Gender gap by age: It's worse than you think. What can reach the "manosphere"??
The Graph below is from The Ezra Klein Show with Democratic Pollster David Shor (3/18)
It is haunting me. Spend some time really taking it in. The trend. And where it is going. And going fast.
What would reach these young men in their bubble? I don't see the destruction of social security bothering them much. I think most zoomers don't believe it will be there for them in any case.
What could get through to the young "manosphere"?
Any ideas?? Do they care that they are destroying the government? Or is smashing things seen only as "strength." What could break the fever of their anger? What would turn them against 47's criminal rampage?
Of course, the crimes are actually a demonstration of incredible weakness. 47 is too weak to get his "beautiful bill" out of Congress, so he and MUSK are on a smash and grab crime spree that is destroying the economy. But somehow I don't see that going "viral."
What about Musk? Do they really see that pitiful, manic man and the grand canyon-sized emptiness he is desperate to fill with attention and self-aggrandizement as a role model?
What can break through that?
I'm serious here. I'd love to hear thoughts because I am at a loss and I think this is the BIGGEST "structural" problem we are up against as we work to save our country from these monsters.
From the interview:
I agree. To me, this is the scariest chart in this entire presentation, and again, something I’m very surprised by.
At the bottom, we have age, and at the top, we have the gender gap and support for Kamala Harris, comparing women and men.
What you can see is that, for voters over 30, the gender gap was fairly stable at around 10 percent, which is roughly where it’s been in American politics
And for voters over age 75, it’s even lower. So a fairly low gender gap among older voters.
I think that a lot of people underestimate how recent the gender gap is. Historically, Republicans did better with women than with men. This was true across most of the West, that center-left parties did better with men than women. That shift happened in the United States during the Clinton era and has remained stable since then.
What’s crazy is that if you look at people under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. Eighteen-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics.
EK: Is that abortion?
I think it’s still too early to say exactly what the cause is. What’s interesting, though, is that this is happening in other countries, as well. Obviously, different countries have different political systems, but I’ve seen similar patterns in Canada, the U.K. and Norway.
There’s a lot of research to do here, but it’s still very striking. It’s similar to how a lot of people talk about the Democratic young men problem — and it’s still somehow underrated, because the actual numbers are just a lot worse than people think.
The huge gender gap implies to me it’s not just inflation. Women pay high prices for eggs, too.
If you look at the U.K. election last year, the Labour Party did a lot better because the incumbent party was unpopular. What’s interesting is if you break it down by age, the Conservatives actually increased their vote share among 18- to 24-year-old voters by 2 or 3 percent, even though they did 8 or 9 percent worse overall.
...
I feel like the story you’re implying you believe here is that this polarization among young men and women is driven by young men who were in high school and online during Covid.
This was around the time when #MeToo was cresting, Jordan Peterson became a big figure and Andrew Tate was rising. You have what’s now called the manosphere.
But there’s a sense the Democratic Party is becoming much more a pro-women party and in some ways, sort of anti-young men. And that, in turn, had a huge effect on young men’s political opinions.
I do want to stress that this seems to be a global phenomenon. And I don’t want to overcenter the specific things the Democratic Party has done but rather focus on the broader cultural shifts.
Peterson and Tate are global figures.
Exactly. I agree with that. We’re in the midst of a big cultural change that I think people are really underestimating.
If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.
If I were going to speculate, I’d say phones and social media have a lot to do with this. How that translates into partisan politics depends on what the parties do. But I think it’s a big shift.
It seems plausible to me that social media and online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. If you’re a 23-year-old man interested in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and online, you’re being driven into a very intensely male online world.
Whereas, if you’re a 23-year-old female and your interests align with what the YouTube algorithm codes, you are not entering that world. You’re actually entering the opposite world. You’re seeing Brené Brown and all these other things.
The capacity to be in highly gendered media worlds is really different in 2024 than it was in 2004, and that’s true worldwide.
I agree with that entirely. Online communities are much more gender-segregated than offline ones. In that respect, it should be unsurprising that suddenly shifting a bunch of young people’s social worlds to be entirely online all at once would cause the political situation to change.
Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters.
I do think that, even as the idea of the rising demographic Democratic majority became a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually going to save them. They thought that this was a last gasp of something and that if Donald Trump couldn’t run up his numbers among seniors and you had millennials and Gen Z really coming into voting power, that would be the end of this Republican Party.
That is just completely false, and it might be the beginning of this Republican Party.
Paywall-free interview transcript with graphs: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-david-shor.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6E4.-InP.6ZJfYS9TNpQh&smid=url-share
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Introvert. Is that two strikes?
Well, I never figured out what was attractive until later, and whatever came my way or didn't, I eventually married and have the most wonderful daughter, so I wouldn't trade any of it for anything.
Despite acting in the junior high school play, I always was just myself and never put on airs. Maybe that was the thing to do. But given the outcome, no regrets, even when I look back and facepalm over the many klutzy moments. The thing is not to be jealous. If I were, I'd have jumped off a bridge long ago. I figure that I'm a winner in this game of life, so no regrets. No woulda, coulda, shoulda.
I always felt, rightly or wrongly -- because what the hell did I know about the other gender? --- that girls were attracted to extrovert macho athletes --- often to their regret or peril, and that I'd find the right one.
What one projects nowadays is a mystery to me, with half or more of life online. Yikes. And how much of that is one to one?
I did meet my wife via a personal ad in a singles magazine. In the 80's. I just presented a refined and sensitive self, and you can guess what my competition was. Seems 90% of guys were gnarly surfer dudes. It worked anyway. 
That world completely changed.
I didn't have a son, but he'd be in his 30's now. Not sure what I'd have said, but I tried to be a good example for my daughter, and she has outstanding values and compassion for others. Besides being a scuba diver! She's a Bernie supporter, and what more could a Dad ask?
