They’re a group that previous presidential candidates may have overlooked.
Now, young men have emerged as a voting bloc that could potentially swing an election expected to see a razor-thin margin of victory for the candidate who wins.
And so far, surveys are showing younger men increasingly drifting toward Donald Trump and Republicans.
An NBC News poll last week found a nearly even Trump-Harris split among men ages 30 or younger.
That comes as the share of young men who identify as registered Democrats has dropped by 7 percentage points since the spring of 2020, according to data from a national survey conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, while those identifying as Republicans have increased by the same amount, for a net shift of 14 points in four years.
The trend has been especially pronounced among young men of color. A poll published this month from the University of Chicago’s GenForward Survey found one-quarter of young Black men now support Trump — a sea change from 2020, when Black men of all ages went for President Joe Biden by a nearly 9-to-1 margin. Among young Latino men, 44% said they were backing Trump, up from 38% in 2020.
The reasons for the apparent rightward drift of young men are mixed. There’s evidence that younger men today are more prone to be lonely, single and less well educated. Adding to the complexity is that younger men have actually experienced solid economic gains, at least on paper, during the Biden administration.
Among men ages 25-54, known as prime-age individuals, the labor force participation rate, or the percentage of the population either with jobs or looking for work, has climbed back to 90%, the level it had reached prior to the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.