As Democrats investigate what went wrong in the 2021 elections and what is going wrong heading into the 2022 elections, a familiar pattern is emerging: Men are abandoning the party in droves.
Just this week, snippets from the Democratic Governors Association’s postmortem of the Virginia governor’s race were made public, including the report’s conclusion, which read, “We need to address the long-term problems that exist for Democrats with Latinos and black men.”
On background from a source with knowledge of the findings in the memo, the Washington Examiner has obtained the underlying data driving this conclusion. It turns out that Democratic candidate Terry McAuliffe actually improved on President Joe Biden’s margin among black women (+78 for Biden compared to +87 for McAuliffe). But at the same time, McAuliffe’s support among black men fell off a cliff (+74 for Biden compared to +55 for McAuliffe).
This growing gender gap among blacks is also evident among Hispanics. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that while a strong 55% of Hispanic women said they would vote for Biden in 2024, an even stronger 56% of Hispanic men said they would pull the lever for President Donald Trump. That 56% support among Hispanic men almost matches the 61% of white men who voted for Trump in 2020.
So why are men leaving the Democratic Party?
Perhaps it is because the entire Democratic agenda seems designed to make men irrelevant, and men have begun to notice.
Consider the slideshow Biden’s White House released to promote their Build Back Better agenda this October. Very similar to a slideshow produced by President Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign featuring a fictional “Julia,” Biden’s “Linda” goes through life with new Democratic programs helping her along the way.
We see Linda pregnant with her son “Leo,” but Leo’s father is not mentioned. We then see Linda benefit from an expanded Child Tax Credit, government-subsidized daycare, and government-run Pre-K, but no man shares in their life. It is as if fathers didn’t exist.
Not only do these programs seem designed to make men irrelevant, many of them actually make it harder for men to marry the women in their lives. According to the Tax Policy Center, for example, a mother making $19,000 a year would lose almost $1,000 a year in expanded child tax credit benefits if she were to get married. The subsidized daycare in Build Back Better also contains steep benefit cliffs that punish couples who tie the knot.
Democrats may not care if mothers raise their children alone — 73% of them say unmarried parents can raise children just as well as married couples. But reality is quite different. While many boys raised by single mothers do turn into fine men, overall, boys from single-parent households fare far worse on average than boys raised in married households.
Even after controlling for income, boys raised by single mothers are more likely to get suspended in school, more likely to get arrested, less likely to graduate college, and less likely to find a job than boys raised by married parents.
Boys need fathers. Ideally their own father, but research has shown that boys raised in neighborhoods where fathers are common do better than boys in neighborhoods where fathers are rare.
Until Democrats are ready to admit that men cannot be replaced by government programs, that families need married fathers, then we can expect more men to leave the party.
