Transcript: Daniel Cox

My interview with the American pollster

This week at Lean Out, we continue our series on the challenges facing modern men. Our guest on the program has done pioneering work on the increasing gender gap in American society and politics. He’s thought a lot about the dangers of men and women growing apart — and about how we might come together.

Daniel Cox is director of the Survey Center on American Life. He is also a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute. His forthcoming book is titled Uncoupled, and he writes the Substack newsletter American Storylines.

This is an edited transcript for paid subscribers. You can listen to the interview for free here.

This podcast series is dedicated to Marc Antione Jubinville. May he rest in peace.

---

TH: Thanks so much for participating in our podcast series on the challenges facing modern men. There are a lot of threads to pull with this topic, but I want to start today by talking about the political gender gap between men and women, which I believe emerged around 2015 and has rapidly increased. As I understand it, young women are becoming far more liberal and men are skewing more conservative. You are a pioneering researcher on this issue, and this became a big story during the election. What made you aware of this trend — and what drew you to the subject?

DC: It's something I more or less stumbled across in the day-to-day review of various data sets that we work on. We conduct four or five different polls a year, and they cover a range of different topics, from friendship to changes in American family life, views and experiences with organized religion, to politics. One of the things that I'm always trying to better understand is how we're seeing changes in American society — and the people who tend to be on the vanguard of these changes tend to be young people. So, I'm always curious about what's happening with young people today. 

A decade, or a decade and a half ago, we were really focused on young people leaving organized religion, a trend that continues in the United States. And so, I was trying to get a sense of where the politics of Gen Z was. The thing that really jumped out at me, looking at this data across two decades, was that beginning around 2016, 2017, you saw this separation occur between young men and young women.

We define young as between the ages of 18 and 29. There was just this dramatic move in a liberal direction among young women. And young men weren't really going anywhere. They had the same breakdown of liberal, conservative, and moderate among that group. But if you look under the hood, and you poke around a little bit more — which we ended up doing over the next months and even years — what we saw was that young men were becoming more politically alienated. So, a group that was largely Democratic during the Obama years — more than six in 10 identified as Democrat during roughly both his terms — had quickly during the years after moved away and became much more likely to identify as Republican, even though largely they had negative views of both political parties. In fact, there's no group that is more likely to say that they hate the Democrats and the Republicans than young men.

TH: How does this play out issue by issue? What are the specific issues that young men and women are disagreeing on?

DC: This is another thing that makes it a little challenging to provide a clean and clear narrative of what's happening with young men. And why I tend to emphasize that a lot of it is about political disaffection versus any positive political agenda. In conversations that we have had, whether in focus groups or one-on-one and in surveys, there is not a clear place where young men really stick out. It's young women who say, “I care a lot about gun control and climate change and gender equality and even racial equality.”

But young men are kind of more of a shoulder shrug. It just doesn't rank as high for them. LGBT equality, abortion, reproductive health, all that stuff. Young women are like, “Yes, these things really matter to me. It matters in the kind of politicians I want to elect and how I vote.” And young men, if they say anything, it is broadly about the economy, and they want things to be going well and there to be job opportunities. Of course they are really concerned about the cost of living and prices — something that tends to come up a lot. But it's broad characterizations of these issues and not anything really definitive that we hear when we talk to them.

TH: It's interesting. This divide that we're talking about definitely came up in the presidential election. 56% of young men voted for Trump and just 40% of young women did. The Democratic campaign and the Republican campaign were very influenced by these themes that we're talking about, and targeted very specific demographics. Can you reflect on how this trend impacted the campaigns and their messaging?

DC: Yeah, I think if there is one thing that ties young men and young women together at this particular moment, it's a sense of uncertainty and feelings of anxiety. It's high among both. It's a little bit higher among young women. But I think where it comes from is very different. And I think that gets at the root of this division. So you see around the time of the #MeToo movement, in 2017, where you had a movement ostensibly about empowerment — and greater accountability for men engaged in this incredibly destructive behavior. What you see instead is a lot of young women becoming more insecure and uncertain and fearful. There was some trend data from Gallup that asks: How worried are you about being a victim of various crimes? And then there was about 15 or 20 different options, car theft and being mugged, and they included one on sexual assault. And post-2017, you just see this huge uptick in the number of women who are concerned about becoming a victim of sexual assault. Even though there didn't seem to be any definitive evidence that rates of these kinds of crimes were increasing. It seemed to be something else that was driving them. 

For men, it's much different in the post-#MeToo era. You hear a lot of concern about being accused of something. Even if the accusation doesn't go all the way to the authorities getting involved. If you're in college, you worry about your status as a student — you can be kicked out. There's a reputational risk. A lot of men are worried that a misunderstanding can blow up on social media and they can be ostracized. We heard a lot of this, and particularly in the dating context. So: “Hey, I'm out there and I'm told to be bold and confident and to approach women. But I'm really worried about being labeled a creep, or engaging in behaviour that is ‘creepy.’ So what do I do? How do I navigate that?” There is a sense that there's not any hard and fast rules to any of this. That if you are attractive and charming, you can probably get away with behaviour that for other men would be creepy. So, there is just a lot of uncertainty on both sides.

But I think for a lot of young men, they think that the institutions — whether it's higher ed, the media, the political parties, or at least the Democratic Party — tend to favour women. That women and girls are the people that need help, to be uplifted, to be empowered. There's not as much focus or emphasis on the challenges that a lot of young men are facing. They are struggling economically, academically, and socially. For a lot of the young men that we talk to, they feel a little bit adrift and there is no one ready or willing to throw them a life preserver.

TH: Before the election, earlier this fall, you were in Philadelphia doing focus groups with young men and young women, and some of those comments got published in The Washington Post. Huge outpouring of feedback on that. One of the things I thought was so interesting that you said in your Substack was you wish that these young men and these young women had been sitting there listening to each other. What stands out about what the genders are missing about each other?

DC: It seems to me that we are at a cultural moment where it is so easy to point fingers, and to blame. We're so ready to reward people who have been victimized, or victims, that we are not building space for empathy and understanding. What seems to be fundamentally missing is opportunities to learn in safe environments and to make mistakes. To say the wrong thing, to do the wrong thing — without being ostracized, without having to suffer major repercussions. Particularly for young people. That is a time when you make a ton of mistakes. I can think back on so many mistakes that I made, things that I said either due to ignorance or just not thinking about the consequences of my actions. If I lived at a time when social media was around, it could have been blasted out forever to all these people. People could make snap judgements about the type of person I was. I think that's terrifying — that when you're that age, there's just no room for error. I think, for me, that is what's really been a defining feature of a lot of Gen Z’s existence. That you say the wrong thing, you do the wrong thing, you get cancelled. You pay significant consequences for it. 

We should be understanding that simply because someone says the wrong thing or does the wrong thing, there needs to be a pathway back to acceptance — and the grace that we need to offer. I feel like it's really hard to be gracious if you feel like you are under duress and people are attacking you all the time. And I think both young men and young women feel this way. We need to get to a place where we can hear each other. And yes, realize there is real pain out there and there are real problems, but we don't get through this by stepping back and removing ourselves from difficult conversations.

TH: I want to touch, too, on the media's role in all of this. It is something that we cover on the podcast quite a bit. There was a recent Jia Tolentino essay, “How America Embraced Gender War,” in The New Yorker. I know you read it, and disagreed with it. I did too. It made me think: There is this strong pop feminism lens in much of the media right now, in the wake of #MeToo, and the “toxic masculinity” discourse. We've already touched on this a bit. It can be very simplistic, very reductive. In general terms, what do you think the media is missing about where women and men are at these days? What's our biggest mistake on this issue?