The Democrats trying to understand young American men know people are roasting their plan.
All that mocking just proves their point, they said: Democrats aren’t taking this disaffected and politically alienated voting bloc seriously enough.
It “reaffirms what young men already think, that Democrats don’t want to invest in you,” said Ilyse Hogue, who co-founded the Speaking with American Men project.
The group has a two-year, $20 million budget to study young men and how Democrats can reach them. The results of an initial round of research shared exclusively with POLITICO — including 30 focus groups and a national media consumption survey — found many young men believe that “neither party has our back,” as one Black man from Georgia said in a focus group. Participants described the Democratic Party as overly-scripted and cautious, while Republicans are seen as confident and unafraid to offend.
“Democrats are seen as weak, whereas Republicans are seen as strong,” Hogue said. “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 SAM project — which turned into a punchline for liberals and conservatives alike — is pitching itself to donors and officials as a hub for research, paid advertising and influencer outreach that’s focused on young men, a once-critical part of the Democratic coalition that they lost to President Donald Trump in 2024. The group was founded by Hogue, the former president of NARAL; John Della Volpe, a pollster who specializes in Gen Z voters; and former Texas Rep. Colin Allred, who unsuccessfully ran for Senate last year.
The focus groups found that young men feel they are in crisis: stressed, ashamed and confused over what it means to be a man in 2025. They vented about conflicting cultural messages of masculinity that put them in a “no-win situation around the meaning of ‘a man,’” according to the SAM project memo.
They described how the Covid pandemic left them isolated and socially disconnected. They also said they now feel overwhelmed by economic anxiety, making “traditional milestones,” like buying a home or saving for kids’ college, “feel impossible,” an analysis of the research said.
“The degree to which those economic concerns are also impacting how they think about themselves and quote-unquote success of being a man, and living up to their own expectations or the expectations of their family or society,” Della Volpe said. “There’s another layer of economic anxiety that I don’t think I fully saw until now.”
Young men’s feelings of crisis are connected to their exodus from the party, SAM’s research suggests. SAM’s national survey found that just 27 percent of young men viewed the Democratic Party positively, while 43 percent of them viewed the Republican Party favorably. The polling sample included 23 percent self-described Democrats, 28 percent Republicans and 36 percent independents.
In last year’s presidential election, the gender gap leapt to 13 percentage points nationally, up from 9 percentage points in 2020, the Democratic firm Catalist found in its final 2024 analysis that men’s support for Kamala Harris dropped by 6 points, winning just 42 percent of men — the lowest on record in recent elections.
That gap became even more pronounced among 18- and 29-year-olds. Just 46 percent of young men voted for Harris in 2024. The losses tracked across every racial group, and the most pronounced hemorrhaging came among Latinos and Black men.
Those challenges for Democrats echoed through the focus groups. An Asian American professional 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.”
Another Latino man from Las Vegas said that during the 2024 campaign, Harris focused on, “Oh, I got Beyonce on stage with me. Oh, I got Lady Gaga on stage,” and “it just kind of felt like, what does that have to do with me? I’m trying to move up in life.”
“Trump’s over here like, ‘if we’re able to get a surplus in our budget, then we’re going to have no tax on tips, no tax on overtime. It’s going to take a while to get to that point, but at least he’s saying the things that — oh, this is what I’m going to do,” the Latino man added.
A second Latino man from Las Vegas spoke admiringly of Trump and Andrew Tate, a controversial influencer who has been accused of rape and sex trafficking, as “always loved and hated, but they’re truthful, honest, to what they believe in.”
Della Volpe, who warned Democrats ahead of the 2024 election about their weakness with young men, said, “this is not a lost cohort, a lost generation,” but Democrats are “losing it” right now.”
Hogue said part of SAM’s mission “super charg[ing] social listening” and progressive influencers on Discord, Twitch and other platforms in their fundraising proposal. They’re urging Democratic candidates to use non-traditional digital advertising, especially on YouTube, in-game digital ads and sports and gaming podcasts.
“Democrats can’t win these folks over if they’re not speaking the language that young men are speaking,” Hogue said. “Most people I talked to, Democratic operatives, have never heard of Red Pill Fitness, which is just huge online.”
But there’s still frustration around SAM’s pitch that isn’t just about mocking it.
“The Democratic Party is missing that we’re not going to be able to message our way out of these deep problems men are facing, starting with the fact that they know the Democratic Party doesn’t really like or respect them,” said Ross Morales Rocketto, a Democratic strategist who’s also focused on researching men but isn’t involved in the project. “It’s really easy for Republicans to play off the politics of grievance.”
