Why did young men move left in this month’s US elections? | Cory Alpert

Just a few months ago, it seemed that the political landscape was changing permanently, with young people shifting right – especially young men. Democrats spun up a vortex of efforts to win them back, but they often appeared to be flailing. This month’s elections, however, told a different story.

Young men in the US face a political identity crisis. It should not be controversial to say that the world that many were promised as children has not come to fruition. Two decades of war and a turbulent economy have combined with a massively changing workforce. Young men’s disaffection should come as no real surprise.

An entire ecosystem of hucksters has emerged to take advantage of these young people, peddling a dark vision that offers violence and control as a response to a changing world. Meanwhile, the Democratic party failed to imagine a political future that included these young men. In Democrats’ parlance, anyone who took one step in that direction was hopelessly lost, unable to see the beautiful egalitarian future that we could create together.

There is a fine line here. I am not arguing for the redemption, welcome, or whitewashing of the people who have peddled this bleak reality. But we can and should build a political coalition that includes this generation, that doesn’t leave them out in the cold, only to find a home in the most bleak fringes of a political movement that tells them that a lust for control over other people, especially women, is the only way to find meaning.

On the left, we tell ourselves the story of our own vaunted sympathy, and yet we assign only blame to the young men who do something similar, looking for community and only finding it among the most opportunistic and dangerous political movements. We have done little to welcome them in.

And while Democrats had solid policies and economic plans, Republicans, backed by an army of digital content, were able to take the mantle of running on the economy and framing the left as cultural warriors out of touch with the majority of Americans.

But the good news is that this month’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City show Democrats have learned a lesson.

The three marquee campaigns of this year were all remarkably similar, despite coming from different parts of the ideological spectrum. Their messaging was relentlessly focused on affordability – how expensive and difficult life has become for the working and middle-class people of their communities. Their solutions covered a wide ideological range, but the focus remained the same.

Most young men, like most trans people and Black people and immigrants and everyone else, are dealing with housing that has skyrocketed in price, especially compared with our parents’ generations. Instead of having one career in our lifetimes, we now have to continually seek new jobs. Living independently as an adult is much more expensive and complicated now than it has been. These affordability campaigns gave young men something to do about those pressures rather than ceding that frustration to the most cynical actors.

Undoubtedly this conversation is easier to have when Donald Trump is taking three steps every day to dismantle the economy. There’s a real sense that the economy is getting worse. That it’s more difficult to pay bills and keep food on the table, especially when Republicans are, quite literally, ensuring that 42 million people cannot afford to keep food on their table by refusing to fund Snap during their government shutdown.

Republicans got distracted, trying to defend Trump and also trying to repeat his playbook of tying Democrats to the culture war of the moment. But without Trump’s singular ability to control a media narrative, Republicans with far less political talent and capital floundered, making themselves look weak and silly in the process.

The political miracle is that this ruthless focus on affordability and cost of living may have brought in many of those same young men who had followed Trump a year ago. In Virginia and New Jersey, men under 30 broke for their new Democratic governors, with about six in 10 supporting Spanberger, according to the AP. In New York, young men went for Zohran Mamdani over Andrew Cuomo by a margin of nearly 40 points, according to a Tufts Circle analysis.

It turns out that these young men are not completely lost to us. We just failed to imagine a reality where they could be in our camp.

Affordability broke through amid the longest government shutdown in US history, as consumer prices were rising ever higher thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs. For all of his bluster, eventually the economic reality becomes an unavoidable political crisis for anyone not far gone in his cult of personality who has to pay their bills.

Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, and Mamdani in New York City showed us that the frustration that every working and middle-class person feels could be directed into a political coalition that sees marginalized people as people also affected by the greed and corruption that has made life unaffordable for so many.

Young men, like everyone else, are looking for a politics that can make life a little better. Democrats are finally figuring out how to offer them that chance.

• Cory Alpert is a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne looking at the impact of AI on democracy. He served in the Biden-Harris administration for three years