as a result, young men are increasingly voting for Republicans: in 2024, while young women supported Kamala Harris by 17 points (58%–41%), young men went for Donald Trump by 14 points (56%–42%).

That’s a 31-point gap. Let that sink in for a second: 31 POINTS! It drove a 21-point swing among young people aged 18-29 from the Democratic ticket to the Republican ticket between 2020 and 2024. Youth turnout also dropped meaningfully between those two elections.

Electorally speaking, this is a five-alarm coalition crisis for our party.

Souce: James McNellis

But many Democrats want to treat the loss of young male voters like it’s a simple branding issue: cut out the scolding and cut back on the purity tests, invest in better social media, hire a “bro translator,” do a few more podcasts, and voila, young men will return to the fold. That’s a comfortable, easy solution. It’s also wrong. If Democrats continue to cling to the myth that messaging tweaks will be enough to win back the hearts and minds of young men, then we risk losing this generation for good.

Here’s the harder truth: right now, many of these voters don’t just think Democrats are annoying. They think we’re fundamentally opposed to a lot of the things they love—the apps they use, the communities they’ve built, and the hobbies they practice every day. And they resent us for it.

Take TikTok, the most popular social media platform among young people; Pew reports that roughly half of 18–29-year-olds use TikTok at least once a day. During the Biden Administration, Democrats opposed the app, hyping it as a “national security risk,” denouncing it as the work of a “foreign adversary,” and pushing a divest-or-ban strategy that President Biden signed into law in April 2024. Meanwhile, Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans prodigiously pumped out content on TikTok to an eager audience of young male voters.

All that made the 2024 lived experience of a 22-year-old guy rather simple: Donald Trump uses my favorite app. Democrats tried to delete it. We can’t be shocked that a generation of daily TikTok consumers heard “ban the app” as “ban my social life.”

Then there’s the gamer/streamer/Discord universe, all popular social hubs for young men. Democrats have been late to recognize these spaces as a new town square, and when we do show up in these spaces, too often, it’s to talk about what’s wrong with them—the addiction, toxicity, and violence that all fester like weeds online. Whereas Republicans and right-wing influencers regularly show up just to hang out and ingrain themselves in the community. Young men are unsurprisingly concluding that Democrats don’t like, respect, or appreciate their culture.

Politics is relational – if one side shows up and the other side critiques, don’t be surprised who winds up earning the trust of their audience.

Money is the next layer. Gen-Z increasingly feels insecure in, and distrustful of, our economy. That’s partly why cryptocurrencies resonate so strongly with this generation. Pew finds that men ages 18–29 are the most likely demographic group to say they’ve invested in, traded, or used crypto; 42% of young men say they have, compared with just 17% of young women.

You don’t have to be a crypto evangelist to hear the underlying message these numbers present: a lot of young men believe the traditional financial system doesn’t offer them a fair path to security or upside. But when young people believe that Democrats want to ban, shame, and regulate crypto into oblivion, we come across like we’re dismissing the frustration that brought about crypto-curiousity in the first place. Democrats should instead make clear that because the system has failed people, and because scams and market manipulation are real, consumers need protection – and that we alone have a plan to give it to them.

Sports betting is the same story in a different costume. A Siena poll last year found that almost half of all men ages 18-49 have an online sportsbook account. The same poll found Americans support legal online sports betting in all 50 states by a 16-point margin. States, meanwhile, have grown dependent on the revenue: the National Conference of State Legislatures reports states collected more than $1.8 billion in sports betting tax revenue in fiscal year 2023, and the U.S. Census Bureau has documented sports betting as a growing source of tax revenue that funds public services. But Democrats again come across far too often as a “nanny-state”, trying to regulate away the fun, community, and thrill that gambling offers millions of young people.

Some regulation is good, of course. According to that same Siena poll, 58% of respondents said that the federal government should regulate online sports betting to protect customers, and 63% supported the SAFE BET Act, the kind of federal guardrails Democrats have championed.

But tone matters – and the coming reckoning over prediction markets offers an opportunity for our party’s posture to pivot.

Prediction markets – platforms where people trade “event contracts” on the outcome of elections, sports, and economic data – are catnip for a very online, very male slice of the electorate. Under President Biden, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission issued a proposed rule in May 2024 aimed at further defining which event contracts are “contrary to the public interest,” explicitly treating political contests as “gaming.” Since President Trump returned to office, the tone around these markets has shifted: states have escalated legal fights, while federal officials have more openly defended federal jurisdiction and signaled interest in clearer rules, as opposed to broad prohibitions.

Democrats can, and absolutely should, be working to quell gambling addiction, combat match-fixing, and stamp out insider trading. But we should also be working to shape the world of online betting as it is, rather than treat a wildly popular hobby as a moral failure that must be eradicated. Otherwise, we risk repeating the same mistake we made with TikTok: we’ll look like the people who show up to a party, only to shut off the music. And nobody votes for the vibe-killers.

I’m not saying that Democrats should rush to embrace every emerging technology, willy-nilly – I’m saying that Democrats should be the party of competence. Regulate without condescension; protect consumers without treating voters like children; fight scams without insulting the millions who are trying to get ahead in a system that hasn’t exactly been handing out trophies.

Those are winning policy principles – and right now, we have an opportunity to capitalize on them. Donald Trump’s failure to deliver on his plethora of campaign promises and his prioritization of his billionaire buddies over regular, hardworking, struggling Americans is giving Democrats a new opening with young men. If we stop worrying about our branding, start listening to this generation, and work to meet them where they are, we can truly start to earn back their trust – and ultimately, their votes.