The First 100 Days: Trump’s Honeymoon with Young Men May Be Over
It is now well known that Donald Trump performed unusually well among young men in 2024 (and not just young white men). His ability to capitalize on “low-attention” or “low-propensity” young men in particular suggests that the Republican coalition may even have room to grow when it comes to the views of young men who aren’t habitual voters.
Trump was partly able to cultivate the support of these voters via an online media environment that eagerly (and lucratively) injected rightwing cultural values into supposedly non-political content - from comedy to sports to gaming.
As a result of this long term effort and the inevitable early Presidency polling bump, Donald Trump enjoyed strong favorable ratings among young men, hitting 60-34 net approval in the week following his inauguration.
Since then, Trump’s numbers have declined across the board, with a recent CNN/SSRS poll suggesting Trump’s first one hundred days have been the worst for any sitting president in the modern era. While recent YouGov/Economist polling has shown Trump’s numbers falling across age, race, education, and other key factors, the precipitous nature of the decline among young people has drawn particular attention.
In a separate survey of registered voters tracked by YouGov, approval of Trump among young male registered voters was similarly dramatic. In data provided to YMRP by YouGov Blue, Trump’s approval rating among young men who are registered to vote fell from 60 percent approve to 34 percent disapprove to now just 43 percent approve to 54 percent disapprove. That’s a net approval change of 37 points! YMRP analysis in the past suggested young men may be more likely to swing back from the right to the left, and Trump’s first one hundred days have shown this is certainly possible.
YouGov Blue’s Registered Voter Omnibus January B, February B, March B, and April B, 2025 waves.
Bad ideas badly implemented
Why has this happened? Lets not bury the lede: Many Trump administration policies are viewed as extreme and unpopular. This is true across many groups of voters and is not just limited to young men. Trump is showing vulnerability even on “signature” Republican issue areas like immigration and growing the economy. According to the recent Yale Youth Poll, young voters are less likely to favor key Trump education and immigration policies than other voters, and are slightly more worried than older voters about Trump’s refusal to follow the courts. Young men oppose abortion bans and support new government programs to create jobs and economic opportunity. For many voters, this Trump Administration is simply too extreme and is moving things in the wrong direction. When it comes to explaining Trump’s movement in the polls, don’t overthink it: A lot of it is simply because he’s doing things voters don’t like.
The economic consequences of Trump’s policies could be severe for young men, and are just starting to be felt. A Marketwatch analysis widely shared on Reddit and Twitter laid out the net effect of Trump’s first one hundred days on the economy: “severe and lasting consequences” stemming not just from tariffs but from their erratic and dubious implementation, embodied by some US ports supposedly opting to forego tariff collection entirely due to uncertainty about their actual rate, and from the perception that Trump’s daily mood is the most important leading economic indicator. Recent results from the Texas Manufacturing Outlook Survey show US manufacturing is receiving significantly fewer orders already, and the goods in question are bearing new price hikes. The market is down, the price of ordinary goods continues to climb, new houses are still slow to build and expensive to buy, and “long term life costs” such as childcare continue to rise.
As a generation of young men see their prospects for homeownership and family and (albeit distantly) retirement dwindle, the consequences for Trump’s polling numbers may be unsurprising. The economic temperature is going down, the political temperature is going up. Again, don’t overthink it.
Yes, Trump ran on tariffs and many experts warned they were bad ideas at the time, with a summer 2024 analysis warning Trump’s views on trade were economically dangerous. Many Trump supporters seemed to not believe he would do the things he said he was going to do, or were simply not aware of his specific policies. Young men voters are starting to see the reality of the Trump Presidency, and it’s changing their perspective. Of course, it remains to be seen how these polling shifts will translate to changes at the ballot box.
The Manosphere Starts To Turn On Trump
The young men who drifted right in 2024 were distrustful of leftwing and Democratic messengers on many issues, and their disproportionately social media-based information environment fed them more of the same perspectives. Democratic messages were not heard much at all compared to the fawning optimism of rightwing social media stars who dominate the attention economy for this demographic. The Left made occasional attempts to rectify this imbalance, but not enough, and some questioned whether it was “appropriate” at all to go on shows like Joe Rogan.
Since then, the vibes have changed. Prominent accounts that young men trust have begun to react negatively to Trump’s first hundred days. The prominent gaming news account Gamers Nexus earned over four million views and a few days at the top of the r/Games subreddit for their analysis of how tariffs were making consoles more expensive. Elon Musk’s Paths of Exile 2 saga is now widely known, and his livestreams have become hostile territory. America’s professional gaming economy is deeply intertwined not just on pure economics but on close cultural affinity for their Japanese and Korean counterparts, with gamers, board gamers, anime fans, and manga fans alike facing disruption to their communities and livelihoods from Trump’s tariffs.
The Yale Youth Poll points out that young people are more positive on the cryptocurrency economy than others, and many of the trusted news sources in this domain have been alarmed by the Trump Administration’s moves to roll back law enforcement in this area. The popular investigative journalist Coffeezilla famously declared “crime is now legal” in what is now a multi-part series documenting Trump’s dismantling of anti-scam regulations, and he recently circulated footage of David Portnoy saying that “memecoins are ‘legalized ponzi schemes.`”
Market data suggests 800,000 people lost money on Trump’s memecoin, with a New York Times analysis finding that the Trump organization may have made up to $100 million in its share of trading fees. The Hawk Tuah coin, currently trading less than 1 percent of its momentary all-time high, is emblematic of what happens to a digital economy where pump-and-dump schemes are more or less legalized by an administration seeking to cash in. Suffice it to say, many crypto investors were not thrilled to see the SEC drop the Hawk Tuah case that had, until Trump came into office, apparently been well underway. The corruption present in the Trump administration’s first one hundred days has not gone unnoticed in the parts of the Internet where many of his young men supporters live. In the words of a post that spent a day on the top of the notorious r/wallstreetbets subreddit, observing the bafflingly positive fortunes of the price of $TSLA, “this casino is rigged!”
Even on the conservative side of social media, Trump’s first one hundred days have not been received kindly by some. Joe Rogan famously recently criticized Donald Trump’s deportation policies and emphasized the importance of due process, albeit only a slight blip in an episode that did not dwell long on the subject. Candace Owens recently said she no longer supports Trump, urging her followers to “buck up and root for Harvard” over the President’s attacks on campus speech. These are not reliable indicators of opinion change - neither of these figures can or should be trusted to do the right thing on a regular basis - but they show a media ecosystem where some major movers are beginning to observe that Trump has gone too far (or at least, think they can get views by speaking this way).
It should be noted that prominent voices on the Left have started to take the male-dominated podcast world more seriously. Pete Buttigieg recently went on the popular Flagrant podcast, talking about defending Social Security and calling out FoxNews. President Trump went on the same show in 2024 (while the Kamala Harris campaign reportedly turned down the opportunity).
We also are seeing a rise in Left-leaning media endeavors like the Brogressive Podcast, Radio Abundance, Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie, and many others seeking to innovate in podcasts and YouTube, where young men disproportionately get their news. New efforts are underway to not only help build a progressive media ecosystem, but to improve Democratic and progressive fluency in what already exists. This will require talking to a population that says they generally don’t like politics, and often don’t talk about it in ways that we would prefer.
Young Men Want A Better Life
But more fundamentally than the changing vibes, many of the views espoused by rightwing messengers seeking to persuade young men rested on a highly dubious understanding of what young men actually want out of life. In our research of young mens’ opinions, we found the qualities that young men say are most important to being a man include “protecting your family” and “being honest.” This may come as a surprise to those who believe young men no longer want families and value only making a grift. In a July 2024 survey, YMRP found that over eighty percent of 1,100 young men said at least one of “protecting your family,” “being honest,” or “being confident” was important to them as a man. Only 3 percent selected “being sexually active,” 3 percent selected “winning and being the best,” and 2 percent selected “being wealthier than those around you.” Among those same men, among the subset who were familiar with Andrew Tate, the highest share (41 percent) said they disliked his content, 23 percent said they found him amusing but didn’t trust him, and just 27 percent of those who viewed his content said they actually liked and trusted it. As young men continue to grow up, their values may come into increasing conflict with what the most outlandish grifters are trying to sell them.
The vast majority of young men do not fit the “incel” moniker that is often grafted onto them. About 66 percent of young men said having children was important to them, with only 12 percent saying it was “very unimportant.” About 63 percent said getting married was important to them, and 61 percent agreed “the American dream is attainable for me, personally.” About 57 percent agreed “I will be able to afford to raise children in the near future.” Large shares of young men want the good life and believe they will be able to attain it.
But they were also worried about how modern life was failing to help them reach their goals. Young men were split 50-40 on “I believe I will be able to afford a house in the near future,” and agreed by a 51-41 margin that “I often feel lonely” (though that is a more optimistic appraisal than some research has had of mens’ loneliness). Far from rejecting the possibility of a prosperous life, many young men do not actually buy the doom and gloom of the most extreme and harmful voices on social media. Rather, they embrace the possibilities for themselves and have a set of demands for our society that are eminently relatable to those in older generations.
Indeed, our research in 2024 showed that Trump was losing economically anxious young men. But he won young men who voted on the basis of their more objectionable views about sex and gender. Our results also showed that some of these views were surprisingly prevalent among young men overall, with majorities holding at least some bad views in this regard. The following table breaks down the Harris/Trump vote intent of young men from July 2024 by some of their views about the economy, sex, and gender. These results showed the role that sexism and transphobia played in buttressing young mens’ support for Donald Trump:
The state of play prior to Trump’s second term: Vote motivations of 18-29 men captured in Young Men Research Initiative polling, June 2024.
The key political question is whether a segment of young men will continue to vote on the basis of those views on gender, or if they will decide to focus on their economic interests upon realizing grievance does not pay the bills. Already, we see small but apparent shifts underway in many of the information spaces inhabited by the persuadable voters key to his 2024 victory. More fundamentally, Trump may have misread much of the young male electorate and how to win its favor for the long term. What these voters need now is to hear messages from credible, reliable, and relatable sources about how to achieve the lives they seek. As we make it past Trump’s first 100 days, we will continue to track and explore the attitudes of this crucial share of America’s current and future electorate.