The Feminist Revolution and the Democratic Party

My old friend Eli Zaretsky, the author of Capitalism, the Family, and Personal Life (1986), has often told me that of all the movements of the 1960s, the feminist revolution has had the most intense psychological impact on American life and politics. The point is debatable. Certainly, the revolution in civil rights has stirred the country. But if one looks at American politics over the last sixty years, changes in women’s status and opinions, and men’s reaction to them, have played an enormous, and sometimes unacknowledged, role. And the rise and growth of feminist politics is an important part of this story.

I want to focus here on how changes in women’s attitudes have affected American party politics. In the last half century, a gender gap has arisen in which female voters have become more likely than male voters to favor the Democrats. Women have also risen to the top of the Democratic Party; two of the last three Democratic presidential nominees have been women. Yet as with the ballyhooed rise of the “minority voter,” the emergence of a gender gap must be broken down into its components in order to be properly understood.

In the first decades of this gender gap, it was driven more by working‑class women than middle-class and professional women (roughly identifiable in polling, respectively, as women without a college degree and those with one). But it has increasingly become the province of college-educated women. These women have also provided the lead­ership, the votes, and the money. Their views, which have been shaped by the feminist movement, have had a lasting impact on American partisan identities and alignments. They have helped to transform what it means to be a Democrat and to be liberal. They have allowed the party to remain competitive as it has lost support among working-class voters, but their rise has also provoked, as became apparent in the 2024 election, a backlash among some male voters.

The Anatomy of the Gender Gap

Since the onset of reputable election polling after World War II, and probably since women received the franchise, there has been a gender gap in voting. For my purposes, I will refer to the difference in percentage points in supporting the Democratic candidate. From 1948 through 1960, men were more likely to vote Democratic than women. In 1956, for instance, when Republican Dwight Eisenhower defeated Democrat Adlai Stevenson, men were 6 percentage points more likely to have backed Stevenson.¹ That changed in 1964, when Lyndon Johnson defeated Republican Barry Goldwater. In 1976, to be sure, when Democrat Jimmy Carter defeated Gerald Ford, there was no measurable gender gap, but in 1980, the pro-Democratic female gender gap returned with a vengeance and would remain entrenched as a significant electoral trend in years to come. The data generated from various sources—the American National Election Studies (ANES), Gallup, and the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research—attest to this.²

Women’s organizations began talking about a gender gap after the 1980 election: that’s when the term originated. In the 1980 election, women proved 9 percentage points more likely to vote Democratic. That gap has persisted to this day, and since 2012, has been in double digits. In the 2024 election, women were 10 points more likely than men to have backed Democrat Kamala Harris.³ There is no single answer why they did so. Instead, the gender gap has been the product of several factors coming together.

Women’s work: The first is the change in women’s position in the home and labor force. In 1948, only 32 percent of women worked outside the home.⁴ Over two-thirds were “homemakers.” By 1964, the composition of women in the labor force had risen to 38.7 percent; it peaked at 60 percent in 1999, and it has hovered around that number ever since.⁵ The earlier prevalence of homemakers may help explain why women were less likely than men to support Democrats from 1948 through 1960.

According to data compiled by Richard A. Seltzer, Jody Newman, and Melissa Voorhees Leighton in Sex as a Political Variable (1997), in twenty presidential and congressional elections from 1952 to 1992, homemakers, with only two exceptions, were more likely to vote Republican than women who worked outside the home. In the 1992 election, homemakers were 9.4 percentage points more likely to vote Republican.⁶

This is a possible explanation: In the immediate postwar decades, women who were tied to home and family were prone to reject change in their circumstances. They would be more likely to vote for the Republicans because they were then seen as the status quo party. By the same token, as women joined the workforce, they were more likely to favor Democrats as the party of change. But to understand why that is so, one must introduce additional factors: one such factor is the greater likelihood that women in the workforce would have gone to college—and exposed to feminist politics and concerns.

Divisions in class, education, and locale: As a guide to changing opinion, the match between class and education works differently for college-educated women before and after the 1960s. In 1956, only 5.6 percent of adult women had college degrees.⁷ Today, 39 percent of adult women do, more than the percentage of men who have degrees. In the 1950s, women with college degrees occupied the upper and upper-middle classes and tended to vote for Republicans as the business and professional classes did during that period, regardless of whether they worked outside the home. In 1956, Eisenhower carried these voters by two to one.

During that period and afterwards, most women without degrees who worked for wages could be accurately counted as working-class. Many of them, like their husbands, had been and remained New Deal Democrats. They supported social security; they were supportive of government spending on health care and education and for the poor. And that was particularly true of women who worked outside the home. In the 1964 presidential election, they were 20 percentage points more likely to support the Democrat; in 1968, the gap was 13 percentage points; in 1976, it was 14 percentage points; and in 1980, they were 9 percentage points more likely to support the Democrat than their college-educated counterparts. That reflected, above all, their continuing support for New Deal Democratic politics and the Republicans’ grudging support for or opposition to New Deal programs.

By the early 1970s, the political trajectory of college-educated women began to change. During the 1960s, increasing numbers of women had begun going to college and working outside the home. They were no longer confined to the higher reaches of the society and economy. They worked in health care, education, the media, and the growing high-tech industry. Nurses and schoolteachers joined unions. At universities and in the large metro centers where they went to work, they were exposed to the political movements that had arisen during the ’60s. This included movements for civil rights, peace, environmental and consumer protection, and, above all, women’s rights.

In the 1984 election between Ronald Reagan and Democrat Walter Mondale, these women were more likely to support the Democrat than their working-class counterparts. Beginning in the 1988 election, most college-educated women began supporting Democrats. They have continued to do so and in growing numbers. In the last three presidential elections, Democratic candidates won over 60 percent of the vote from college-educated women.

By contrast, some women without college degrees—most of whom either work at home or for wages—have abandoned the Democrats. While many black and Hispanic women have remained loyal Democrats, white working-class women have turned to the Republicans. They did back Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 and Barack Obama in 2008, but after that election, they began to bolt. In 2012, white working-class women favored Republican Mitt Romney over Obama by 20 percentage points; in 2016, 2020, and 2024, they favored Trump by 27, 25, and 28 percentage points, respectively. The difference between these voters and college-educated women had become a chasm. While white college-educated women favored Harris in 2024 by 17 points, Harris lost white working-class women by 62 to 37 percent.⁸

Many white working-class women simply followed the same political trajectory as white working-class men. Some split with the Democrats initially over civil rights, but later over programs that seemed to ask them to subsidize the poor with higher taxes or premiums, while receiving no benefits themselves.⁹ Many also objected to Democratic support for gun control and indifference to illegal immigration. Significant numbers shared the cultural agenda of the religious Right.

The loss of Democratic support was particularly dramatic in rural areas and small towns that used to favor the Democrats. These areas, where on average only 25 percent had college degrees, became hotbeds of Republican support. Feeling left behind and ignored by Democrats, they backed Trump in his three campaigns. While Harris carried the big cities and adjacent suburbs, Trump won the men and women of rural areas and small towns by huge margins. According to a vote analysis by Dante Chinni of the American Communities Project, Trump carried women voters in aging farmlands by 82 to 17 percent and in working-class country towns by 68 to 30 percent.¹⁰

At the same time, college-educated women were becoming more Democratic. As they became more diverse, and less upper-class, as a group, they became far more supportive of Democratic economic initiatives—from New Deal programs to Democratic proposals on health care, education, and childcare. The change came quickly. In 1956, only 23 percent of college-educated women thought the government should help people get health care.¹¹ By 1968, that number had risen to 42.7 percent. By 2020, 47.9 percent thought the government rather than private insurance should pay for health care. That’s what used to be called “socialized medicine.”¹²

At colleges, many women were exposed to the civil rights revolution and to regulatory reforms pioneered by Ralph Nader and Rachel Carson and embraced by the Democrats. When they went to work, it was often in the large postindustrial metro centers where about half of the residents have college degrees, and where the ideas that originated in the 1960s continue to prevail. In 1984, 34.8 percent of college-educated women thought spending on the environment should be increased; by 2020, it was up to 59.2 percent.¹³ In 2020, 52.7 percent of college-educated women thought government should aid black and minority citizens; by contrast, 23.7 percent of women without college degrees shared this view.¹⁴ But most important of all, college-educated women became exposed to feminist ideas and priorities.

Feminism: The modern post-suffrage feminist movement (later dubbed “second-wave feminism”) originated in the mid-1960s; this was at the same time as the emergence of the female gender gap in the 1964 election, as many more women were beginning college and entering the workforce. Betty Friedan’s bestselling The Feminine Mystique appeared in 1963, and in 1966, Friedan and other feminists founded the National Organization for Women (NOW). That was followed by the National Abortion Rights Action League (naral) and the National Women’s Political Caucus. On campuses and among young graduates, a women’s liberation movement sprung up.

The women’s movement agitated for equal rights for women in the workplace and home and in school admissions, the right to abortion, the prevention of violence against women, and the creation of women’s studies departments. But the women’s movement also extended its reach to health care, education, and childcare. One of the key publications of the movement was Our Bodies, Ourselves, published in 1972 by the Boston Women’s Health Care Collective.¹⁵ The women’s movement became a chief defender of the government safety net established by the New Deal and the Johnson administration. It joined forces on these issues with conventional liberals. Radical feminist groups went further: they questioned the role of the nuclear family and endorsed gay liberation.

Support for feminism has been concentrated among women who were attending or had graduated from college, single women, young women, and women who lived in postindustrial metropolitan centers. It has had less resonance, and sometimes inspired sharp opposition, in small-town and rural America and among women who did not graduate from college. According to the American National Election Studies, in 1980, a crucial year for the gender gap, 50 percent of female college graduates thought women should have an “equal role” to men, but only 30 percent of women without degrees thought so: similarly, 49 percent of college graduates favored full abortion rights compared to 25 percent of women without degrees.¹⁶

Forty years later, the same kinds of differences remained. In 2020, 60 percent of women with degrees favored full abortion rights. By contrast, only 44 percent of women without degrees favored full rights, and 40 percent wanted either to ban abortion or to permit it only in the case of incest, rape, or threat to a mother’s life. Of course, men of different classes and regions also held opposing views on these subjects, but they didn’t tend to base their choice of candidates on them. Unsurprisingly, these issues mattered more to women, and they also mattered more at certain times.

Many of the college-educated women and single women consulted by polling organizations have identified themselves with the feminist label. According to a YouGov poll in 2024, 43 percent of women with a college degree identify themselves as feminists compared to 25 percent who do not have a degree.¹⁷ An Ipsos poll in 2018 came up with almost identical numbers: 44 percent instead of 43 percent for women with degrees.¹⁸ According to a Pew poll in 2020, 26 percent of women with degrees said that “feminist” describes their views “very well” and another 46 percent “somewhat well.”¹⁹ That’s 72 percent. In these polls, the two other groups that stood out were young women and seniors. That makes perfect sense: for young women, it’s because they experience more directly the challenges of abortion rights and employment; for seniors, it’s because they are the generation that grew up when the women’s movement originated.

The first clear indication that the commitment to feminism among college-educated women played a role in their election choices was in the 1972 and 1976 presidential races. The 1972 election pitting Republican Richard Nixon against Democrat George McGovern was the first in in which the Democrat received a higher percentage of the vote from college-educated women than from women without degrees. That reflected the changing composition of the women with degrees, but it also may have had to do with abortion becoming a political issue in that campaign. In this race, Nixon accused the Democrats of backing “acid, amnesty, and abortion,” while the McGovern camp embraced the demands of the women’s movement.

The 1976 election saw the gender gap temporarily disappear: college-educated women were 13.7 percentage points more likely to back Republican Gerald Ford than women without degrees. They went 60 to 40 percent for Ford. That may have had to do with Ford having enthusiastically backed the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which had been revived in 1971, and which promised women equal rights to men. Also, the First Lady, Betty Ford, enthusiastically supported the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, which made abortion a right. In the campaign, Ford and Carter both took equivocal positions on abortion rights.

In 1980, the female pro-Democratic gender gap revived and has since persisted. In that election, the Republicans became committed to the agenda of the religious Right. Reagan opposed abortion rights and the ERA, and the Republicans became defenders of the traditional family. They also balked at funding for childcare and a national program for access to health care. After its repudiation by the GOP, feminism quite naturally became the province of the Democratic Party. That’s probably why, in the 1984 election, college-educated women were more supportive of the Democratic challenger, Walter Mondale, than were women without college degrees. In 1988, for the first time, most college-educated women backed the Democratic candidate, Michael Dukakis.

In the 2010s and early 2020s, feminist concerns have once again shaped elections, particularly among college-educated women and single and young women. This was the time of the “Me Too” movement that exposed celebrities, media moguls, business leaders, and politicians who had sexually abused or otherwise taken advantage of women. Some of the abuses were decades old. They came out in the 2010s, at a time when women had reached a critical mass in the upper reaches of the media, legal firms, and political organizations. In 2022, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, reigniting the movement for abortion rights. And last but by no means least, in 2016, 2020, and 2024, Trump was the Republican presidential nominee. From his firm embrace of the religious Right in court appointments to his own history as a womanizer publicly accused of sexual assault, he appeared to embody everything the feminist movement opposed.

The Democrats in these elections highlighted feminist concerns. In the 2016 election, Democrat Hillary Clinton ran as the embodiment of feminist ambition. “I’m with Her” was her campaign slogan, and in the convention, she burst through a glass ceiling to signify that she would be the first female president. “Hillary Clinton is suddenly bringing gender, subtly and explicitly, into the 2016 campaign,” an article for the National Women’s Political Caucus declared.²⁰

In 2024, Harris was more circumspect about the possibility of becoming the first woman president, although her supporters were not. During her campaign, she spoke eloquently and passionately about abortion rights but with far less conviction and clarity about economic issues. Both presidential candidates received over 60 percent of the vote of college-educated women. Harris received 61 percent of the vote from young women aged 18–29.²¹ She won women in big cities by 67 to 32 percent and in adjacent suburbs by 61 to 37 percent.²² These were women whose outlooks were most likely to have been shaped by feminist concerns.

By contrast, Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 barely won the vote of women without college degrees, and Harris lost that vote to Trump. If the vote of minority women, whose electoral loyalty to the Democrats has dated from the civil rights era, is set aside, Clinton, Biden, and Harris lost the vote of white women without college degrees by 34, 36, and 35 percent, respectively. Many of these voters do support abortion rights, but they accord less importance to basing their vote on the issue than do college-educated women and women who live in large metro centers. They are also much less likely to describe themselves as feminists.

To sum up: the pro-Democratic female gender gap was initially driven more by working-class women than by women with college degrees. That began to change in the 1980s and culminated in the dramatic shift in party allegiance in the last three elections. Many working-class women abandoned the Democratic Party for the same reasons as their male counterparts. Those who lived outside the great metro centers felt snubbed by Democratic elites; they blamed Democrats for lost jobs through bad trade deals and regulations and for rising illegal immigration. But many also rejected what they saw as Democrats’ identification with cultural views of the family and home that had been shaped by feminism. In this way, the shift of the party’s base toward college-educated women and feminist priorities helped speed the exit of working-class women from Democratic ranks.

The Politics of Democratic Women

Over the last sixty years, black Americans have become essential parts of the Democratic base and leadership. Witness not merely the importance of the black vote and of opposition to racism as a core issue, but the fact that two of the last four presidential nominees and the current House minority leader are black. The other key group to gain prominence in the Democratic Party has been college-age women whose political outlook was often shaped by feminism. For both of these groups (as with Irish Americans a century earlier), success and visible influence in the political realm became a measure of overall social advancement.

As college-educated women, along with young and single women, have become more attached to the Democratic Party, they have become an increasingly important part of the party’s base and its leadership. In 1998, 13 percent of self-identified Democrats were college-educated women; by 2022, it was up 30 percent.²³ That’s probably the largest single group of Democratic voters with a relatively uniform outlook, who can determine the results of primaries and caucuses. They have also become significant donors. In 2024, women who gave $200 or more contributed $1.45 billion to the Democratic Party and its candidates; men contributed $1.87 billion.²⁴ (By contrast, men gave more than twice as much to Republicans as women did.)

College-educated women have become leaders of the party. As already noted, two of the last three presidential nominees were college-educated women. Nancy Pelosi was the most powerful House Speaker since Sam Rayburn. On the party’s left, the best-known politician besides Bernie Sanders is New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio‑Cortez. Besides California’s Gavin Newsom, the Democrats’ best-known governor has probably been Michigan’s Gretchen Whitmer.

Women are also leaders in the institutions, activist groups, and media that are part of the larger Democratic universe. Two women started Black Lives Matter. A young woman leads the Sunrise Movement. Women head the Economic Policy Institute, the Roosevelt Institute, the Center for American Progress, the Brookings Institution, the Human Rights Campaign, Moveon.org, and the New America Foundation. Women occupy key positions in the New York Times, Atlantic, Bulwark, and msnbc. Women head the afl-cio, and two of the most influential political unions, the American Federation of Teachers and the Service Employees International Union.

As women have gained prominence in the Democratic coalition and its supporting institutions, they have helped to define the party’s political positioning, setting it in a liberal direction. College-educated women have been one of the single most liberal groups. According to a 2020 American National Election Studies survey, 44.5 percent of all college-educated women—of whom 58.9 percent identify as Democrats—define their politics as liberal.²⁵ That comes out to be almost three‑quarters of college-educated women who identify as Democrats while also identifying as liberals: that’s compared to 19.9 percent of women without a degree and 25.5 percent of men with a college degree identifying as liberals.

But the liberalism of college-educated women is different from New Deal liberalism. That older incarnation of liberalism emerged from the industrial unions and the big city machines and was centered on support for higher wages, better working conditions, public works, and programs like Social Security and later Medicare. At the heart of the politics of college-age women is feminism, which includes support for abortion, affirmative action, increased spending on childcare, health care, and education, and greater attention to violence against women. In recent years, defense of the rights of LGBT (and particularly the “T” or transgender) has become an abiding concern of many feminists and Democrats. These concerns have become core issues for the Democrats.

According to the ANES survey, in comparison to women without degrees, and men with or without degrees, college-educated women are the most supportive of using affirmative action in hiring and promotions. According to a March 2025 NBC poll, white women with a college degree were the only group supportive of continuing the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) programs that the Trump administration was trying to eliminate.²⁶

College-educated women have also embraced neoliberal positions on certain issues relating to nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The older New Deal liberalism worried about the effect of unbounded immigration and free trade on workers’ wages and jobs; the newer liberalism brushed aside these concerns. According to the ANES survey, college-educated women have been the most favorably disposed to decreasing or limiting money for border security and the most opposed to any limits on imports. By the same token, they have been the most opposed to Trump’s stands on immigration and trade. In the 2020 primaries, they favored Joe Biden over Bernie Sanders. Their political approach was best represented by Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.

As a result of the influence of these college-educated female Democrats, voters’ perception of what the Democrats and Democratic liberals stand for has changed. If you look at surveys designed to tell whether you are liberal or conservative, or how the electorate leans, you will invariably see a question about abortion, often at the very beginning of the survey, or most recently, about “the social acceptance of people who are transgender.”²⁷ Voters identify Democrats by their stands on these issues. In January 2025, a New York Times and Ipsos poll asked over two thousand voters what they thought were “the most important issues” for themselves and for each party.²⁸ Voters thought the Democrats’ principal issues were, in this order: abortion, LGBT policy, climate change, the state of democracy, and health care. That bespeaks a Democratic Party profoundly influenced by college-educated women and by feminism.

This disparity between what an average voter thought important and what he or she believed the Democrats stood for has proven disastrous for Democratic candidates, including Harris in 2024. It is not a product of voters’ imagination, but perception, and it is the result of the degree to which Democratic politics today is shaped by college-educated women who were products of the feminist revolution.

The Political Repercussions

Like the civil rights movement, the successes of the women’s movement have bent the moral arc of the universe. That, however, is not the question here. Our focus is on what feminism’s effect has been on American party politics. And from the standpoint of what feminists and Democrats have wanted to achieve, the answer is decidedly mixed.

Beginning in the 1970s, as Republicans wooed the religious Right, and continuing through the Donald Trump era, feminism has brought women into the Democratic Party and strengthened its ranks. It has also opened new avenues for women’s leadership in the states and in Washington. Opposition to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade also helped Democrats win the House of Representatives in 2018. In the first months of the second Trump administration, college-educated women have led the charge against what has been, for them, something of a political horror show. As a group, they have been the most critical of Trump’s stances.²⁹

But the preeminence of feminism and of college-educated women has also provoked a backlash, one that’s benefited Republicans while em­powering a stridently anti-feminist conservative opposition. The backlash began in the ’70s. In 1978, Democratic Senate incumbent Dick Clark was upset by Republican Roger Jepsen partly because Catholics in eastern Iowa abandoned the Democrats over their support for abortion. Evangelicals were once either apolitical or inclined to back Democrats—but were opposed to abortion and supportive of the traditional family; after the feminist revolution, they became one of the Republicans’ most dependable constituencies. In 2024, Trump won eight of ten white evangelical votes. As Democrats have become more closely identified as a feminist party, they have found it near impossible to reach many observant white voters whose faiths take a more traditional view of family.³⁰

To be sure, Democrats cannot be faulted for casting their lot with women’s rights any more than they could have been faulted for supporting civil rights. But the backlash against feminism has been fueled partly by radical stands that feminist groups have taken that go well beyond the defense of women’s rights. In the ’70s, radical feminists attacked the institution of the family itself, which invited Republicans to cast their own party as “pro-family.”

In the last few decades, most feminist groups have taken up the cause of transgender rights. They have called for a feminism that is “trans-inclusive,” and they have forcefully denounced other feminists who insist on a biological definition of sex as “TERFs” or “trans-exclusive radical feminists.”³¹ Going well beyond opposing discrimination against transgender people in employment or housing, they have taken to defending the participation of biological men in women’s sports and to championing surgery and hormonal drug treatments for minors who question their gender. Republicans have been able to exploit these stands, which are unpopular with the public, including many voters who identify as Democrats.

During the last decade, Democrats and feminists have also charged that Trump and his supporters are afflicted with “toxic masculinity,” a term that ironically originated with pro-feminist men’s groups.³² No doubt the term fits the behavior of Trump himself and of some of his associates, but its use, which extended to the supporters of Bernie Sanders, who were derided as “Bernie Bros,” conveyed an overall dismissal of masculinity. Coupled with an elevation of women’s concerns and an indifference to whatever ills young men may suffer, the term “toxic masculinity” suggested that feminists and Democrats disliked men.

As Richard Reeves, who wrote Of Boys and Men (2022), has noted, the counterpart to the Harris campaign’s focus on feminist concerns was its seeming indifference to the plight of young males who suffer from a high suicide rate and an absence of opportunity.³³ The Trump campaign seized on this impression to devastating effect in 2024, just as it sought the support of figures like UFC CEO Dana White and podcaster Joe Rogan, who are cultural lodestars to many young men.³⁴

In championing men, Trump could also rely on a resentment toward women and feminism that predated his campaign. While the gap between women’s and men’s wages has shrunk (though it persists), and while men still occupy most of the commanding positions in business and finance, women have rapidly advanced in the last century up the occupational ladder. According to the Department of Education, women received 61 percent of the college degrees last year. Since 2015, women have outnumbered men at law schools.³⁵ Women are now 40 percent of practicing lawyers, up from 31 percent in 2010. Similarly, since 2019, women have made up the majority of medical school students; women also account for 45 percent of the faculty in medical schools.³⁶

Women’s advances may have stirred resentment among younger men. According to a Brookings Institution study, 45 percent of the men aged eighteen to twenty-nine say they face discrimination as men.³⁷ The number of young men who think the United States “has gone too far in promoting gender equality” rose from 8 percent in 2017 to 19 percent in 2024.³⁸ In a 2020 survey, half of men believed that society “punishes men for being men.”³⁹ According to a Pew Poll that year, three in ten men believed that “women’s gains have come at the expense of men.”⁴⁰ When Trump appealed directly to men’s resentment in the 2024 election, he fully reaped the benefits of that underlying resentment. Much of his success in wooing young men, but not young women, may have come from an underlying opposition to feminism. In an April 2025 NBC poll, 44 percent of young men (18–29), compared to 26 percent of young women, thought “America would be strong if more women held traditional gender roles” as homemakers.⁴¹

Just as there has been a pro-Democratic female gender gap, there has been a pro-Republican gender gap among men. The Republicans have won the male vote in every presidential election since 1996, except in 2008 when they lost the vote by 1 percentage point. In the 2016 and 2024 elections, the male vote provided Trump with his margin of victory.

In 2024, Trump also broke ground among different male voters. Trump won young (18–29) male voters by 56 to 42 percent after having lost them to Biden by 56 to 41 percent.⁴² Trump vastly improved his showing among Latino and black males from 2020, and he edged out Harris by 49 to 47 among young Latinos.⁴³ Harris and the Democrats were able to maintain, with minor losses, their margin among young women and among black and Latino women, but the pro-Democratic female gender gap was overcome by the pro-Republican male gender gap.

In other words, the growing identification of the Democratic Party with feminism—driven by the importance of college-educated women to the Democrats’ base and leadership—allowed Trump and other Republican politicians to peel away male voters. The result has been exactly the opposite of what many women who embraced Democratic politics over the last decades had hoped for. Instead of a victory for feminist politics, it has contributed to the success of a party that opposes not merely the most radical measures advocated by feminists but some basic objectives of the movement, such as ensuring the right to abortion, preventing violence against women, and ensuring that women are given their due in the higher circles of public power, including the military.

Toward the 2028 Election

In American politics, the two parties are roughly equal in voter support nationally, with about a third of voters occupying a fluid middle and identifying as “independents.” In recent years, presidential elections have been won or lost on the ability of one party to make the vote a referendum on the other party’s most extreme cultural positions. In 2022, the Democrats held their own by tying the Republicans to abortion bans. In 2024, Trump and the Republicans succeeded in making the election, at least in part, a referendum on Democrats’ identification with extreme feminist positions on the status of men and transgender issues. Having succeeded in that election, Trump and Republicans are likely to continue with that formula. Democrats, for their part, have been forced to rethink how the public sees their party.

American political parties are loose coalitions of politicians, powerful donors, and lobbyists, business and labor groups, issue organizations, consultants and intellectuals in the media, think tanks, foundations, religious blocs, policy groups, and the active primary electorate. When a party wins the White House, the president rules the party and can keep the different parts of the coalition in check. That’s been the case with Trump and the GOP. But without a president in the White House, the party’s political identification is up for grabs. That’s the case with today’s Democrats.

In the wake of the Democrats’ defeat in 2024, some prominent politicians, donors, and operatives are attempting to reshape the party’s identity looking toward the 2026 and 2028 elections. Some of this rethinking involves the party’s identification with radical cultural stands. There have been two different strategies for redefining the party’s goals. The first, enunciated by Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy, has been to restore the party’s older, pre-1960s focus on economic wellbeing while placing less emphasis on social issues.⁴⁴ Social issues would simply be downplayed without necessarily changing the party’s positions on them. That approach has also been recommended by California Congressman Ro Khanna and by a group of retired labor and political operatives who are drawing up a “Contract with Working Families,” modeled on the Republicans’ 1994 “Contract with America.”

The second approach has included repudiating the party’s 2024 positions on social and cultural issues and condemning the influence wielded by narrow interest groups and NGOs—what are often called “the Groups”—on the party’s political identification. Most often cited as an example of this perverse dynamic is the questionnaire circulated by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which asked aspiring candidates whether they supported government funding for gender-affirming medical care on prisoners who were illegal immigrants. Five years later, the Trump campaign bludgeoned Harris for checking yes on the ACLU’s questionnaire.

Two politicians, Massachusetts Congressman Seth Moulton and California Governor Gavin Newsom, repudiated the party’s support for biological men competing in women’s sports. Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a potential presidential candidate, promised in his February State of the State speech to “begin implementing targeted solutions to uplift our men and boys.”⁴⁵ Ilyse Hogue, the former chair of naral Pro-Choice America, along with a pollster and former congressman, has organized “Speaking with American Men,” a project to figure out how Democrats can reach young male voters.⁴⁶ The project exemplifies Democrats’ insularity—consisting, it seems, of metro elites trying to understand the rubes in flyover country—but it is notable and exceptional in being led by a prominent feminist.

Other efforts are specifically intended to redefine the party as “moderate” on social issues. A former Senate staffer and a consultant have begun a new think tank, Searchlight, that would free the Democrats from the undue influence of progressive institutions on social policy. Other Democrats are trying to promote moderation through a PAC called “Welcome,” which in June hosted an event at which Democrats were urged, in the words of one attendee, “to come back to the center and get away from woke, identity politics.”⁴⁷ The event attracted Michigan Senator Elissa Slotkin and Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez from Washington and Jared Golden from Maine.

There has also been a subliminal discussion among Democrats about whether their party should nominate an “alpha male” rather than a woman in 2028. The discussion has been greeted with some derision. In a May radio appearance, Representative Jasmine Crockett from Texas accused Democrats of wanting to run “the safest white boy” for president.⁴⁸ Later that month, msnbc aired a discussion, “Is a female candidate at the top of the 2028 ticket ‘radioactive’ for the Democrats?,” in which their panelists dismissed the concerns about running another woman candidate.⁴⁹ These dismissals bore out, however, the extent to which Democrats are privately mulling whether a male candidate will be needed to counter the Democrats’ reputation as a “woman’s party.”

Will these discussions bear fruit in a presidential ticket that could alter voters’ perception of the Democrats? American politics has proven, to say the least, unpredictable, but if the past is any indication, the discussions foreshadow a change of direction in 2028, if not earlier. The Democrats, fearful of a repeat of the 2016 and 2024 elections, will likely look to the most electable candidate. That could entail nominating a male with relatively moderate social views. They did this in 2020.

What is less likely is the prospect of a Democratic presidential candidate in 2028, even a successful one, changing the social and geographical trajectory of the party in any fundamental way. The Democrats will remain primarily a party of the country’s great metropolitan centers in which college-educated women, whose outlook has been shaped by the rise of a feminist movement over six decades ago, and whose numbers are growing, play a leading role. The question will be how they will play that role. Will the leading politicians and movement leaders (exemplified by Hogue) who have emerged from this group press for a broader politics that will take account of men and of the cultural predilections of middle America? Or will they press hardest and most visibly for the objectives that grew out of mid-twentieth-century feminism? How Democrats ultimately decide will go a long way toward settling their fate as a viable and competitive political force in the years ahead.

This article originally appeared in American Affairs Volume IX, Number 3 (Fall 2025): 209–27.

Notes