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After the Trump administration stormed into Venezuela to arrest Nicolás Maduro, I waited eagerly for my colleague Julia Ioffe to weigh in with her typically insightful (and wry) analysis of foreign policy in the MAGA era. She delivered, outlining the myriad ways in which Trump has dialed back his supposedly isolationist views in favor of a “newfound zest for foreign intervention.” The catalogue, so far this term: a strike against Iran’s nuclear sites; strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen and Islamic State positions in Syria and Nigeria; and saber-rattling against Colombia, Mexico, and Denmark. Last year, Trump launched more missile strikes (626) than Joe Biden did in his entire first term (555). The administration made its pivot abundantly clear on X this week, with the State Department posting an aggro image of Trump, declaring, “THIS IS OUR HEMISPHERE.”
As Julia pointed out, the MAGA faithful have mostly gone along for the ride. “What used to bill itself as a noninterventionist movement has deftly reformatted,” she wrote. But while the Trumpiest Republicans might love the pivot, MAGA alone didn’t get Trump elected. His 2024 math worked because independents and casual voters broke for him, too—and despite Trump’s victory lap this week, his military adventurism continues to put him crossways with one of the most important voting blocs that sent him back to the White House: young men.
In many ways, the drift of young men away from Trump this year tells the story of why his presidency has hit the skids. Simply put, Trump continues to do things he wasn’t elected to do—and young male voters have noticed. This week, I received exclusive new data from a fresh, large-scale report conducted by Speaking With American Men (SAM), a multimillion-dollar research project, created by Democrats in the aftermath of 2024, that studies why young men shifted so dramatically to the G.O.P. The project is helmed by longtime youth polling expert John Della Volpe, who surveyed 4,211 young people between the ages of 16-29 from October 28 to November 6 for the second installation of The SAM Project’s ongoing study. It found that young men simply don’t trust the president anymore—a rupture that began with Trump’s Liberation Day tariff announcement last spring.
“He Didn’t Deliver”
Last year, young men were typecast as a bunch of reactionary white “bros” who voted for Trump because of podcasts, Zyn, misogyny, or whatever. Those were all real angles, sure—but they also conveniently whitewashed the whole story. Young men of all races and classes shifted to Trump, hoping that would bring down costs and help them access an economy that felt out of reach, Della Volpe told me. But prices haven’t gone down, and the president seems more focused on foreign policy than domestic affordability. In Della Volpe’s polling last spring, Trump’s favorability rating among young men was 56 percent; in his SAM survey shared with Puck, it now stands 46 percent (and a lowly 36 percent among all young people). “The big picture is that Trump was getting the benefit of the doubt in the first 100 days of his term,” Della Volpe told me. “Now, they are reflecting on those policies several months later and seeing no significant improvement. And they’re saying that their situation is no better. In many cases, it’s worse.”
The survey also found that “avoiding unnecessary wars and conflicts” is of paramount importance to young men: 78 percent of them said it “matters,” and 68 percent said they’d be more likely to support a candidate who avoids them. Young men also said that Democrats would avoid foreign wars compared to Republicans, by a 5-point margin. Of course, the Trump administration would say that their Venezuela action was necessary, and Trump stressed this week, too, that the United States is not at war with the country. But when your administration forcibly extracts a foreign leader from a heavily fortified compound, killing dozens of people in the process, that might seem like a semantic difference.
Meanwhile, only 27 percent of young men agreed that Trump is “delivering for people like you.” Forty percent said, “He talked big, but let people like me down,” while another 26 percent responded, “He’s made an effort but didn’t deliver.” During the campaign, the president positioned himself as a fighter in campaign ads and at UFC events, but just 22 percent of young men agreed with the question, “Do you feel like Donald Trump is fighting for people like you?” (A combined 50 percent of young men said “no” or “not really” when asked the same question.) When asked to choose a description for Trump’s impact on the political system, only 40 percent of young men said, “He shakes things up and brings needed change.” But 47 percent said Trump “creates chaos and makes things worse.” If young men saw Trump as a change agent last November, it seems they no longer do.
The Bernie Dilemma
The SAM Project’s latest survey is also the rare, high-quality poll that includes insights from 16- and 17-year-olds, many of whom will be eligible to vote in next year’s elections and in 2028. The new data is jam-packed with goodies for political junkies. To wit, among young men, Barack Obama registered the highest favorability rating of any public figure (56 percent), trailed most closely by MrBeast (55 percent) and Joe Rogan (53 percent). The only Republican who comes close to Trump’s favorability rating with young men (46 percent) is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (44 percent). Otherwise, young men give MAGA Republicans a favorability rating of just 32 percent. J.D. Vance has a lower favorability rating (33 percent) among young men than Andrew Tate (35 percent). Kristi Noem has an abysmal favorability rating—the same favorability rating as incels (17 percent). The late Charlie Kirk remains rather popular, with an 11 percent net approval rating among young men. His widow Erika, though, is underwater at a –4 percent net approval rating.
By a single point, young men actually think Democrats are better on immigration policy than Republicans, undercutting cocky White House aides proud of their deportation memes. But even though young men are turning on the G.O.P., they don’t hold the Democrats in very high esteem either. Only 18 percent of young men said the Democratic Party is “definitely fighting for people like you,” while 34 percent said Democrats are fighting “maybe a little.” Kamala Harris is underwater with a –11 percent net favorability rating with young men, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is at –2 percent. Likely presidential contender Gavin Newsom, who has made a push to bro out on his eponymous podcast, has only a 26 percent favorability rating among young men. Surprisingly, Bernie Sanders’ favorability rating with 16-29-year-olds overall is just 39 percent—and 40 percent among men—suggesting his appeal to Millennials hasn’t translated to the youngest generation. “He’s seen as part of the system now,” Della Volpe told me.
The Bernie number gets to a crucial insight about young men. For them, Della Volpe told me, conventional politics are not really top of mind. That’s because they haven’t seen politics deliver for them in their lifetimes. Instead, their perspectives are based on the pressures they face in their everyday lives, both economically and existentially. In the poll, only 28 percent of young men identified as Republican, and just 19 percent identified as Democrat. The rest identified as unaffiliated or independent. A slight majority (52 percent) said they did not consider themselves to be politically engaged. “What we have found is that young men think they’re doing what society wants, which is be providers and be protectors,” Della Volpe told me. “But they don’t feel respected by the political institutions and the process. A big reason for that is they weren’t really targeted or communicated with writ large by political leaders, other than Trump and his types, until recently.”
The Resentful Strivers
The survey also revealed an enormous amount of anxiety about affordability and what it means to be successful in America. Men listed groceries and rent or housing as the top items they’re most stressed about paying for. They said political leaders have almost no respect for trade jobs or the working class. Almost half of young men (49 percent) said they wanted political leaders in both parties to do more to “prepare workers for the future of A.I.” Many also described their fondness for cryptocurrencies as a pathway to creating wealth in a world with few opportunities to do so. (And speaking of their digital lives, the survey found that 87 percent of young men play video games weekly—with 51 percent saying they game for three hours a day or more.)
These frustrations can lead to resentment, the SAM survey found, which are some of the feelings that Trump tapped into last year while reaching out to men on podcasts and YouTube shows. “Breitbart got it half-right,” Della Volpe said. “Politics doesn’t flow only from culture, it also flows from the daily experiences shaping young people’s lives.” A large majority of young men, 67 percent, said that “society puts too much pressure on men to act a certain way”; 57 percent said, “I’ve held back my opinion because I was worried how people would react”; and 51 percent said, “Sometimes I feel blamed for just being a man.”
Based on his survey research and modeling, Della Volpe bundled young men into five different cohorts, trying to categorize them in a more nuanced way than the usual left-right spectrum. Among these groups, the largest he identified—the “Resentful Strivers”—made up 29 percent of young men. This cohort might be right-leaning, but mostly because they feel like their efforts are undervalued at work, at school, and with women and family. They aren’t ideological, nor are they purebred conservatives or lifelong Republican voters. They mostly just feel ignored. “These men are resentful that they’re working hard and not being recognized, through financial gain or financial stability or through politics,” Della Volpe told me. “But I believe they are center-based, non-ideological, and they are shifting right because they feel let down by the left.”
Della Volpe added that these are gettable votes for Democrats, or any politician that lends them an open ear. “I truly believe—and I sliced and diced this thing for hours—it really is far more about experience than ideology,” he continued. “They care about the environment, they care about access to healthcare, they care about not entering unnecessary wars, they care about corruption. There is an opportunity for Democrats to establish a relationship that can potentially be turned into political persuasion messaging, and mobilization messaging, in the coming years.”
