This is the first installment of “SATURDAY AT THE RACES,” a weekly, wonky look at the electoral sprint to the finish line. The conventional wisdom says that the race for the White House begins in earnest after Labor Day. But the end of the Democrats’ convention convinced me to start today. I was also compelled by the newscycle, which churned out some corroborating evidence for a theory that occurred to me during the GOP’s convention.
This election is a referendum on masculinity.
I came to that not-very-original conclusion before Hulk Hogan ripped his shirt in two, before Kid Rock’s retro-Bro musical tribute and before ultimate fighting tycoon Dana White set-up Trump’s rambling nominating speech. It was cemented in my mind the night before, when a conspicuously bandaged Trump slowly strode into the arena, set to James Brown’s “It's a Man's Man's Man's World.”
He was manliness personified, building on the buzz from his iconic, fist-in-the-air pose after being clipped in the ear by an incel’s bullet. For many, his defiance in the face of an attempted assassination transformed his image of masculine strength from callow shtick to living legend. As Jeff Zuckerberg, the world’s most successful incel, said, that’s when he became a “badass.”
That’s the badassery Trump planned on riding to victory over a decrepit, doddering and undeniably weak opponent. Joe Biden was a made-to-order option for the Trump campaign’s simple, All-American choice of strength versus weakness. It was a choice they spent tens of millions of dollars and all four nights of their convention hammering home. It looked like the election was money in the bank.
That was then, and this is now. And now Biden is gone, and Trump finds himself locked into another close race against a woman. But this time, the woman doesn’t come loaded with a carousel of baggage acquired through decades of fighting in the trenches of the culture war over feminism. Unlike Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris is a blank slate, one that her campaign effectively painted with themes of “strength” and “patriotism” and “martial resolve”. They used their convention to establish her viability as a Commander-in-Chief. And she validated it during a forcefully-delivered, strength-projecting acceptance speech. She essentially delivered the eulogy for the Trump campaign’s strategy of strength vs. weakness.
For good or for ill, what he’s left with is a referendum on masculinity. And although he’s perfectly suited to both exploit and to be hampered by this referendum’s “gender gap,” the phenomenon might also show there’s something more elemental going on in this election.
That’s the upshot of a report out today in the New York Times under the headline: “Many Gen Z Men Feel Left Behind. Some See Trump as an Answer.” As reporter Clair Cain Miller observes:
In some ways, this presidential election has become a referendum on gender roles — and the generation with the biggest difference in opinion between male and female voters is Generation Z.
On one side are young women, who as a group are very liberal, and who have been politically galvanized by gender bombshells like #MeToo, the overturning of Roe v. Wade, and the candidacy of Vice President Kamala Harris.
On the other are young men, some of whom feel that rapidly changing gender roles have left them behind socially and economically, and see former President Donald J. Trump as a champion of traditional manhood.
Cain Miller fleshes out the contours of this referendum with polling data and interviews. First, let’s hear from Gen Z’s men:
In interviews with young men planning to vote for Mr. Trump, they described feeling unvalued. They said it had become harder to be a man. They valued strength in a president. Yet they didn’t express bitter misogyny or praise the exaggerated displays of brawn embraced by the Trump campaign. Their concerns were mostly economic, like whether they could fulfill the traditionally masculine role of supporting a family.
Ranger Irwin, a 20-year-old Trump voter who works at a Discount Tire in North Las Vegas, Nev., said American society no longer “lets boys be boys.”
“Men my age, from a very young age we were told, ‘You’re not supposed to do this, you’re not supposed to do that, you’re just supposed to sit here and be quiet,’” he said. It’s made being a man “a little bit harder than it used to be.”
Those themes are echoed by young men throughout the report:
Alec Torres, 21, a high school graduate who works in retail in Canton, Ga., and who planned to vote for Mr. Trump based on concerns about prices, said that what he wants is simple: to be able to support a family.
“We can’t afford to have children, we can barely afford three meals a day,” he said. “I want to be able to go to the doctor and afford it, I want to be able to own a home, I want to be able to have a car, I want to have a job I enjoy. I want to live, not just survive.”
He supports abortion rights, and leans progressive on other social issues: “You want to be gay or trans? Cool,” he said. But he said that boys are no longer raised to be good fathers or to provide for their families.
Democrats have been losing support among young nonwhite people (though still retaining their backing overall). Mr. Torres, who is Hispanic, Native American and Black, is planning to vote for Mr. Trump, and also liked Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Perhaps that’s a clue indicating why RFK Jr.’s splashy endorsement of Trump might not amount to much. His appeal has been rooted in the masculinity media ecosphere anchored by Joe Rogan. To wit, RFK Jr. has made a show of doing shirtless push-ups, eating roadkill and generally being a “man’s man” throughout his quixotic campaign. His core constituency, which has been shrinking with more speed since Harris entered the race, was already likely to vote for Trump. They’ve probably already bled a bit into Trump’s column after Biden exited. In other words, he’s not expanding Trump’s base. And polling done both with and without him in the race shows that Trump doesn’t pick up more than one point on Harris if RFK Jr. is out, and they’ve tended to pick up his spare percentage points equally.
It is possible, though, that there are some left or libertarian-leaning anti-war, pro-environment voters he could dislodge as he campaigns for his new alpha. But he’s unlikely to solve Trump’s real problem, which is his widening gender gap. Here’s the data from Cain Miller in the New York Times:
When President Biden was still in the race, men ages 18 to 29 favored Mr. Trump by an average of 11 percentage points, while young women favored Mr. Biden by 28 points, according to four national New York Times/Siena College polls conducted from last December to June. That was a 39-point gender gap — far exceeding that of any older generation.
And in Times/Siena polls of six swing states this month — taken after Ms. Harris became the presumptive Democratic nominee — young men favored Mr. Trump by 13 points, while young women favored Ms. Harris by 38 points, a 51-point gap.
These numbers are both echoed and expanded upon in a new poll from Fairleigh Dickinson University (FDU), which noted the gender gap’s contribution to Harris’s largest lead nationally thus far:
Voters nationally give Vice President and Democratic nominee Kamala Harris an edge over former President Donald Trump in November’s election by a seven-point margin (50 to 43), but race and gender remains central to the vote. When voters are made to think about the race or gender of the candidates, Harris’ lead grows substantially; when they’re not, support is essentially tied. Harris is also helped by strong support among the slightly less than half of men who reject traditionally masculine identities. Trump’s strongest support is among men who hold traditionally masculine identities, while women and other men strongly favor Harris.
Given that socio-cultural dynamic, it’s perhaps not coincidental that this election’s undercard features a fight between “contra-cat ladies’ man” JD Vance and “kindly coach hug-it-out” Tim Walz. The dustup over the right-wing attack on Gus Walz’s tears of joy only highlights extent to which this election’s outcome will reflect what we think about masculinity. That swimmer-turned-right-wing-media-star Riley Gaines was raucously cheered when she spoke out against trans athletes at yesterday’s Trump rally in Arizona further exemplifies the depth and breadth of this emergent referendum.
Meanwhile, Trump pines for the days of a referendum on his “strength” versus Biden’s “weakness.” It’s understandable. He doesn’t want it to be a personality contest, or a referendum on “old” versus “new,’ or “the past” versus “the future.” Even worse, as the FDU poll predictably illustrates, the stark juxtaposition of Donald “It’s a man’s man’s man’s world” Trump versus Kamala “’Freedom’-loving” Harris is a made-to-order proposition for Harris, who can capitalize on the issue of abortion and from the pent-up demand for a long-deferred promise of breaking the “highest, hardest glass ceiling”:
Mentioning the sex of the candidates has no real effect on men’s votes: it increases support for Harris by 5 points and reduces support for Trump by 2. But among women, mentioning the sex of the candidates drops Trump’s support by 7, from 40 percent in the unprimed condition to 33 percent in the gender primed condition. The net effect is a change from women favoring Harris by 16 (56 to 40) in the unprimed condition, to favoring her by 26 (59 to 33) in the gender primed condition.
Unsurprisingly, Trump falls into a widening gap if the election is framed as a referendum on gender. Ironically, though, Trump may be sustained by a newly emerging gender gap among men.
The gender dynamics of the race are also clear from a question asking respondents about how masculine or feminine they consider themselves to be. On this question, a little more than half of men say that they’re “completely masculine,” and a little less than half describe themselves some other way (as “mostly masculine,” “slightly masculine” or in one of the feminine categories). The men who put themselves in the “completely masculine” category favor Trump over Harris by a wide margin, 64 to 30. All other men favor Harris by a 20-point margin, 55 to 35. Among women, “completely feminine” women are little different than other women: both favor Harris by about a 20-point margin. While there is a big difference between men and women overall, that difference is driven entirely by the men who say that they are “completely masculine.” Those men favor Trump; all other sex and gender groups favor Harris by about the same 20-point margin.
FDU’s findings may be an outlier. Then again, Trump didn’t become a WWE Hall Of Famer for nothing. Nor is his “completely masculine” messaging far afield from his campaign’s emphasis on strength. And although his teenage boy-recalcitrance appears to many like a caricature of “traditional” masculinity, it’s also a media magnet that sends a loud and clear signal. He may be loudly and clearly defining a choice between “traditional” and “non-traditional” masculinity that is also shaping notions of gender for a generation of young men.
“We talk about the gender gap in voting as being between men and women,” said Dan Cassino, a professor of Government and Politics at Fairleigh Dickinson. “But it’s not. The real gender gap is between men who are holding to traditionally masculine identities, and everybody else. Identity isn’t just about race and sex: Trump’s appeal to a traditional form of masculine identity is the only thing keeping this race close.”
That means Trump has opened up a brand new gender gap within the category of male voters. And that gap both sustains and limits him. It’s both his floor and his ceiling. He’s also inexorably tied to a brand of masculinity that seems to turn off the rest of the electorate, including the subset of “non-traditional” male voters. His one avenue for growth might be found in Cain Miller’s Gen Z men who tie their view of masculinity to their view of the economy. They could be married into a coalition with voters willing to overlook Trump’s juvenile dude act in favor of their economic self-interest. It’s a version of the Culture War-Economic Self-Interest voter coalitions the GOP has been building since Reagan won in 1980. It’s no doubt why his team tries to continually refocus him on the economy and inflation. But they fail in no small part because he is a juvenile dude whose rants and grievances are fed by his “Macho Man” brand of masculinity. It’s who he is. And it’s probably why Kamala Harris has gotten so completely under his skin. His insult-driven reaction to her keeps him stuck under a “crass ceiling” instead of a glass ceiling … and that ceiling might be harder for Trump to crack than the ceiling Harris is now aiming to shatter.