In the months leading up to the 2024 election, and particularly after the ascension of Vice President Kamala Harris to the top of the presidential ticket, Democrats found themselves particularly vexed about the best way to reach young men and bring them into their coalition. Their fears that they were falling short in this regard were borne out in November, when the majority of young men between ages 18 and 29 voted Republican. That trend cut across racial lines: Young white men supported President Donald Trump overwhelmingly, but young Black and Latino men swung toward Trump by an even larger margin than their white counterparts from 2020 to 2024—even as majorities supported Harris.

Those losses have precipitated soul-searching on the left, as Democrats wonder how to revive their appeal to young men who are struggling financially but intrigued by the machismo promoted by Trump and media figures popular on the right. Republicans are “exploiting grievances” by connecting economic pressures to shifts in gender norms, said Shaunna Thomas, the co-founder and former executive director of the gender justice organization UltraViolet.

Democrats know they need to bring young men back into the fold. But it’s a delicate dance: On the one hand, the wrong kind of outreach risks coming across as condescending, but on the other hand, too much focus on the needs of young men might end up alienating the women who have traditionally formed the core of the Democratic base.

“I think Democrats really tend to focus on deficits more than their strengths. They look for the shortest line from point A to point B for success, and they look at what’s working on the other side. If they were to mimic that in any way, I think that would be a really great way to weaken the loyalty women have shown to the party,” said Thomas.

The right has cultivated the anger of young men using online platforms for years. The vitriolic 2014 Gamergate movement was cultivated and harnessed by then-Breitbart editor and current Trump adviser Steve Bannon. Right-wing impresarios like Andrew Tate, an online influencer accused of sexual assault and trafficking whose winter arrival in the United States appeared to be orchestrated by Trump allies, have envisioned a world of violently enforced traditional gender roles. The endorsement of Trump ahead of 2024 by nominally political figures, such as popular podcaster Joe Rogan, also served to give the impression that Republicans understood young men better than Democrats did.

But Thomas worries that trying to replicate a media ecosystem that has been effective for the right could be disastrous for the left.

“Some people employ a methodology where you take very seriously what you see young men responding to on the internet, and your instinct or your strategy is to replicate that. I think that’s a mistake,” said Thomas. “If you try to appeal to young men at the expense of women and gender nonconforming people, not only are you doing the opposition’s work for them, you’re definitely going to lose your base.”

It’s a tension that Ilyse Hogue, the former president of the abortion rights group NARAL Pro-Choice America, is trying to reconcile. Along with John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, Hogue is leading an initiative called “Speaking With American Men.” The program—which has been met with online skepticism by liberals and conservatives alike—will invest $20 million over two years in research, organizing, and communications focused on young men of different racial and economic backgrounds.

The initiative’s prospectus promises that the program will serve as a “research hub” that also works to “identify and build trust with organic leaders in the largest, relevant online communities in Discord/Reddit and other online platforms.” It also seeks to “provide a media roadmap” for Democrats to use nontraditional methods of reaching young men, including by investing in YouTube commentary shows and video game digital ads.

The initiative’s early focus groups found that young men are confused about how they should express masculinity, frustrated by social isolation, and feel unable to reach economic milestones, according to reporting by Politico. Hogue also said that she has seen that young men may share policy preferences with Democrats, but nonetheless do not feel as if the party has their best interests at heart.

“They’re not seeing themselves reflected in those sorts of coalitions that progressives claim to care about. And so some of the solutions are really about ‘a rising tide lifts all boats,’ but we have to actually be able to communicate: ‘You are on the boat too,’” Hogue said about how Democrats should think about reaching young men.

But Amanda Litman, the co-founder and president of Run for Something, an organization focused on recruiting and supporting young progressive candidates, warned that Democrats may be in search of a political solution to something that may be more of a “cultural problem.” To a hammer, everything is a nail. To a political strategist, believes Litman, “everything looks like something you can poll-test your way into.”

Litman believes that Democrats are at risk of “misunderstanding” how to reach young men who have shifted toward the right in recent years, and “trying solutions that ultimately will be a waste of resources.”

“I think Democrats, especially in the last 15 years, have started to micro-target our way into oblivion,” said Litman. “We can’t pretend we can ‘focus group’ our way into a solution here.” Litman argued that focusing on underlying policy goals was the better way to reach young men, without isolating them as a specific demographic that needs to be wooed.

Ross Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who served as lead organizer of White Dudes for Harris ahead of the 2024 election, believes that, after an electoral loss, Democrats tend to focus on “shiny objects”: the topics that they believe will appeal to voters—and donors—without necessarily giving thought to effective strategy. Morales Rocketto believes that the Democrats’ desperate focus on clawing back support from young men is the latest shiny object upon which the party has fixed its gaze.

But he worries that treating young men as a prize to be won assumes that they already might be lost. “I get maybe a little bit frustrated when I see things that are like, ‘Well, all we need to do is do some polling, and then we’ll have the messages that work for them, and then like, everything will be OK,’” Morales Rocketto said.

Much has been written about the social isolation that many men feel. But Democrats should not be surprised if young women are “collectively eye-rolling” over the recent emphasis on young men voters, said Thomas. She argued that there is still a very clear power imbalance in American society, highlighted by such occurrences as the overturning of the federal right to an abortion and the election of Trump instead of two different female candidates in 2016 and 2024.

Neither loneliness nor economic hardship are the exclusive domain of men. People are more likely to feel loneliness in early adulthood and old age, regardless of gender; some studies have shown that women and men also report equal rates of loneliness. Recent polling by the Pew Research Center found that men are not more likely than women to say that they feel lonely or have few close friends, although they are less likely to turn to their networks for connection and support. Then there are the universal worries about economic uncertainty. According to the most recent Harvard Youth Poll, young women are more likely than young men to say that they are struggling to make ends meet; by contrast, young men are more confident than young women that they will accumulate significant wealth.

Litman argued that Democratic candidates needed to address the “root causes” of inequality, such as addressing the cost of living or investing in health care, which would, in turn, assist citizens across the entire demographic spectrum.

“I think the right candidate or elected official who can … thread the needle of, ‘We can lift up men without bringing down women,’ the one who can talk about how we need to care for mental health without making it ‘women need to solve their problems’—that’s what we need,” Litman said.

Hogue said that the purpose of the initiative was not to focus on men at the detriment of women, but to assert that Democrats are not “ceding a generation” of young men to the right by reaching them where they are. She also argued that outreach to young men was not a “zero-sum game” that would automatically alienate other demographics.

“Why do we feel like we can’t actually reflect the needs of both men and women in our coalition and not pit them against each other?” asked Hogue. “It’s not about going after a new constituency. It’s about reaffirming our commitment to young people to a better future regardless of their gender.”

Still, speaking generally about the party’s efforts to reach young men, Thomas warned that while the right may be better at “exploiting” young men’s worries about shifting gender norms, it would be a mistake for Democrats to assume these concerns are the “main event.”

“It’s strange, the extent to which we are focusing on this data about young men, as if it’s limited to them, as if they’re the only people experiencing this,” said Thomas. “These issues are just not isolated to men, and it’s silly to try to create a strategy as if it is.”