How Republicans Lost Men
Men - men! - have turned on Republicans and it's somehow a non-story
For all the utterly tortured analysis of why Democrats can’t seem to crack the code for appealing to white guys who hate women and resent people of color and equate freedom with saying the r-slur online, there’s been no exploration or explanation for why Republicans are hemorrhaging men’s support ahead of the 2026 midterms.
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This could be explained, I think, by one of the unspoken rules in mainstream media coverage of American politics: Republicans win men, Democrats win women, and this arrangement makes sense because Republicans are dad and Democrats are mom.
File this unspoken rule alongside another classic: Nothing can ever be good for Democrats and nothing can ever be bad for Republicans. So it goes.
The poll watchers and political spreadsheet warriors are telling anyone who will listen that the cultish god-king who rules the world’s most powerful nation via deranged social media posts is as unpopular today as any president in modern history. Trump is, by almost every measure, south of 1980 Jimmy Carter, who got there by asking Americans to perhaps turn down the thermostat slightly.
That Carter was considered an abject failure and Trump is (so far) not seen in this light has me pointing back to that hard-and-fast rule of American politics, the one about nothing ever being bad for Republicans.
Our big sleepy boy isn't just bleeding support from the people of color with whom he made inroads in 2024. He's not just losing the backing of young zoomer dudes who way back in the fall of 2024 thought Trump was cool and based and that Kamala Harris laughed too much (young men came out strong last year for Democratic women gubernatorial candidates in New Jersey and Virginia).
Our nappy time big boy and his Republican enablers are losing men, as in not women, as in men generally.
Even the most wildly optimistic among us could not have predicted that two years into his second term Trump would be 18 point underwater with guys. This is the group that in 2024 rallied behind the insurrectionist candidate by nightmare margins: 56 percent of men voters backed the sleepiest president of all time while 42 percent voted for the laughing lady. That's a far cry from the 50-44 split we saw in the 2020 election.
And it wasn't only white guys who rallied behind the president whose afternoon naps are shown live on cable news. Fifteen percent of Black men voted for Trump in 2024, compared to 8 percent in 2020. Trump outright won Hispanic men in '24 after losing the Hispanic men vote by nearly 20 points in 2020. In some parts the country Trump won Hispanic guys by double digits.
How we got to a political environment in which Democrats are winning men is hardly a mystery: The price of grapes, as I wrote a few weeks after the 2024 election, never came down. The price, in fact, kept climbing, along with the price of everything else. Men (and many women) are more than willing to overlook fascist horrors as long as you make shit a little more affordable for them and their families. The price of shit, in the end, is all that really matters.
For a lot of guys, that was the deal in 2024: This decrepit fucker says he'll bring back pre-pandemic costs; I don't care what the fuck else he says he wants to do. Ethnic cleansing? Weaponized government? Terror campaigns against blue states? Have at it buddy, just make that gas cheaper. Make it possible to buy fast food for my family of four without spending $60.
Denny Carter
But nothing, as you know, is cheaper. Inflation keeps ticking upward, family budgets continue to be stretched beyond imagination, and that decrepit fucker is handing out billion dollar government contracts to his golf pals and his stupid fucking sons.
This chart from the latest YouGov/Economist poll result is really quite stunning. Trump’s net approval is not only deeply negative, but about 15(!!) points below what it was at this point in 2018, putting the GOP deeper in blue wave territory now vs then substack.com/@gelliottmor...
— G Elliott Morris (@gelliottmorris.com) June 3, 2026 at 8:37 AM
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Nowhere in mainstream coverage of American elections is this data reflected. Normie consumers of news likely have no idea Republicans have done the impossible and lost men five months ahead of the midterm elections because big media outlets either can't or won't acknowledge the mood of the nation in its surreal post-constitutional moment.
For the white man who backed Trump for a third time in 2024 with hopes that his vengeance tour against the United States would include a sustained federal effort to put ladies and people of color back in their place, his regime's anti-diversity efforts have rung hollow. They've made for splashy, monstrous headlines but again and again, these efforts to roll back diversity, equity, and inclusion programs – to re-segregate American society and erase American history – have fallen flat. That's because judges don't reside in the right wing's insulated unreality, in which white men are the aggrieved victims of an aggressive anti-white agenda pushed by shadowy elites.
Meanwhile, white guys' economic prospects remain unchanged and diversity is more popular than it's ever been.
I combed through the general ballot cross tabs of a a bunch of polling over the past ninety days and could not find any group that could be described as on fire for Republicans (Democrats are widely unpopular but mostly because voters see Dems as insufficiently willing to fight authoritarianism). Even Gen X-ers, the most fascist generation, are tepid in their GOP support.
Republicans have a meager 43-36 lead over Democrats among voters with a high school education.
28 percent of independents said they planned on voting Republican in the 2026 midterms. Fifty percent said they would vote for a Democratic candidate.
Democrats have a 44-41 lead over Republicans among voters from the South.
Democrats have a 48-44 leader over Republicans among voters in the Midwest
The thing with politics is that you have to eventually deliver something for the voters who hold their nose and vote for you because they see you as the least-bad of two bad options. You can go ahead and torment your base's perceived enemies and make life miserable for those they hate, but you have to do something that rewards their loyalty.
The Trump regime never did that because they never intended to do that. It was never part of the plan. They thought the blood and tears and pain of the Other would suffice. It did not. Now men are looking elsewhere.
Follow Denny Carter on BlueSky at @dennycarter.bsky.social
