In America, an electoral battle is underway to win over the male vote

Los Angeles. The Democratic Party has tried on two occasions to prove that a woman can be commander-in-chief. But for various reasons – which would fill several pages – on the two occasions that arose – Hillary Clinton, who nevertheless won the popular vote, and Kamala Harris – no woman has ever become president. In this mid-term election race, in which Congress is up for re-election on 3 November and in which the left hopes to curtail Donald Trump’s room for manoeuvre, men are the real protagonists. Not just men, but masculinity. The reason lies in the unexpected blow to liberals and progressives when young men – mainly white, but not only white, including many African Americans and Hispanics – chose Trump in 2024. And so today, the politicians who can turn the tables – the Senate candidates from Texas, James Talarico; from Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed; and also the candidate from Georgia, Jon Ossoff – along with their social media managers and supporters, are bringing up the issue of machismo to defeat a party – the Republicans – which for years has played on the contrast between masculinity and queer identity, attacking the Democrats’ overly ‘woke’ policies.

El-Sayed called his opponent a ‘beta’ (i.e. passive, weak, not an ‘alpha’), and in response to Fox News presenters who claim that everyone on the left is a ‘sissy’, he recounted having played football and lacrosse – sports considered ‘for real men’. He added that Vice-President J. D. Vance has a beard glued to his face and injects himself with testosterone, and that Donald Trump is a coward because he won’t go to Michigan. Ossoff’s Kennedy-esque qualities are being extolled, and on TikTok people are saying “run for president, we need a hot president”, meaning cool. A candidate from Indiana is filmed, covered in sweat, whilst lifting weights. A prospective MP from Montana tells the crowds at pub rallies about his time as a firefighter, when he’d parachute into fires. The aim appears to be to win back the ‘gym-bros’—the gym-going crowd who drink protein shakes—by showcasing physical strength in order to reclaim a slice of the electorate that had drifted toward the ‘MAGA’ camp, drawn in by mixed martial arts fights outside the White House and the outspoken nature of the podcasters.

According to a summer poll by the Washington Post, 27 per cent of Americans believe that the Democratic Party views men negatively. After California’s Governor Gavin Newsom had pointed this out two years ago, following the election, expressing his anger that the party had abandoned men – and, in an attempt to make amends, rushing to give interviews with influencers from the ‘manosphere’ – other Democrats began to realise that antagonising men had ultimately driven them away. Now they want to win them back to the blue side, bring them back into the fold, and hope they will be the percentage that makes the difference.

Trump supporters are firing back. Donald Trump said that Talarico is a vegan (he isn’t), as if that were the worst possible insult. The Republican candidate in Texas, Ken Paxton, has run election adverts claiming that Talarico has low testosterone. The deeply Christian Talarico responded by saying he could not care less about insults from old men with fake tans and, in his characteristic sermon-like style, spoke of his stepfather who mowed the lawn in front of their house every Sunday – and did the same for the widow next door – “and he never spoke of it; he just did it, because that’s what a real man does – he serves others. It is the weak men who serve only themselves.”

With sky-high petrol prices, wars abroad and a rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, many young people seem to have had enough of a president who had promised, if nothing else, to sort out the economy and bring down the cost of living. At least that is what, according to Puck, pollsters specialising in Gen Z are saying. Whilst these twenty-somethings may have voted for the right because the left seemed to be concerned only with women’s issues, LGBTQ matters and gender quotas, they might now vote Democrat after Trump failed to deliver on his promises. While at the start of his second term young men believed Trump would have a positive impact on their lives, today the majority say he has made their lives worse. For many of them, especially those not driven by ideology, the motto ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ still holds true, and they are prepared to forgive the long-running MeToo movement, in which one was supposed to feel ashamed of being a ‘straight white man’.