A Quinnipiac poll conducted July 23-27 found that 20 percent of men approve of the Democratic Party. Seventy-one percent disapprove. That's not a gender gap. That's a gender canyon.
And the midterms are just three months away.
The numbers confirm men overwhelmingly abandoned voting with the Democratic Party. And not just white men. Not just older men. All men across every age, race and economic background.
The damage among young men was particularly brutal. Gen Z favored Harris over Trump by just 4 points — compared to a 25-point margin for Joe Biden in 2020. Among Latino men aged 18-29, Democratic support cratered by 16 points. Among young Black men, the drop was 10 points.
James Carville, the Democratic strategist who's been sounding this alarm for two years, warned his party about having "too many preachy females" driving the messaging. His proposed solution was backing David Hogg for DNC chair, which tells you something about the depth of the bench. When the guy famous for screaming about gun control is your answer to the masculinity deficit, you might be misreading the problem.
A Third Way survey of 1,462 registered voters aged 18-29 from December 2025 found that 39 percent of young men said the top reason they wouldn't vote Democratic was that the party is "out of touch with working class" Americans. Another 29 percent called the party "inauthentic" and "unrelatable." Twenty percent said "too ideologically extreme."
The outreach attempts have been something to behold. Tim Walz was selected as Harris's running mate in 2024 partly as a play for male voters — the flannel-wearing, football-coaching, Midwestern dad. It didn't work. The campaign spent tens of millions on male-targeted messaging and still watched young men shift right by roughly 6 points from 2020.
Here's what the data reveals that the DNC doesn't want to discuss. When Third Way asked young men which party they associate with "financial independence," Republicans won 35 to 18. On "starting a family," Republicans won 34 to 9. The Democratic Party has become, in the minds of the men it's trying to court, the party that lectures you about pronouns but can't help you buy a house.
The party's defenders will point to generic ballot numbers that still favor Democrats among young male voters overall. And technically, that's true — the same Third Way survey showed Democrats leading 61-31 on the pushed generic ballot among likely young male voters. But that lead is built on the assumption these men actually show up. The same research found that the swingy, moderate, low-propensity young men who backed Trump in 2024 are far less likely to vote in a midterm. Democrats aren't winning converts. They're counting on the other side staying home.
Between 2018 and 2020, Democratic support among young voters dropped 6 points. Between 2022 and 2024, it dropped 12. The trajectory isn't ambiguous. Each cycle, more young men look at the Democratic platform — the identity politics, the economic messaging that sounds like a sociology lecture, the cultural posture that treats traditional masculinity as a diagnosis — and decide it's not for them.
