It’s the most startling thing I’ve seen in this year’s presidential campaign – the astoundingly large gap between how young men and young women plan to vote this November. Among women under age 30, an overwhelming 67% plan to vote for Kamala Harris, while just 29% say they’ll back Donald Trump. But among young men, a majority – 53% – plan to vote for Trump, while 40% say they’ll support Harris, according to a New York Times/Sienna College poll. That’s an astonishing 51-percentage-point gender gap.
It’s easy to understand why so many young women favor Harris – she has an inspiring life story, champions reproductive freedom and would break the biggest glass ceiling of all by becoming the first female president. But I’m mystified why so many young men back Trump.
Many of them seem to like Trump’s machismo. They like that he talks tough. They see him as an icon of traditional manhood. But all this raises an unavoidable question: should Trump be looked to as an icon of manhood considering that he boasted of grabbing women’s genitals, was found liable for sexual assault and had an affair with an adult film star soon after his wife gave birth? That shouldn’t be anyone’s model of manhood.
Many young men seem to admire Trump’s king-of-the-jungle vibe: he roars, he bellows, he boasts that no one can ever beat him (unless they cheat). But when you cut through Trump’s tough talk and look at the record, it becomes clear that Trump did very little for young men in his four years as president.
Whoops, I should note that if you’re a young man making more than $1m a year, Trump did do a lot for you, thanks to his colossal tax cuts for the richest 1%. But for the more than 99% of young men who don’t make $1m a year, sorry, Trump didn’t do diddly for you, other than cut your taxes a wee bit, a tiny fraction of the tax cuts that he gave to the richest Americans.
I recognize that many young men feel uncomfortable about the Democratic party, partly because some Democrats unfortunately treat men as a problem – and sometimes as the problem. If the Democrats were smart, they’d see that young men – like every other group in society – have problems that they need help with, problems like affording a home, finding a good-paying job, obtaining health insurance, affording college and having enough money to raise a family.
Regardless of how you feel about Harris, the truth is that her policies will do far more for young men than Trump’s policies will. It’s not even close. She is serious about lifting up young men and young women, and she has plans to do so.
Unlike Trump, Harris will help with soaring rents and home prices. She has pledged to build 3m new homes to help drive down housing prices. In another big step to make housing more affordable, she plans to give a $25,000 subsidy to first-time home buyers. Unlike Trump, Harris is also attacking the problem of high grocery prices – she has promised to crack down on price-gouging at the supermarket.
For many young men, health coverage and high health costs are a problem. On those matters, Trump will only make things worse. He has repeatedly promised to repeal Obamacare. That would be a disaster for millions of young men and women because they would no longer be able to be on their parents’ health plan until age 26. What’s more, repealing Obamacare will push up healthcare prices.
Many young people complain about their mountains of student debt. Trump won’t help on that; he has condemned the idea of forgiving student loans. In contrast, Harris wants to expand Biden’s debt cancellation program, which is hugely popular with young Americans. What’s more, Trump backed huge cuts in student aid – a move that would make it harder for young people to afford college. Harris is eager to make college more affordable by increasing student grants. Not only that, she is looking to what Tim Walz, her running mate, has done as Minnesota’s governor. He has made Minnesota’s state universities and community colleges free for students from middle-class and lower-income families.
If you’re a young man frustrated by how little your job pays, you should know that Trump – doing a big favor for his corporate allies – did nothing to raise the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage. Harris strongly supports raising the minimum wage.
Trump has made two big promises to make your life more affordable. Without giving details, he says he will cut auto insurance prices nationwide in his first 100 days in office. He also says he will cut energy and electricity prices in half during his first year in office. If you believe those far-fetched promises, then you’ll probably believe me when I say I have a bridge to sell you.
If you’re a young father or if you hope to have a family someday, you should know that Harris’s policies will do far more for you than Trump’s. Recognizing how expensive it is to raise a family, Harris has called for creating a children’s tax credit of $3,000 per child per year and $6,000 for a newborn.
To improve work-family balance, Harris has long pushed to enact paid family and medical leave so that people can take much-needed paid time off to spend with their newborns or care for sick parents or children. (Most Republicans oppose a paid leave law because their corporate donors oppose it.) Trump doesn’t have similar pro-family policies – his main policy proposals are huge tax cuts for corporations and the ultra-rich and large tariffs on imports that will dangerously push up inflation.
Although many young Americans don’t realize it, Biden and Harris have worked hard to create good-paying jobs for those who don’t go to college. Biden and Harris fought to enact three important pieces of legislation – an infrastructure bill, a green energy bill and a computer chips bill – that will create about 1m construction jobs, factory jobs and other jobs across the US, many of them unionized jobs with strong benefits.
If you’re one of the many young people at Starbucks, REI, Apple or elsewhere who support unionizing as a way to increase your pay and improve your working conditions, you should know that Harris is a strong supporter of unions and enthusiastically backs legislation to make it easier to unionize. But billionaire Trump dislikes labor unions. When he was president, he and his appointees did dozens of things, large and small, to weaken unions and create roadblocks for workers seeking to unionize.
There’s no denying that Trump’s tough talk makes many young men feel good. But tough talk is cheap. It won’t help anyone pay the rent, afford college or raise a family. Harris doesn’t talk as tough as Trump, but her record and her policies make undeniably clear that she will do far more for America’s young men and women than Trump will.
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Steven Greenhouse, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, is an American labor and workplace journalist and writer