In early 2020, I changed my Florida voter registration from Independent to Democrat in order to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary. A few months after he lost, I changed my registration back to Independent.
This was not an exercise in sore-loserdom, but rather, something more pressing: avoiding embarrassment. Voter information is public in Florida and, around that time, an angry commenter on Twitter called me a Democrat and produced my voter file as proof.
Of all the slurs ascribed to me in my years as a journalist—libtard, commie, faggot, just to name a few—Democrat is by far the most humiliating, because it implies that I am not only a libtard, a commie, and a faggot, but also an unprincipled one, who, like the Democratic Party, believes in nothing at all.
The truth is, I can’t think of a single male friend who self-identifies as a Democrat. Perhaps this is because I’ve spent most of my adult life in the deep-red Florida Panhandle. Or maybe it’s because my friends didn’t go to elite colleges, if they went to college at all. Whatever the case may be, even the ones who still vote Democrat admit to doing so only with a bit of embarrassment in their voices, and all of them happen to be gay. None of my straight male friends, to my knowledge, have voted for a Democrat since Bernie. If they have, they are closeted about it.
So I was not surprised to learn recently that the Democratic Party plans to spend $20 million on a project called “Speaking with American Men: A Strategic Plan.” Like Margaret Mead observing the grass-skirted natives in Samoa, notebook in hand, Dems plan to study the “syntax, language, and content that gains attention and virality” in online male spaces, according to a plan obtained by The New York Times.
It’s money well wasted. The Democrats have been losing the support of young men like me for years. Why? Let me tell you from my perspective as someone the Democratic Party once won and lost.