Democrats believe they’re making progress after Trump’s gains with young men helped him win in 2024. Republicans say they’re focused on ensuring those inconsistent voters turn out.
Winning the hearts and minds of young men has been at the center of politics over the past year. Republicans sought to cement Donald Trump’s gains, while Democrats, fearing they could lose an increasingly disaffected segment of the electorate for a generation, launched a series of initiatives to prevent that.
Ahead of next year’s midterms, some Democrats say the momentum is shifting. High-profile Democrats running in last month’s elections — Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Zohran Mamdani in New York City — improved on the party’s poor performance among young men one year before.
Some 2028 Democratic presidential contenders launched policy initiatives aimed at men and boys. And in Trump’s first year in office, many young men say they feel a continued economic and social malaise, cutting into his support with that key group.
You’d think that would work, but it may be part of the problem. The idea that right wing guys don’t get dates doesn’t seem to have a lot backing it up. Kind of a new phenomenon to study, but for short term dating, studies on characteristics that seem to be common with far right ideals seem to indicate the opposite.
Short term dating probably isn’t the best metric to determine the long term dating success of right wing men. Who, in my experience and those of everyone I know, are avoided like the plague and need to intentionally hide their politics to get one of those short term dates
The way people define a successful dating life is different, it can be especially skewed in an unhealthy fashion when you’re younger and viewing that as a good metric tends to be more popular for men which is who we’re talking about here. The key point though is that the numbers we’ve collected don’t seem to be matching when it comes to follow-through. You can find a lot of vague data with ‘would you avoid dating’ going above 80%, but the ones that collect ‘have you dated recently’ are still pretty rough but don’t tend to get anywhere near that high. Can’t understate how rough most of the data here is though. The best we can usually do with real data is correlate negative personality traits you’d expect to be more common with conservatives and extrapolate from that. The data on whether shitty people get laid doesn’t look great for us and goes pretty far back comparatively.
I don’t think we’ll get it any time soon because I think everyone would hate the results and I don’t even know how you’d work it or who you’d get to pay for it, but I’d love to see someone try to do a cohesive study on the effect of political stance on an individuals dating life throughout it’s entire lifecycle. Even if someone got it going too, we’re basically just proving that people make poor relationship decisions which I don’t think anyone is going to be surprised by.