Young Men May Not Be as Conservative as You Think

Gen Z men in their teens and twenties are leaning further right than ever… or so mainstream media would have you believe.

For months before and since the November 2024 election, news articles, podcasts and polls have been pointing to the widening gender gap between young men and young women. (Young white men aged in particular voted for Donald Trump by a 28-point margin in 2024, compared to 2020 when young white men between 18 and 29 supported Joe Biden over Trump by six points.)

This rightward shift among young men regardless of race (combined with young men’s overall regression in educational achievement, mental health and social skills) has become a major focal point for news articles and polling. Critics have offered many theories for why Gen Z men are so conservative, from the rise of “brocasts” and the online manosphere to generation-wide loneliness as a side effect of the COVID-19 pandemic.

However, new polling from the Young Men Research Project (YMRP) suggests there might be more to the story.

“The share of young men who say they voted for Trump in 2024 but no longer view him favorably, it’s on the order of 5 to 8 percent of young men,” John Ray, YMRP team member and senior director of polling at YouGov, told me in an interview.

YMRP, founded in early 2024, conducts polling, research and media analysis to “better understand [Gen Z’s] gender gap and support efforts to engage young men on progressive issues and values,” according to the project’s website. YMRP’s most recent survey, from May 2025, polled 1,079 American men between the ages of 18 and 29. The survey covered a range of topics from politics and economic outlook to personal goals and aspirations—with sometimes surprising results.

Shifting Away from Trump

Although the majority of respondents (a +5 margin) indicated they support Trump, a “considerable” number of young men polled said they voted for Trump in November but currently dislike him, according to Ray. This shift has happened over a relatively short period of time, since Trump’s second presidency only started in January, just six months ago.

One main reason that respondents gave for why they no longer support Trump surrounded complaints about the current economy. (Interestingly, the young men who were most anxious about the economy in November tended to vote for Harris, while negative views about women, feminism and trans people, unsurprisingly, were more likely to predict Trump support.) Other young men who no longer support Trump said he turned out to be more “extreme” since taking office than they were led to believe.

“I think a lot of people who think about politics for a living find that very surprising,” Ray told me. “They find that very odd to think that young men could believe they were sold a false bill of goods on a president who, to many people, is basically doing what he said that he was going to be doing.”

However, the youngest men from YMRP’s sample, who are 18 now, were only 9 when Trump was first elected in 2016. That’s very young to form a strong political opinion, especially since, as Ray pointed out, younger voters are less ideologically based than older voters simply because they’re still developing their political ideas. “They don’t sort of memorize talking points in the way that other generations do,” he said, “so they do actually still have a capacity for surprise that many older voters simply would not.”

The Rise of the Manosphere

For the last several years, we’ve been seeing the American right-wing taking advantage of these still-developing young male minds.

In Ms.’ new Summer 2025 print issue, YMRP affiliate Jackson Katz describes the rise of far-right online influencers, such as Joe Rogan, Andrew Tate (a self-proclaimed misogynist) and Theo Von, and their role in shaping the politics of their overwhelmingly male viewership.

According to Katz, “conservative media has been devastatingly effective in creating a space where conservative ideas are seen as edgy and countercultural—where listeners are instructed that ‘real men’ support right-wing pirates and candidates.’”

This spring, I interviewed Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of the reproductive justice organization Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity (URGE). Like Katz, she told me about the dangers of these “brocasts”—many of which explicitly endorsed or promoted Trump when he was on the campaign trail in 2024. 

McGuire explained, “the right has outspent and outmaneuvered the left in terms of using online spaces to talk to young people … so you have the Ben Shapiros and the Jordan Petersons and the Joe Rogans. You have all of these figureheads peddling really toxic masculinity, really toxic ideas about gender, with legions of young male followers.”

However, YMRP’s May survey suggests that while influencers like Joe Rogan remain popular with young male audiences, they might not be taking everything he says to heart.

Contrary to progressive fears that the brocasts are molding vulnerable young men into the Jan. 6 rioters of tomorrow, many young men whom YMRP polled said they watch these far-right influencers for entertainment, not necessarily because they like or agree with them. Ray also suggested that many Gen Z men’s first exposure to these voices comes when they’re scrolling for funny, apolitical content such as “reaction videos” where YouTube or TikTok comedians show clips of Andrew Tate and other big names to point out how outrageous they are.

Gen Z Men and Loneliness

What about the loneliness crisis facing young men, which polls have been warning about for years now? YMRP’s survey is no exception; 54 percent of young men agreed that they’re lonely while 26 percent strongly agreed. There are probably several reasons for this loneliness, especially the stratospheric rise of phones and social media as kids’ primary entertainment and the aftermath of COVID and online school, which hit when most younger Gen Zers were in middle or high school.

But that doesn’t mean we need to jump to conclusions about young men’s loneliness creating a pipeline to violent right-wing incel extremism. “We are actually not finding that loneliness necessarily cuts one way or the other politically,” says Ray. 

In YMRP’s survey, young men who identified as conservative were actually less likely to report strong feelings of loneliness (married men and regular church-goers were also less likely to say they were lonely). However, even though loneliness doesn’t correlate with extremist political views, it does correlate with young men playing games online and engaging in more harmful behaviors such as online gambling and pornography.

The survey also showed that while young men are pessimistic about the state of the world, they value traditional life goals like getting married, buying a house and having kids. This interest in marriage, family and a white picket fence perhaps seems to line up with right-wing evangelical Christian values of the “traditional” family structure (combined with the White House’s truly bizarre, Nazi Germany-esque proposals from earlier this year to convince women to have more children).

But when asked what they value, a majority of young men expressed support for progressive social programs like affordable housing and afterschool programs for kids, even when explicitly told in the wording of the question that this would raise taxes. Sexist and transphobic views are still prevalent, but the majority of young men surveyed oppose abortion bans.

Finally, when asked to rank which qualities most reflect “what it means to be a man,” a vast majority of survey respondents gave high rankings to options such as “providing for your family,” “honesty” and “helping those in need.” More bro-y answers like “being sexually active,” “winning and being the best” and “being wealthier than those around you” received some of the lowest scores on the list.

Conclusion

In our interview earlier this year, URGE’s McGuire suggested that mainstream media coverage of young men’s far-right swing misses some of the nuance of the situation. While there has been a visible shift of young men supporting Trump and internalizing conservative ideology, young men now aren’t necessarily more conservative than men in previous generations. It’s really young women who are more progressive than ever, thanks to growing up during the era of #MeToo, the fall of Roe v. Wade and Trump’s two presidencies. As always, media attention tends to focus more on men than on women, hence the huge number of recent headlines about Gen Z men’s shift to the right.

YMRP’s survey also suggests that young men, compared to older generations, hold their policy views weakly and are more willing to support things such as abortion that are at odds with their stated party preference. As we can see in recent cases like the controversy over the Epstein files—with just 10 percent of men 35 and under satisfied with the information released, and even far-right commentators like Joe Rogan expressing dissatisfaction with the government’s cover-up—the young men who have swung so far to the right just might be swinging back.