Another Reason Why Kamala Harris Lost Among Young Men
As the wind blows away the confetti after the 2024 election for the American presidency, more clues are emerging about the strength of Trump’s victory.
Perhaps the most surprising result was that young men (18 to 29 years old) overwhelmingly voted for Trump – 56 percent for Trump versus 42 for Harris. Amongst young white men, the gap was 28 percent – 63 percent for Trump versus 35 percent for Harris. Amongst young men without a college degree, the gap was 18 percent; amongst those with a college degree, the gap was 6 percent.
In short, the Democrats lost the Gen Z men. Bigly, extremely very bigly. Why?
In the aftermath of the result, most pro-Harris commentators have attributed the loss to Trump’s “bro” appeal and his “hypermasculinity”. Young men felt like victims in an increasingly feminised world and voted for a boorish clown who validated their nostalgia for a patriarchal past. As one condescending writer on The Conversation mused:
young men seek out explanations for their struggles in ways that affirm their sense of injustice. These explanations are often found in the “manosphere” – a loose confederacy of social media platforms and influencers flooded with discussions about how “woke” politics, feminism and the rise of progressive values are undermining traditional masculinity.
How about a different take, one that doesn’t patronise young male voters, doesn’t infantilise them, doesn’t sneer at them?
Hypersexual Scare Campaign
The big mistake that Kamala Harris made was placing abortion at the front and centre of her campaign. Her message to young women was that the most important issues in their lives were abortion and the freedom to have sex wherever, whenever. The corollary for young men was that they should be able to have porn wherever, whenever.
So, one arrow in the Democrats’ quiver was to warn young men that “Republicans are going to steal your porn”. A group called “Hands Off My Porn” reportedly spent US$100,000 on ads for Kamala Harris. It was campaigning against age-verification for viewing online pornography.
Even more significant was the $2.5 million spent by the Democratic Super PAC Progress Action Fund on two ads, “Republicans In Your Bedroom – Part 2” and “Republicans Killing Your Wife.” The ads warned young male voters that Republican would ban abortions and online porn. They were a sinister, silly and obscene waste of money.
Another group, FTW PAC, ran anti-Trump ads on pornography websites in swing states during the final two weeks of the election. A 10-second ad featured a picture of the former president with the words, “Trump’s Project 2025 will ban porn.”
“I’m not a male influencer or anything, but I am trying to get out this message to men: That this guy, who you might think is ‘king of the bros,’ actually has a very conservative agenda that is going to take away your porn, is going to ban abortion, is going to do all kinds of invasive, culturally conservative things and you should be aware,” Wally Nowinski, the brains behind the porn-site ads, told Newsweek.
How much influence this had on the election is unclear. But it suggests that pandering to the sex-positive vibe was bound to fail. At a key point in her campaign, Kamala Harris was interviewed on “Call Her Daddy”, the podcast with the biggest audience among young women – it’s a raunchy, sex-saturated show about girls’ relationships. It showed what her priorities were.
What had these Democrats been smoking when they assumed that pornography and masturbation were the top issues for young male voters? No wonder they lost. Trump is terribly flawed, but he treated them like men. He appealed to their sense of dignity and self-respect. Harris’s campaign treated them like doofus porn-addicts who live in their mother’s basement and don’t take showers. Game over.
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Republished with thanks to Mercator. Image courtesy of Deans Charbal/Wikimedia Commons.
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Witty comment . Democrats don’t understand how the Feminists have angered young males and made them feel disempowered. It’s a world in which males are increasingly not needed ,ie IVF provides babies (often girls ) for lesbian couples who will grow up without fathers . Kamala was raised by a career mother. Her parents separated when she was quite young. It seems Kamala chose not to have any children ? What a stupid campaign –Republicans will take away your Right to abortions and porn. No wonder she lost !
Something the article doesn’t pick up on is that while the Harris-Walz campaign failed to connect with young adult males, it did resonate with young adult females. You need both on your side to succeed. They did pick on that fact far too late in their campaign to have much success. They also focused far too much on the abortion-IVF issue, and far too little on the economy too differentiate between what Trump was claiming about it, and highlighting gains like re-opened factories, massive job growth, incredible gains on the stock market and how those would benefit the blue collar class in the short and long term. Their messaging on the economy was a major fail despite it being described by most major news sources including Fox as the “envy of the western world” repeatedly. That is because any gains for blue collar workers failed to trickle down past Wall Street and to working class people.
Harris was also very vague about the economy and in particular, reduction of inflation. Inflation is where average working class people have been hit hard with increased living costs of the household basics.
Harris failed to differentiate herself from Biden in regard to the war in the Middle East. She just said she would do the same. That annoyed many people who wanted a more concrete answer one way or the other. That felt like she did not have an articulated solution or alternative to the current status quo.
Harris-Waltz ran a clean campaign without any of the scandals of the other side.
Now that the popular vote is becoming clearer, it shows that Trump did not have the massive landslide victory and mandate to undertake radical changes to the government systems and structures he repeatedly claims in the media. Harris may even win the popular vote once all the votes are counted. Trump looks like having a victory of 1.*8% according to today’s news media. That may be even closer as the next few days tick over. Having majorities in both houses – Senate and Congress – is a major victory for Trump.
Lets also face the fact that many American just don’t want a female president! Especially if she is a non-white! Trump exploited that by denigrating Harris racially in his speeches.