Bro voters say they have abandoned Democrats as party ignores their issues and muddles meaning of being a ‘man'
Hot-button topics, such as economic anxiety in combination with uncertainty over cultural issues, have led to a crisis among male voters, according to a study carried out by the SAM project (Speaking with American Men).
It was previously reported that Democrats have spent $20 million on the project, with donors and strategists being holed up in luxury hotel rooms brainstorming how to convince working-class men to return to the party.
The SAM project aims to 'study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.'
Preliminary results, shared with Politico, show that ' Democrats are seen as weak, whereas Republicans are seen as strong,' according to Ilyse Hogue, co-founder of the SAM project.
'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.'
The survey, which included 23 percent self-described Democrats, 28 percent Republicans and 36 percent independents, also found that the conflicting cultural definitions of masculinity put men in a 'no-win situation around the meaning of 'a man'.'
One respondent described Democrats as embracing 'the fluid masculinity of being, like, empathetic and sensitive,' while 'Republicans are more like, the traditional masculinity of a provider, strong, and the machismo type.'
In addition, the combination with general concerns over the economy, which proved to be a successful campaigning point for Donald Trump during the election, made 'traditional milestones', including buying a house and having children, 'feel impossible.'
This combination of concerns may be contributing to the decline in male support for the party, with SAM's national survey finding that just 27 percent of young men view the Democratic Party positively.
The promotion of Kamala Harris as the Democratic presidential candidate may also have had some bearing, the project's findings suggested.
Democratic firm Catalist found that in 2024, the gender gap between men and women voting for the Democrats was 13 points, after men's support dropped by 6 points to 42 percent – the lowest on record in recent elections.
One Latino man from Las Vegas, quoted in SAM's findings, said that during the 2024 campaign, Harris focused on, 'Oh, I got Beyonce on stage with me. Oh, I got Lady Gaga on stage.' 'It just kind of felt like, what does that have to do with me? I'm trying to move up in life,' he said.
However, pollster John Della Volpe, another co-founder of the project, says that the current male cohort and younger generation is not 'lost' – though he added that the Democrats are 'losing it' right now.'
A previously reported part of SAM's plan for the Democrats included buying advertisements in video games, online streaming platforms, and podcasts. Influencers, including Joe Rogan and Theo Von, were credited with wooing a large proportion of the male voters.
'Democrats can't win these folks over if they're not speaking the language that young men are speaking,' Hogue told Politico. 'Most people I talked to, Democratic operatives, have never heard of Red Pill Fitness, which is just huge online.'
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Independent
28 minutes ago
- The Independent
Passengers flee smoking jet on emergency slide after apparent landing gear problem at Denver airport
Passengers slid down an emergency slide of a smoking jet at Denver 's airport due to a possible problem with the plane's landing gear, authorities said. American Airlines Flight 3023 reported a 'possible landing gear incident' during its departure from Denver International Airport on Saturday afternoon, the Federal Aviation Administration said. The Boeing 737 MAX 8 was on its way to Miami International Airport. Video aired by local media showed people sliding down the inflatable chute near the front of the plane while clutching luggage and small children. Some of the passengers, including at least one adult carrying a young child, tripped at the end of the slide and fell onto the concrete runway tarmac. The passengers were then taken to the terminal by bus. One of the passengers was transported to a medical facility, authorities said. Five people were evaluated for injuries at the scene but did not require hospitalization, Denver International Airport officials said in a statement. 'About halfway to takeoff speed, we hear a big bang and a pop,' passenger Shaun Williams told KUSA-TV. 'The pilot immediately started abort procedures for taking off. You could feel him start to hit the brakes.' Firefighters called to the airport extinguished a fire after responding to the aircraft, the Denver Fire Department said. In a statement, the FAA said it will investigate.
The Independent
28 minutes ago
- The Independent
Mike Johnson says Ghislaine Maxwell coming clean on Epstein case would be ‘a great service to the country'
Speaker Mike Johnson called on Jeffrey Epstein's accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, to come clean and told Americans that he "hoped" she could be trusted as he faces the growing uproar around the White House's handling of the investigation. Johnson appeared Sunday on NBC's Meet the Press, where moderator Kristen Welker asked him point-blank if the convicted sex-trafficker girlfriend of Epstein could be trusted to accurately testify about the crimes she and Epstein committed. Epstein was awaiting prosecution for sex trafficking underage girls after a previous conviction on similar charges when he died in federal custody. Maxwell has been thrust back into the spotlight as the MAGA base has grown frustrated with President Donald Trump and his administration's shutting down of the so-called Epstein files release. Last week, a top Department of Justice official met with Maxwell about the case. "Well, I mean, look; it's a good question. I hope so," Johnson told Welker in response. "I hope that she would want to come clean." "I hope she's telling the truth. She is convicted, she's serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking. Her character is in some if she wants to come clean now, that would be a great service to the country. We want to know every bit of information that she has." The House Oversight Committee voted this week to issue a subpoena for Maxwell after the Justice Department announced its own plans to speak with her. Agency officials did so for nine hours between Thursday and Friday, after making a statement seeming to confirm that her testimony hadn't been aggressively sought before. Some have called Maxwell to testify and suggested she should be given a pardon for sharing what she knows about the Epstein case. She was convicted of sexual abuse against minors and sex trafficking for helping Epstein carry out crimes. Johnson touted the Oversight subpoena favorably Sunday, casting it as evidence that GOP leadership supported efforts aimed at transparency. The Trump administration turned speculation about Epstein's death and the so-called 'Client List' of his co-conspirators into a raging wildfire in early July. The Justice Department and FBI published a joint memo explaining that future releases from the files would not take place, and that the list of Epstein's accomplices was not found. Epstein was rumored to have cultivated personal relationships with many powerful men and institutions. Critics of the president have alleged that a cover-up is in the works regarding the Epstein files. Democrats have hammered the president for his reversal, and a pair of scoops from the Wall Street Journal have reported on the president's connections to Epstein, to Trump's fury. The newspaper reported the contents of a message allegedly penned by Trump to Epstein as part of a 50th birthday celebration in 2003, including allusions to a shared 'secret' between them. Trump firmly denied authoring the note, and sued the Journal and its reporters in response. A second article from the Journal days later reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi informed Trump in May that he was mentioned in the Epstein investigation multiple times, thought it was not clear in what context. The White House called that story 'fake' and has repeatedly insinuated that Democrats including Joe Biden tampered with evidence while Trump was out of office. Being mentioned in the files does not mean wrongdoing, and hundreds of names are reportedly included. The lead GOP co-sponsor behind a House resolution that would force the Justice Department to release the entirety of its collected evidence related to Epstein said Sunday that his push was to help the convicted pedophile's victims and would only grow stronger in the coming weeks. Earlier on the same network, Rep. Thomas Massie appeared alongside the resolution's lead Democratic co-sponsor, Rep. Ro Khanna, as the two promoted a resolution that would force Attorney General Pam Bondi to release 'all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials' related to the Epstein and Maxwell investigations. Massie told Welker that 'the release of the Epstein files is emblematic of what Trump ran for' and explained that the president's MAGA base expected results. 'There seems to be a class of people beyond the law, beyond the judicial all thought that when Trump was elected, he would be the bull in the china shop and break that all up,' said Massie. Massie went on to say that the Trump administration had lost his trust on the issue after publicly supporting transparency around the investigation, then doing an abrupt about-face. The administration is now calling on its supporters to move on from the issue and focus on hashing out issues with the 2016 'Russiagate' investigation instead of Epstein. Top administration officials, including Vice President JD Vance, also spent months calling for the very releases the Justice Department says it won't authorize. 'People who were allegedly working on this weren't sincere in their efforts,' Massie said. 'Somebody should ask Speaker Mike Johnson, why did he recess Congress early so that he didn't have to deal with the Epstein issue?' 'Politics is the art of the doable. There's enough public pressure right now that we can get 218 votes and force this to a vote on the floor,' said Massie. He also firmly rejected a DOJ memo explaining the administration's position against further releases of information from the Epstein files, despite the very public promises of Bondi and others to do the opposite. In the memo, agency officials said that explicit imagery involving children was 'intertwined' throughout the files collected by the Justice Department. Some have said the files should not be released to protect sex-abuse victims of both Maxwell and Epstein. 'That's a straw man [argument],' Massie responded on Sunday, after Welker read part of the memo. 'Ro [Khanna] and I carefully crafted this legislation so that the victims' names would be redacted, and that no child pornography will be released.'
The Guardian
36 minutes ago
- The Guardian
We do not comply: how do we disrupt the momentum of Trump's cruelty?
The exterminating force of Project 2025 is plowing through the culture, the government and people's hearts and bodies like a drunk on a violent tear. We wake each morning, holding our breath to bear witness to the new devastation: PBS and NPR defunded, cuts to the fight against human trafficking, Medicaid gone for millions, Ice working to surveil critics, tons of food for the poor ordered burned and wasted. The momentum of cruelty always feels inevitable. Cruelty is by definition 'a callous indifference to or pleasure in causing pain'. For those of us who have suffered physical, political, racial and emotional abuse, it feels like a familiar steamroller of violence. We only have to witness the cries of parents being separated from their children, men screaming out for 'libertad' from cages in Everglades detention center (AKA Alligator Alcatraz), non-violent protesters beaten for trying to stop a genocide, to be frozen in that same incapacitating dread and fear. What is the antidote to this destructive environment of mendacity possessing us now with fear, ennui and self-mutilating rage? Ash-lee Woodard Henderson, a powerhouse activist and brilliant organizer, told me: 'It's not decided where we go yet. Which is why it feels tense. What we know is that there's no going back to an old normal because our economic system has failed us and our governmental structure is being destroyed. They're trying to replace what was with this minority rule of disgustingly wealthy humans dictating what can happen not only in this country, but globally. 'We've gotta block and build at the same time. That means confronting both elected officials and the corporations that are lifting them up. We need to make sure that we are gumming up their ability to successfully implement any sort of action, whether it's policy or otherwise, that takes more power and rights and access to life-saving resources away from our communities.' So how do we gum up their momentum; how do we become refusers, artists of disruption, interrupters of their hateful and life-destroying trajectory? How do we clear the noise and fear in our heads so that we are able to hear the call of our inner morality? 'The thing that I love about being non-cooperative and non-compliant with the Trump administration,' Ash-Lee told me, 'is its accessibility: people have all sorts of abilities, all sorts of means, regardless of class, regardless of identity, to find a tactic that fits for them. What keeps you up at night enough to make you active? Trump says we shouldn't ask people for warrants. We demand warrants. When a business puts a 'No Kings' sign up or a 'No Ice' sign in their window, they're not complying. And we need more people to do that wherever they are,' she said, 'whether it's a general saying, 'I'm not gonna command my troops to do this,' whether it's troops becoming conscientious objectors, whether it's us boycotting Target and T-Mobile.' This tyrannical white supremacist landscape is erasing our sense of existence and meaning. Daily forms of rebellion birth us back into our bodies and our purpose. Non-compliance is art, as art is meant to defy the status quo, question the givens, expand the boundaries of knowing and freedom. And as you courageously make your mark of refusal, you carve a path for others to be brave. Non-compliance is praxis, stretching and transforming the muscles of our discontent into impactful and embodied action. There are a multitude of ways that we can make their lives miserable by taking small risks and huge ones. Like folks in California sitting in their cars outside the hotels where the Ice agents are and just lying on their horn for hours. Or people towing Ice vans away that are parked illegally. Or the Harlem baseball coach who knew all his kids were American-born. When Ice invaded the field, he told his kids to get inside the batting cage and stay silent. He said he was willing to die for his kids to get home. 'And non-complying is also filling in the gaps of resources and care that they are taking away. They're already closing rural hospitals where we live because our governor didn't expand Medicaid,' Ash-Lee told me. 'So residents must build an alternative like country people and black folks across the country have been doing on their own accord for decades, if not centuries, creating community spaces where we can both line dance, do some boots-on-the-ground organizing, get your blood pressure checked, get your mammogram in the mobile unit, get your teeth cleaned, whatever. All of those things are not complying.' I think of the man who suggested we all dress in Ice suits with masks and Oakley sunglasses and enter detention centers and free immigrants. Or my white British friend who was in a store in Nevada when Ice invaded and they started harassing Latinos for their identification. He stepped up and calmly asked why they weren't asking for his ID. He asked simply without hostility. He asked it three times. Even though they continued, he momentarily disrupted the trajectory of cruelty and forced them to bring consciousness to what they were doing. Or the Rev Mariann Budde's staring down Trump and his billionaire cronies in the first row of a Washington church in January, calmly and fearlessly demanding compassion for immigrants, refugees and LGBTQ+ communities. Sign up to Fighting Back Big thinkers on what we can do to protect civil liberties and fundamental freedoms in a Trump presidency. From our opinion desk. after newsletter promotion And this is the time for artists to speak out, to disembed themselves from a fascist system, to place principles over profit and self-advancement. To be what Viet Thanh Nguyen calls 'disagreeable'. Yes, of course there are risks. But at this moment, with the jackboots in the streets and at our door, when each hour another liberty is being erased, and those who speak truth to power are being removed from TV, from universities, from cultural centers, when the cultural platforms are being removed themselves, speaking out is not just an obligation, it's survival. And there are artists beginning to organize. The poet Michael Klein is creating a new podcast calling writers 'to take our language back in writing a way through the various veils of deceit–an act, which in itself, has always been a form of resistance'. Meena Jagannath, a movement lawyer, is gathering artists and activists in salons to deepen our collective investigation and imaginative co-creation. She told me: 'Our charge in these times is to support each other in building protagonism – a sense that we have agency to contest fascist narratives about how the world is and should be. It needs to be a collective, creative and responsive process that takes in what's going out there and alchemizes it into a more expansive imagination of what could and should be.' So in a nod to the late great Mary Oliver, I ask you, what is the one precious, wild creative act you are doing to impede this nightmare? V (formerly Eve Ensler) is a playwright and activist and the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls
