Male grievance, especially white male grievance, is the beating heart of Trumpist populism.
Donald Trump returns to the White House on Jan. 20 because white men were determined to bring him back to power. They didn’t do this on their own, of course—they had a lot of help. The American electorate is a complex patchwork of demographic groups and constituencies that can’t be reduced to one or even a few categories.
But in the countless election post-mortems still to come, the commentariat—scholars and pundits alike—should never lose sight of the fact that male grievance, especially white male grievance, is the beating heart of Trumpist populism, and has been from the start.
That might seem like stating the obvious. Doesn’t everyone know that Trump’s charismatic performance of an over-the-top, cartoonish version of white male strength is the main reason for his astounding political success? Well, yes and no. Trump himself makes no effort to hide this part of his appeal; quite the contrary. Anyone who witnessed the hypermasculine spectacle of the Republican National Convention in July could see that Trump’s campaign promoted him like they would a pro wrestler, the ultimate people’s champion. The bad ass “man’s man” who has the stones required to rescue America from weak-kneed liberal degeneracy.
And yet, from the moment on election night when it became clear that Trump was winning a decisive victory over Kamala Harris, many analysts honed in on the wrong target: white women. Once again they failed to show up for another woman. They voted for the most openly misogynous, abusive man ever to run for president. They chose to put their identification with whiteness over solidarity with women—especially women of color.
As political journalist Susan Milligan wrote, “Women were supposed to save the country, turning out in Dobbs-driven droves to keep that sexist and rapist out of the White House and elect the first female president. Of course, women in America are expected to shoulder a lot of burdens for society at large—often to clean up for men, both figuratively and literally. So it’s sadly not surprising, after Kamala Harris’ loss, that some pundits are looking at exit polls and concluding that women voters did not Do Their Job. White women, in particular, seem to be taking the brunt of the criticism.”
This focus on the white women’s vote—however important it may be—effectively shifts attention away from the driving engine behind the Trumpist resurgence: white men, who supported Trump 60 percent to 37 percent, according to early exit polls from NBC News. A commanding majority of them saw fit to return to the presidency a deeply misogynous man whom many Republican members in his first administration described as “unfit,” “dangerous” and a “fascist.”
To be sure, the white women’s vote is a critical aspect of the story of this deeply consequential election. In coming decades, political scientists, historians, feminist theorists, social psychologists and others will endlessly analyze and debate their role in reelecting an adjudicated rapist.
It’s worth noting that until now, most of these analyses have failed to provide anything close to a sophisticated class and education breakdown. A front-page New York Times article on the women’s vote published a week after the election didn’t even mention that college-educated white women actually favored Harris over Trump decisively: by 57 percent to 41 percent, according to exit polls. High school-educated white women, a much larger segment of the female electorate, went for Trump 63 percent to 35 percent.
This absence of a class analysis is especially glaring when you consider that pundits across the political spectrum have identified Trump’s connection with working-class voters—both men and women—as key to his electoral success.
Among high-school educated white men, Trump beat Harris by 40 points, 69 percent to 29 percent!
Harris performed much better with college-educated white men, where she lost by only 3 points, 50 percent to 47 percent, the same margin Biden lost to Trump by in 2020.
There are many explanations—not excuses—for white men’s pro-Trump vote. Of course, misogyny cannot be discounted. Millions of men (and women) apparently remain uncomfortable with the idea of a woman—let alone a woman of color—occupying this country’s highest seat of both political power and cultural influence.
Guardian columnist Moira Donegan put it more starkly: “The Trump campaign positioned itself as a champion of a hierarchical gender order, aiming to restore men to a place of wrongfully deprived supremacy over women. Many of his voters cast their lot in with Trump hoping that he would do just that.”
Misogyny, of course, is not unique to any particular subculture. There was a significant gender gap in every racial and ethnic group.
One widely cited example is the Latino vote: 60 percent of Latinas turned out for Harris. At the same time, an astounding 55 percent of Latinos voted for Trump, a man whose political ascent owes as much to white racial resentment about the browning of America by immigrants from south of the border as to any other single factor.
Harris’ defeat can also be attributed to the Democratic Party’s longstanding failure to communicate compassion and concern about the needs of white male voters, especially as the power of labor unions wilted under sustained attack by the ownership class. This problem dates back to the 1970s, when party strategists first encountered the challenge of simultaneously being the vehicle for the aspirations of people of color, women and LGBTQ people, even as many expected them to continue advancing the interests of white working-class men.
One of the most notable features of Trump’s victory is that he seems to have expanded the GOP’s appeal to young male voters. Many young men, not just young white men, appear to have bought into the narrative—ubiquitous in the conservative infotainment complex and the online manosphere—that Republicans care about the struggles of men, especially working-class men, while the Democrats are out-of-touch elitists who look down on them.
The reason the Democrats didn’t win the battle for young men’s votes is they didn’t fight for them.
Richard Reeves
This narrative is more about identity than policy. While many people who supported Trump said they voted on “the economy,” there are wildly different interpretations of what that means, and no shared understanding among the electorate about what effect, if any, the president has on things like the cost of food and other consumer items.
Harris’ defeat can also be attributed to the Democratic Party’s longstanding failure to communicate compassion and concern about the needs of white male voters, especially as the power of labor unions wilted under sustained attack by the ownership class.
Moreover, the Democratic domestic policy agenda—however inadequate it might be in the view of progressive populists—is arguably far more responsive to the needs of working and middle-class men than anything proposed by Trump.
It is an article of faith in the political punditocracy that Harris was saddled with her association with Joe Biden, who was the target of relentless criticism and mockery throughout the campaign by Trump and others in right-wing media. But the price of eggs notwithstanding, anti-Biden sentiment arguably was based less in a substantive policy critique than it was in an indictment of the incumbent president’s charisma-challenged and frail persona, age-related or not, and his shortcomings as a communicator.
Biden’s was arguably the most pro-worker administration in decades.
- Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—who remains very popular with young men—said that Biden was “the most progressive president since FDR” on “domestic” (read: working-class) “issues.”
- He was the first sitting president to walk a union picket line.
- His administration passed a major infrastructure bill that will produce hundreds of thousands of good-paying blue-collar jobs—disproportionately for men, often in red states—over the next couple of decades.
Meanwhile, Trump’s biggest legislative success in his first term was a massive tax cut, primarily for the wealthy. If policy accomplishments—and not masculinity-themed narratives about “protectors,” “toughness” and “strength”—were the measure of who cares more about working and middle-class men, Harris would have won them in a landslide over Trump.
But as the author Richard Reeves said, Democrats didn’t tell that story—especially to young men. “The Democrats didn’t believe they’d need the votes of young men, because they were going to get sufficient votes among young women, and women generally. The reason the Democrats didn’t win the battle for young men’s votes is they didn’t fight for them.”
Meanwhile, over in the online misogynous manoverse, and in right-wing media more generally, the Democrats are constantly dismissed as the “women’s party” that doesn’t really care if men are left behind. In fact, an article of faith in the MAGA-friendly media ecosphere is that liberals, progressives and Democrats in general don’t like men—and consider white men especially to be “toxic” and the root of all evil.
This is a caricature. Nonetheless, it’s undeniable that progressive and Democratic Party messaging to white men failed to effectively counteract that perception—even after Harris announced Tim Walz as her VP pick.
What’s even worse in the current media environment: The right not only has the daunting advantage of Fox News and talk radio; they’re also way ahead of liberals and the left in communicating with millions of young men through new and emerging digital media platforms.
Will the Democrats learn from this electoral debacle and seek to correct this next time out? Will they reach out directly to young men, who are exposed to right-wing misinformation and propaganda daily from manfluencers on YouTube, brocasters like Joe Rogan, Logan Paul and Theo Von, as well as from more ideological conservatives like Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Charlie Kirk?
You can’t win their votes—or even cut into the huge majorities that Republicans win among working-class male voters, which includes a growing number of young men of color—unless you “go where they are.” Republicans outspent Democrats by as much as 10 to one in media outreach to young male voters, especially in the battleground states.
Kamala Harris ran a truly impressive campaign under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. It would be reductive and absurd to say that her campaign’s decision not to put her on The Joe Rogan Experience is why she lost. But it does point to a Democratic Party mindset that needs to change.
If the Democrats want to win future presidential elections, at least part of the task is clear. They need to communicate more effectively with men, including blue-collar white men and young men of all ethnic and racial backgrounds, whose vote for Trump was less a vote for his policies or against those of Kamala Harris than it was the loudest and angriest statement they could make that we still matter.
