Kamala Harris hemorrhaging support among young men — and Planned Parenthood’s deleted meme hints at why
Democrats are panicking over recent polling data indicating Kamala Harris is not only deeply unpopular with American men, broadly speaking, but increasingly with young male voters.
The Harris boosters at Planned Parenthood Action recently posted then quickly deleted a meme that unintentionally illustrated the alienating approach that might be causing Democrats’ retention problems with young men.
The PPA posted the “Girl Explaining” meme, which features a disheveled young woman with an exposed midriff yelling into the face of an exhausted and ostensibly apathetic young man at a concert.
The misleading caption for the post was:
PROJECT 2025 IS A COMPLETE POLITICAL TAKEOVER OF OUR RIGHTS. THEY WANT DONALD TRUMP AND JD VANCE TO WIN SO THEY CAN BAN ABORTION NATIONWIDE. THAT’S WHY WE NEED TO VOTE FOR KAMALA HARRIS AND TIM WALZ, TWO POLITICIANS WHO HAVE SPENT THEIR CAREERS FIGHTING FOR REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS.
Contrary to the suggestion of the pro-abortion outfit, Trump has disavowed Project 2025 and has repeatedly underscored that he would not support a nationwide abortion ban.
‘They accidentally depicted the real state of politics in 2024.’
The desperate regurgitation of these falsehoods was not, however, the most telling part of the now-deleted post. Instead, Planned Parenthood appears to have shared a meme hinting at the obliviousness of the left to the numbing affect of its hectoring of young men.
While numerous critics responded by noting the “left can’t meme,” a co-host from “The Right Thoughts” podcast, who goes by Enguerrand VII de Coucy on X, wrote, “It’s hilarious that Planned Parenthood misunderstood this meme format to such a catastrophic degree that they accidentally depicted the real state of politics in 2024, the poor unhappy boy being shrieked at by a woke girl.”
Democrats’ pro-abortion, anti-Western messaging and accompanying critiques of tradition, normalcy, and masculinity — both shrieked and calmly communicated — are clearly not resonating with a great many young men.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, recently indicated that there has been a profound shift on campuses, reported Vanity Fair.
‘If Donald Trump wins, this is how he wins.’
“I’ve been doing this for 12 years. This is not normal. The energy is off the charts. You have a younger generation, Gen Z, who experienced a lot of — they would say — lies and deceit during COVID, and a lot of their life being altered,” said Kirk. “There is this pent up ‘rebellion energy’ that has never come out.”
Kirk noted further that young men
are profoundly more conservative than people would have expected and, in fact, are the most conservative generation of young men in 50 years. They want to be part of a political movement that doesn’t hate them. Those are their words, not mine. The cultural blob of all left-wing influence has definitely had an undertone that if you’re a straight, white, Christian male, that there’s something wrong with you. Or you must apologize. Or you’re a colonizer.
The Guardian reported that in 2016, 51% of young men identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party. That plummeted to 39% in 2023, and now the majority of young men want to see Republicans elected.
The leftist think tank Data for Progress noted in a report Tuesday “a significant gender divide exists among young voters, with young men showing more conservative tendencies than young women.” According to Data for Progress, young men are evenly split between Harris and Trump.
Citing the apparent expertise of John Della Volpe, Vanity Fair indicated that Democrats win when they secure 60% of the youth vote — but this is far from guaranteed. While Harris has reportedly won over young women like that represented in the meme by 67% to 28%, Trump is winning Gen Z men by 58% to 37%.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the growing gender gap extends to various issues, including two issues Democrats discuss ad nauseam on the campaign trail: abortion and student debt. Neither of these issues animate or mobilize male voters anywhere as much as their female counterparts and for good reason.
Young men have increasingly been steered out of colleges — adding to their disenchantment with leftist diversity initiatives — such that women now account for 60% of all college students and carry the super-majority of student-loan debt.
Melissa Deckman, CEO of the Public Religion Research Institute, told the Guardian that in 2022, 49% of Gen Z men said that the U.S. had become “too soft and feminine.” Last year, she said that 60% of the cohort said the same.
Blaze News previously highlighted Democratic strategist James Carville’s thoughts on what might be driving this trend.
“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election,” Carville told the New York Times earlier this year. “I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?'”
As if anticipating Planned Parenthood’s meme, Carville added, “A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females.”
“‘Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you,'” continued Carville. “The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.'”
Democrats’ alienation of young men could preclude them from keeping the White House.
“It’s extremely serious,” Mike Madrid, a nominally Republican strategist who co-founded the pro-Harris Lincoln Project, told The Hill. “If Donald Trump wins, this is how he wins.”
“This is part of a broader dynamic, a bigger trend that we’ve noticed and we’ve been watching for a longer time than both candidates have been on the national scene,” added Madrid.
Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist involved with “White Dudes for Harris,” told The Hill, “There is an ongoing fight about masculinity in America today and the future of masculinity and I think Democrats as a whole have not done a great job of engaging in that fight and I think we need to do a better job of elevating voices that can go have those tough conversations in spaces where those people are.”
In the final stretch before Election Day, the Harris campaign is reportedly making one final appeal to young men with ads on Yahoo Sports, sport betting platforms, and on gaming sites. Time will tell whether this was a more effective strategy than spending weeks accusing young men who don’t like Harris of misogyny.
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