Chris Carlson/AP Photo
Carpenters work on a home, September 19, 2023, in Marshall, North Carolina.
That hardy perennial of American politics, the gender gap, is not only alive and well but alive and huge among the young. The New York Times/Siena poll of battleground states from earlier this month revealed that among voters under 30, males put Trump ahead of Harris by 13 percentage points, while females favored Harris over Trump by 38 percentage points.
This doesn’t mean that young men without college degrees are all that conservative. A PRRI poll of Gen Zers shows that a majority supports abortion rights and same-sex marriage. What they don’t see is an economy in which they have a place, chiefly because, well, it doesn’t. As culture tends to follow (at a distance, to be sure) the economy, they also see a culture that doesn’t value working-class men’s work as it once professed to do (though it was only when unions were powerful that that work was appropriately valued economically).
In a sense, these young men are canaries in a coal mine—detecting, in advance of many others, the economy’s diminished need for certain kinds of manual labor (like coal mining). The jobs that Kamala Harris is highlighting—those in what she calls “the care economy”—involve forms of manual labor, too, but not those that historically or culturally have been deemed “masculine,” which encompasses jobs in construction, transportation, and manufacturing. With neither the job security nor the income to support a family, these young men also fall short of the criteria that would make then “marriageable males”—a term the great sociologist William Julius Wilson used to explain how the “crisis of the Black family” was rooted in Black men’s disproportionate relegation to the informal economy where pay was low and benefits nonexistent. That crisis has now broadened into a crisis of the working-class family, as marriage rates in working-class America have fallen well below those in more upper brackets.
What some of these young men see in Trump, then, is the rhetoric and posturing of hypermasculinity, even though it’s really pseudo and performative hypermasculinity (see, e.g., trotting out Hulk Hogan to attest to Trump’s alleged toughness). There’s hardly anything concrete on offer for them in Trump’s policies, but there’s symbolism galore.
Democrats in general and Kamala Harris in particular can counter this—not that there’s anything they can do to eliminate this yawning gender gap, but there are ways that they could knock a few points off it through the miracle of smart policy. I have in mind Harris’s plans to increase the housing stock by three million units, through federal subsidies to first-time homebuyers and tax breaks to housing developers. This obviously would be welcomed by workers already employed in the building trades, but she should expand her goals, and the number of housing units, so that it would more clearly address those young working-class voters—disproportionately male—who’d welcome work in those trades. That would entail committing more federal dollars not just for the housing itself, but also for apprenticeship programs, more specifically, those programs run by the building trades unions. That could entail actually partnering with those unions through a new agency that would in some way resemble 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 on basic construction and maintenance jobs like road paving. The CWA employed skilled construction workers on more ambitious construction jobs (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 shortage of housing, and addresses it in part by reaching out to young working-class Americans, teaching them the skills required to build that housing, and funneling them into the kind of union-scale (ideally, unionized) jobs that would enable them to make a family wage.
Such a program would expand the diminishing need for manual labor, which is at the root of young working-class men’s frustration with—and despair about—the economy. Making it a federal program that provides entry into remunerative private employment is not only good policy; it can be good politics, too. Simply offering tax breaks for builders and subsidies for buyers, as the Harris-Walz ticket is doing, provides good talking points, but is far too indirect and muted a message to impact swing voters. Elevating this to the level of a distinct federal commitment, to a distinct program with a budget and a name, would have greater impact. Alongside the commitment to a care economy, a commitment to a build economy could provide a way to shrink that gender gap. And in an election where every percentage point will matter, a little shrinkage could go a long way.
