National Service Won't Win More Men for Democrats

Harris won’t fix her men problem by listening to pundits.

You may have heard that Vice President Kamala Harris is struggling to win male voters, and young male voters in particular. Unsurprisingly, the pundit class has been lining up to offer Harris advice on how to change that.

Some of the advice leaves me wondering if these pundits have ever actually met any young men.

Take this op-ed published by The New York Times on October 21. Author John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, suggests that Harris needs to "go big," offering "a bold vision that speaks to [young men's] desire for purpose and strength" and reignites "the hope of the emerging generation." OK, OK, and just how should she do this? By making a "sweeping national call to both military and civilian service" called the "Generation Z Compact to Rebuild and Renew America," writes Volpe, going on to extoll the virtues of mandatory national service.

Because if there's one way to young men's hearts, it's…forced volunteer work? Hmmmm.

To illustrate why this could work, Volpe links to a Hill op-ed by New York attorney Steve Cohen, who wrote that in a poll he sponsored himself (and does not link to), 75 percent of young people supported the idea of mandatory national service. I found a basic overview of this poll on Cohen's website. It was not conducted by a polling firm but by using online software called QuestionPro. It included about 1,000 participants, with roughly half between the ages of 18 and 24, and just 33 percent men. It does not say how participants were recruited, whether they constituted a nationally representative sample, or how the poll was conducted.

Meanwhile, a 2017 Gallup Poll found that 57 percent of respondents under age 30 opposed the idea of a mandatory year of national service for young Americans and only 39 percent supported it.

As for a "sweeping call" to military service, I don't think we need polling to tell us how this would play out. Young people face no shortage of enticements to join the military, and not a lot of barriers to doing so. That they don't enlist in larger numbers probably suggests that there's not a huge audience out there for political candidates who want to talk them into it.

Another suggestion—albeit much less sweeping in scope—that keeps getting mentioned is for Harris to go on Joe Rogan's podcast. Rogan is very popular with young men, and also popular among former President Donald Trump supporters. "In the year's first wave of New York Times/Siena College battleground polls back in May, the No. 1 predictor of whether someone had defected from Joe Biden was whether the respondent was Middle Eastern or North African — a sign of the political toll of the war in Gaza The No. 2 predictor? Whether the respondent had a very favorable view of the podcaster Joe Rogan," Nate Cohn noted in The New York Times a few days ago.

Listening to The Joe Rogan Experience obviously doesn't make people into Trump voters, and Rogan himself is at least somewhat politically heterodox, but the podcast host is popular among a certain sort of disaffected Democrat. And yet, the idea that Harris getting an audience with these people would win them back to the Democrats' side is questionable.

Harris is not particularly good at off-the-cuff interviews, and certainly not one to ooze authenticity and charisma in unfamiliar territory. It's hard to imagine her doing well on Rogan's podcast, let alone well enough to win over people presumably bringing with them certain grievances about the mainstream left that Harris has no answer for. This is probably not an audience that wants to hear about how Harris will lower their grocery bills.

Going on Rogan's podcast would (probably) be way less of a disaster than suggesting we conscript young adults into forced government service. Voters should want candidates who are willing to talk at length about their ideas and their backgrounds, especially in forums that may not be totally friendly. More candidate interviews are a good thing, especially for a candidate who arrived late to the game under unusual circumstances and initially shied away from candid interviews.

But while probably not damaging, I don't think it would do Harris a whole lot of good either. And the idea that it would seems like wishful thinking from people blind to their preferred candidates' weak spots.

Then there's what the campaign is actually doing to reach men: "advertising on sportsbooks and fantasy sports sites; on video game sites like IGN; and during college football, NBA, NFL, and MLB playoff broadcasts," Slate reports. Again, not an idea that's likely to hurt Harris, but broadcasting the same old messages in different spots doesn't seem likely to pick up many men either.

In reality, there's probably not much Harris can do at this point. Men have long leaned more conservative, and gender gaps in candidate choice and partisan identification long predate her. Even more recent changes among young people are likely less due to any specific actions or policies by Harris or vice presidential candidate Tim Waltz, and more related to the overall vibe of the Democratic Party in the past decade or so.

Democrats aren't going to turn any of this around in time for the 2024 election. It's something the party probably needs to consider in a more holistic way than whether it needs more ads during sports broadcasts.

As Richard Reeves, President of the American Institute for Boys and Men, told Newsweek, "I don't think it's a stampede to the right. I think it's more a detachment away from the left." If Reeves is right, the problem for Harris is that they have lost interest in her brand of Democratic politics and the progressive style that has been in fashion for the last decade or so. She's probably not going to solve that problem by offering men more of the same but in different venues.