You’re not going to believe that Democrats are spending $20 million on this. The party has finally realized that it has serious weaknesses — especially when it comes to courting young male voters.
The Democrats recently announced they are conducting a new study to figure out how best to reach out to this demographic, which President Donald Trump won over in the 2024 election. Now, the study’s preliminary findings are in — and they are about as shocking as the revelation that former President Joe Biden actually was experiencing a cognitive decline.
The study is called the Speaking with American Men (SAM) project. It is being headed by Ilyse Hoge, who told Politico that “Democrats are seen as weak, whereas Republicans are seen as strong.”
The first part of the study involved 30 focus groups and a national media consumption survey. It found that many young men believe “neither party has our back.” Respondents also viewed Democrats as “overly-scripted and cautious” and Republicans as “confident and unafraid to offend.”
“Young men also spoke of being invisible to the Democratic coalition, and so you’ve got this weak problem and then you’ve got this, ‘I don’t think they care about me’ problem, and I think the combination is kind of a killer,” Hogue explained.
The focus groups found that young men feel they are in crisis: stressed, ashamed and confused over what it means to be a man in 2025. They vented about conflicting cultural messages of masculinity that put them in a “no-win situation around the meaning of ‘a man,’” according to the SAM project memo.
They described how the Covid pandemic left them isolated and socially disconnected. They also said they now feel overwhelmed by economic anxiety, making “traditional milestones,” like buying a home or saving for kids’ college, “feel impossible,” an analysis of the research said.
“The degree to which those economic concerns are also impacting how they think about themselves and quote-unquote success of being a man, and living up to their own expectations or the expectations of their family or society,” Della Volpe said. “There’s another layer of economic anxiety that I don’t think I fully saw until now.”
Democrats have a serious problem with men.
— Shermichael Singleton (@MrShermichael) June 2, 2025
“Trump is bad” isn’t a platform.
“Democracy is at stake” isn’t a message.
Men want purpose, stability, respect — not lectures about toxic masculinity.
Until Democrats get that, they’ll keep losing male voters. pic.twitter.com/hiMMY03jS0
The findings of a poll SAM conducted are quite damning for Democrats. Attitudes don’t seem to have changed much since the 2024 campaign.
Young men’s feelings of crisis are connected to their exodus from the party, SAM’s research suggests. SAM’s national survey found that just 27 percent of young men viewed the Democratic Party positively, while 43 percent of them viewed the Republican Party favorably. The polling sample included 23 percent self-described Democrats, 28 percent Republicans and 36 percent independents.
In last year’s presidential election, the gender gap leapt to 13 percentage points nationally, up from 9 percentage points in 2020, the Democratic firm Catalist found in its final 2024 analysis that men’s support for Kamala Harris dropped by 6 points, winning just 42 percent of men — the lowest on record in recent elections.
That gap became even more pronounced among 18- and 29-year-olds. Just 46 percent of young men voted for Harris in 2024. The losses tracked across every racial group, and the most pronounced hemorrhaging came among Latinos and Black men.
The bottom line is that Democrats have a high mountain to climb if they want to regain this demographic’s support. As one Democratic strategist put it, “The Democratic Party is missing that we’re not going to be able to message our way out of these deep problems men are facing, starting with the fact that they know the Democratic Party doesn’t really like or respect them.”
Yet, anyone could have told the party all of this. Over the past four years — and especially during the 2024 campaign, it was abundantly clear that the Democratic Party does not care about young men. Instead of trying to make their positive case to these Americans, they alternated between schoolmarming them for being sexist and completely ignoring their concerns.
Instead of putting forth solutions to help young men achieve their goals, they focused more on forcing biological males into women’s sports and screaming about how wicked Republicans are. Indeed, the party and its supporters in the media fully embraced “woke” ideology while calling everyone else bigots for refusing to go along with it.
Remember when they trotted out Barack Obama to call young Black men sexist because they were hesitant to vote for former Vice President Kamala Harris? Case in point.
When it came to economic solutions, Democrats were largely silent. The same is true for education, crime, and other important issues young men are concerned about. The fact is, nobody cares about the Democrats’ progressive pet projects when they are having trouble putting food on the table because of inflation. It does not take a $20 million study to figure this out. But if there is one thing Democrats excel at, it’s wasting money on nonsense.