Why young men like me are voting Trump

Anonymous Zoomer on the most important election in the world

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Picture: Brendan McDermid

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Earlier this year, I asked an anonymous, right-leaning member of Generation-Z to write a column. That column, written by somebody in their twenties, went viral and subsequent pieces by Anonymous Zoomer are among our most read to date. For that reason, I asked them to keep writing for us on a regular basis. I will never reveal their true identity.

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During Donald Trump’s viral interview with podcaster Joe Rogan last Friday, the former president expressed optimism at how “conservatism is getting younger”. Looking back at Trump, Rogan replied: “The rebels are Republican now”.

They have a point. While Kamala Harris and the Democrats still lead Trump among young Americans, there does appear to have been a shift toward Trump among young men like me —male Zoomers from Generation-Z, born from the mid-1990s, who appear to be lining up behind the MAGA revolt in larger numbers than in the past.

Just look at the polls.

Over the last four years, according to research at Harvard, men under 30 have shifted by a net 14-points toward the Republicans. A recent Times/Siena poll puts Trump on 58% among young men to Kamala Harris’ 37%, suggesting Trump will do much better next week among young men than he did four years ago, when he won 41%.

And Kamala while Harris has made gains among young women, who’ve been drifting left for a while (she is a staggering 40-points ahead of Trump among Zoomer women), she’s either static or losing ground among young men.

Now, there’s some debate about this among pollsters; while some say these shifts represent the arrival of an enormous and historic ‘gender gap’, the likes of which we’ve never seen before, others say this shift is exaggerated and that we’ll only really know how many young men support Trump after the election on Tuesday.

But either way, what’s beyond doubt is that in recent years young Zoomer women are much more likely to have moved in larger numbers behind the left-wing Democrats while young men are more likely to have stood still or turned right.

Young American women, note Gallup, are now 20-30 points more socially liberal than their male counterparts, while similar trends are visible in the UK, Germany, and South Korea. The Economist notes that the ‘gender gap’ between women who identify as “very liberal” and men who identify as “very conservative” is now twice the size of the ‘education gap’ between people who have a degree and those who do not. The American Enterprise Institute similarly points out that, since 2016, the share of young men identifying as Democrat has collapsed by 12-points to just 39%.

What’s going on? Why are many young men like me planning to vote for Trump next week? Many commentators will tell you they are rebelling against how the new cultural zeitgeist in the West routinely portrays young White men as inherently problematic, if not dangerous —as Andrew Tate figures suffering from ‘toxic masculinity’, misogyny, MAGA extremism, and wanting to transform the West into some kind of oppressive patriarchy that looks something like The Handmaid’s Tale.

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Young men rebelling against these crude stereotypes might be part of the story but as a member of Gen-Z myself I think there’s a lot more going on. While you won’t hear much about this from the elite class, I think young men like me actually have some good and entirely legitimate reasons for wanting to push back against an elite consensus in American and indeed Western politics that has cut men adrift.

Look, for a start, at the top concerns for young men at this election —the economy and immigration. The two are linked. More than 7 million illegal immigrants have crossed the southern border into America, illegally, since Joe Biden and Kamala Harris took office in 2020. This is an astonishing number. It is larger than the population of 36 of America’s states.

The House Judiciary Committee, furthermore, recently revealed that almost one million illegal migrants received de facto amnesty by having their immigration cases dismissed, terminated, administratively closed, or never being filed in the first place, allowing them to remain in the country for the foreseeable future. Last year, it was estimated that the cost of this disastrous border policy was some $150 billion.

As Marco Rubio wrote recently, in an essay for Compact Magazine, the sheer scale of this immigration crisis is one of two things that have directly hit and undermined the fortunes of American men, who are not only much less likely than their father’s and grandfather’s to enter the workforce, find decent-paying jobs, build a family, contribute to their community and nation, but are also much more likely than their ancestors to fall into depression, loneliness, alcoholism, drug abuse, and suicide.

American men, notes Rubio, have been smashed apart by what became known as “productive offshoring”, or what Matt Goodwin calls “hyper-globalization”, whereby an alliance of the elite class and global corporations colluded to export well-paid, secure, and status-raising jobs overseas so that they can exploit cheap migrant labour and non-existing environmental regulations in other parts of the globe, all while presenting this as the “progressive”, “responsible” or “open” way forward.

At the same time, they’ve also been hit by how the very same people in the elite class and big business imported masses of low-skill, low-wage immigrants into America (like they are doing in Britain), whose arrival allows the same global corporations to further exploit cheap migrant labour here in the West, thereby keeping their costs low, profits high, and further undercutting the role, position, and status of men.

The elite class, Rubio writes:

“… established one-sided “free trade” with Communist China, rewarded offshoring, and spread an open-borders philosophy that captured both major parties, as well as much of Big Labor. Millions of American blue-collar jobs disappeared, and the foreign-born share of the population ballooned out of proportion. The consequences of this for US-born men have been catastrophic. The percentage of prime-age men working or looking for work is close to what it was in 1940, in the throes of the Great Depression. Meanwhile, one economist estimates that by 2016, immigrants “increased the size of the low-skilled workforce by roughly 25 percent.” 

While Zoomer men like me might have not have been directly impacted by these very deliberate political choices, many of us will have watched these changes blow apart the lives of our fathers, neighbours, and fellow men. We will have heard about how, contrary to what the expert class claimed in the 1990s and 2000s, hyper-globalization and mass immigration have directly undercut the ability of working men to earn a living and protect and provide for our wives, partners, and children.

And then we will have watched Democrat elites and also old guard Republicans berate the very same men as racists, bigots, deplorables, thickoes, and “MAGA extremists” for calling this out, portraying them more like embarrassing members of the American family who should at best be ignored and at worst seen as a major threat to democracy, rather than what they are —concerned citizens who know, first-hand, how the broken elite consensus gutted and hollowed out the national economy.

Sohrab Ahmari, founder and editor of Compact Magazine, has recently made similar points, noting how a self-described …