Nic Sumners, a 21-year-old cosmetic car repairman from Virginia, says he is pro-choice. But when he voted in the 2024 presidential election, he did so for Donald Trump.
Despite his personal beliefs, he says that Trump talks about the American people in a way that resonates with him, without—in his opinion—faulting him for his gender and sexual orientation.
“I’m a straight white man, and I feel like we take the blame for a lot of things,” Sumners says.
“Of course there are bad guys,” he adds, insisting he’s not one of them just because he voted for Trump. But what appealed to him about Donald Trump was that “his campaign was not coming after us. He was highlighting the American people, which we are. It doesn’t matter what color you are, what you may identify as. Since I wasn’t excluded, I resonated with it.”
Economics also played a part—Sumner’s mother lost her home during Joe Biden’s presidency (though he says she actually voted for Kamala Harris), and he’s struggled to afford his own rent. He appreciates Trump’s “emphasis on the economy and building America up again.”
But one of the biggest issues for him has been the way men in general are assumed to be inherently bad people because of their politics or their gender.
“It’s a touchy subject,” he admits. “The people I’ve spoken to who voted for Harris are constantly saying that we’re racist, that we’re misogynistic, that, you know, we’re transphobic. And it’s like they don’t understand that most people aren’t like that. Of course, there’s those fringe people who are, but most people just want to live and not be bothered by name-calling.”
And so Sumners became one of the 55% of young male voters aged 18 to 29 who voted for Trump this election. A huge jump from 2020, when 41% of 18-to-29-year-old men backed him. It’s also in direct contrast to young women—58% of whom backed Harris.
So why did so many men swing right during the 2024 election? Much has been said about Trump’s embrace of masculinity throughout his campaign—traversing the podcast sphere with often provocative, highly popular personalities like Adin Ross, influencer and wrestler Logan Paul, Flagrant’s Andrew Schulz, and of course, Joe Rogan. And then there’s the enduring image of 71-year-old former WWE wrestler Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off at the Republican National Convention.
Others have suggested that, because Trump has proudly taken ownership for the overturning of Roe v. Wade (and as a consequence empowering the curbs across the country on reproductive freedom), young male voters must not care at all about women’s rights. A line of thinking that has been emboldened by controversial figures like far-right pundit and proud incel Nick Fuentes, who celebrated Trump’s victory with wildly offensive takes like “Your body, my choice.”
But truth be told, that’s not where the majority of the young men I’ve spoken with stand—even if they proudly voted for Trump. Many young men say they voted for the former president not because they are anti-choice or against human rights or are even that pro-masculinity, but because they’re tired of feeling bad for being a man.
I’ve interviewed young men who echo Sumners’s concerns with what he sees as an overfixation on gender from the left. While it’s difficult, they say, to point to policies that are explicitly anti-man, they argue they’ve been made to feel uncomfortable for being who they are. “I feel like there’s this cultural frustration that young men have that they’re not allowed to be young men,” says 26-year-old Benji Backer from Arizona. “That probably went too far. No one’s telling women they can’t be women.”
Backer, author of The Conservative Environmentalist, says he sees growing support for Trump in his community—including among people who also care about left-leaning social issues such as access to reproductive health care. He points to the fact that, as a state, Arizona voted both to protect abortion and for Trump: “Young people specifically, we’re trying to make it, trying to find our way in the world, get stable jobs, incomes, survive without living with parents.”
While young women may struggle to understand these young men’s viewpoints—especially with so many fundamental rights under attack and women’s health care already lethally compromised in states with abortion bans—many young men say their focus is more on equal economic opportunity than abortion.
In some cities across the country, young women make more money than men (though in the vast majority, men still make more). They’re also attending college at higher rates. And single women are buying homes at higher rates than single men. So some of the tropes about their role in enabling the patriarchy no longer resonate with today’s youngest men, some of whom say they don’t have first-hand experience with that world order.
“We feel really blamed for things that we haven’t had an opportunity to impact,” Backer says, adding that he has tried to ensure pay equity across his business. “I have always prioritized that in everything that I do, and so it doesn’t feel good to feel like I’m being blamed. I get told all the time, ‘You’re a white man, sit down and wait your turn,’ and it’s like, ‘Well, I can’t change the fact that I’m white, I can’t change the fact that I’m a man, I can’t change the fact that decades or centuries ago, people made bad decisions.’ All I can do is do what I can do now. And what I’m doing now is treating people as fairly as possible because that’s what I firmly believe in.”
For Coby, a 19-year-old student at the University of Michigan, it was a combination of identity politics issues as well as economics that drew him to Trump. He was in high school during the 2020 election, and while he grew up a Republican and was supportive of Trump before he could vote, he says he started learning more about politics amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, he says, he prioritizes economic growth, trying to end wars, and “common sense policies,” adding that he appreciates Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s stance on junk food and was glad when Trump brought him into his orbit: “A lot of young guys are really into health now more than ever. There’s this whole wave about rejecting processed foods.”
But Coby, who only wants to be identified by his first name, highlights the way men are talked about as oppressors by some on the left as one of the reasons he sees men trending politically right. “When you tell a young white guy, like, ‘Hey, you’re an oppressor, and because you’re white, you have privileges that your Black and Hispanic peers didn’t have, and you’re inherently at fault, or you’re guilty for that, which is what a lot of the left wings or Democrats are saying, they’re gonna reject that,” he says. “We’re not racist; we’re not misogynistic. We’re just normal people, and we [are] friends with everyone. We’re tired of hearing a lot of this BS from a lot of the far left.”
These concerns outweigh, for him, issues like abortion rights—even though Coby is pro-choice. But “because Trump got rid of Roe v. Wade,” he says, the issue was not a priority for him when casting his ballot in Michigan. “For the past four years the Biden administration couldn’t really do anything about it to federally protect abortion rights.” In his opinion, “That issue is kind of settled. It’s been given to the states.”
A lot of young men I spoke to, like Coby, did care about abortion but also felt it wasn’t their issue—even the ones, like 19-year-old Alex Georges, from Pennsylvania, who planned to vote for Harris. “With abortion, obviously men have their say about it. But women are the ones that…it’s their body.”
An issue that a lot of men did feel was important to them, though, was the ability to speak freely without being ostracized for viewpoints that don’t align with that of their peers. Coby says he feels this most on campus. Last week, Coby says, students and professors expressed their sadness with the election outcome. “I would not have the courage to raise my hand and then speak, ‘Hey, no, I’m happy with the election outcome,’” he says, adding, “It’s very hard for Republicans to speak up. I’m afraid of having a bad rep with a professor.”
For students like Coby, this can lead to resentment. “It’s very isolating. I feel like there’s a sense of moral superiority that occurs. When it comes to people who are within academia, they have this sense of superiority for who they vote for and what they value. And if you’re against that, then they kind of look down upon you.”
Provocative as this might be to many women, many of the young men I’ve met over the last year have told me that they are feeling marginalized, especially by the left. Joe Mitchell, 27, from Iowa, tells me, “I think young men have felt like they have been suppressed to a certain extent.”
Mitchell started an organization called Run GenZ, which recruits and trains young conservatives to run for public office across the country. He also, in line with so many of his peers, voted for Trump.
“Young men have started rejecting some of the ideology of the ‘woke’ set of standards that are put in place for them,” he says. “The Trump campaign specifically targeted that demographic and courted them pretty heavily. There was already a large sense of young men wanting to find a party or people that would help embrace them.”
