The perennial issue in American politics, the gender gap, is not only alive and well, but it is alive and huge among young people. New York Times/A University of Siena poll conducted in swing states earlier this month found that among voters under 30, men preferred Trump by 13 percentage points over Harris, while women preferred Harris to Trump by 38 percentage points.
That’s not to say young men without college degrees are all that conservative. A PRRI survey of Gen Z members shows that a majority support abortion rights and same-sex marriage. What they don’t see, however, is an economy in which they have a place, largely because that’s not the case. Because culture tends to follow the economy (at a distance, of course), they also see a culture that no longer values the labor of working-class men as it once claimed to (though that labor didn’t begin to be properly economically valued until under the power of unions).
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In some ways, these young men are canaries in the coal mine—they recognized earlier than many others the economy’s diminished need for certain kinds of manual labor (such as coal mining). The jobs Kamala Harris highlights—those in what she calls the “care economy”—also involve forms of manual labor, but not those historically or culturally considered “male,” which include jobs in construction, transportation, and manufacturing. Because they have neither job security nor the income to support a family, these young men also do not meet the criteria that would make them “marriageable men”—a term used by the great sociologist William Julius Wilson to explain that the “crisis of the black family” was rooted in the disproportionate displacement of black men into the informal economy, where wages were low and benefits nonexistent. This crisis has now expanded into a crisis of the working family, as marriage rates among the American working class have fallen far below those of the upper income groups.
What some of these young men see in Trump is the rhetoric and posturing of hypermasculinity, when in reality it is pseudo- and performative hypermasculinity (see, for example, Hulk Hogan testifying to Trump’s supposed toughness). Trump’s policies offer them little in the way of concreteness, but plenty of symbolism.
Democrats in general, and Kamala Harris in particular, can counteract this—not that they can do anything to close this gaping gender gap, but there are ways they could, through the miracle of smart policy, reduce some of it. I’m thinking of Harris’s plans to increase the housing stock by three million units, through federal grants for first-time buyers and tax breaks for developers. That would, of course, be welcomed by workers already employed in construction, but she should broaden her targets and the number of housing units so that she more clearly appeals to those young working-class voters—disproportionately men—who would welcome work in the trade. That would mean allocating more federal money not just to housing itself, but to training programs, more specifically, the programs run by construction unions. That might actually mean partnering with those unions through a new agency that would resemble in some ways the Civil Works Administration (CWA) of the New Deal.
The CWA is not as well known today as the New Deal’s Works Progress Administration (WPA), which employed millions of Americans in menial construction and maintenance jobs like road building. The CWA employed skilled construction workers on more sophisticated construction projects (dams, aircraft carriers, and the like), but like the WPA, it brought Depression-era Americans back into the workforce. What we need now is a program that addresses the housing shortage, in part by targeting young working-class Americans, teaching them the skills needed to build that housing, and putting them into unionized (ideally unionized) jobs that would enable them to earn a family income.
Such a program would increase the declining need for manual labor that is at the root of young working-class men’s frustration and despair with the economy. Making it a federal program that provides access to lucrative private employment is not just good policy; it can be good politics. Simply offering tax breaks for builders and subsidies for buyers, as the Harris-Walz ticket does, makes a good case, but is far too indirect and muted a message to sway swing voters. Elevating this to the level of a standalone federal commitment, a standalone program with a budget and a name, would have greater impact. In addition to a commitment to a care economy, a commitment to a build economy could be one way to narrow that gender gap. And in an election where every percentage point counts, a small reduction could go a long way.
