Your bag is empty.
When Carlos Mendoza went to the polls in 2024, he decided it was time to take a chance on Donald Trump. A 28-year-old US Army Officer raised in New York City, Mendoza had been a lifelong Democrat, but found himself increasingly disillusioned by President Joe Biden’s handling of immigration, the continued funding of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, and inflation.
“ It wasn’t necessarily that I agreed with [Trump] on a lot of things,” Mendoza says. “ I just didn’t want Biden.”
But when the economy worsened during Trump’s first two years back in office, and the war with Iran sent gas prices through the roof and endangered friends stationed in bases in the Middle East, Mendoza says he regretted his decision. In Texas, where he’s currently stationed, he took to the polls for the midterm elections and voted Democrat down the ticket, including for Senator-elect James Talarico and Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa.
“It’s just a mirror image of the things that we didn’t want back then with Biden,” says Mendoza, whose name has been changed out of fear of retribution from the Department of Defense. “ We’re pandering to Israel, and gas prices are worse now.”
Mendoza is among the countless young men whose votes flipped from Republican to Democrat this election cycle as part of the country’s shift to the left and rebuke of Trump. In total, men ages 18 to 29 swung by nearly 40 percentage points toward the Democratic Party at the midterms compared to 2024, according to The New York Times. But Democratic insiders and young men alike say that Democrats should not consider this an embrace of their party, but rather a repudiation of a president who has failed to deliver on virtually any of his promises.
Among them is Hasan Piker, a left-wing political commentator and popular Twitch streamer who campaigned this cycle for progressive candidates such as Michigan Senator-elect Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
“Rent is unbelievably unaffordable. The job market is terrible. We’re terrified about AI destroying what remains of the job market. And here you are spending all of your time waging war in Iran after saying you weren’t going to do it,” Piker says. The streamer also credits the Trump administration’s crackdown on anti-Israel dissent as contributing to their struggles with young men: “[Trump] ran on the anti-woke agenda, while simultaneously his administration very quickly got to work to bar people from entering the country for memes.”
Other insiders and experts, such as Ross Morales Rocketto, the chief advocacy and culture change officer for Equimundo, a D.C. nonprofit that promotes gender equality, healthy manhood and violence prevention, say that young male voters remain up for grabs if neither party can deliver on pledges surrounding affordability, the job market and the rise of AI.
”I think we’re entering a political era where the electorate has gotten more flimsy than it probably ever has been in my lifetime,” says Rocketto, a longtime Democratic insider who previously ran “White Dudes For Harris,” in support for former vice president Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign. “It’s driven by anger, and that anger this year was directed against Trump. But it could get redirected towards Democrats.”
The rebuke from young men is not exclusively because of a bad economy, experts say, even if many pundits moved quickly to describe young men’s rejection of Trump as a largely economic decision. Among them was Scott Galloway, who said on the “Raging Moderates” podcast with Jessica Tarlov that “young men go with the economy, and the economy flips back and forth.” But this argument fails to capture the totality of anger toward Trump and Republicans that’s at the center of a generational midterm shift, Rocketto says.
“ Folks have painted young men as basically robots with no feelings that only care about jobs,” Rocketto says. “ When we talk to young men, they will tell you all about the economic stuff, but they’re also seeing all these other fucked up things like Gaza, like Iran, ICE on the streets, and it feels cruel.”
When Playboy spoke with young men extensively in the leadup and aftermath of the 2024 election, outside of UFC events and in countless online spaces, there was a recurring theme in those interviews. On countless occasions, men told us how much they feared being pulled into another war, the idea of being drafted to fight in a foreign country they barely have even heard of petrified them.
Men like Michael, a 29-year-old lawyer from Rapid City, South Dakota, grew up with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq as omnipresent specters during their childhoods—and worried what might happen if the situation in Iran escalated any further. Michael, whose name has been changed because he fears retaliation against his business in the Republican-controlled state, declined to support the Republican Party this November after voting for Trump in three consecutive elections.
“ I don’t want a bunch of 18- and 19-year-olds getting drafted fresh out high school,” Michael tells Playboy. “It’s such a slap in the face.”
Young male voters’ seismic shift to the left came just two years after Trump convinced them he was the right choice. Back then, Trump promised that he would end the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, put an end to foreign intervention, and claimed, without evidence, that Harris would reinstate the draft. Young men noticed this.
“He presented himself, successfully, as the peace candidate,” Piker says of Trump. “And the issue is Donald Trump obviously continued the exact same wars. He didn’t end the war in Ukraine. He didn’t end the war in Gaza. He started a new war in Iran.”
It isn’t just everyday young men that have turned their backs on the Trump administration. Many prominent figures in the podcasting world who endorsed the president in 2024, and arguably delivered him the election, have now soured on him.
Theo Von, who eagerly discussed his cocaine addiction and recovery with the president back in 2024, has described the war in Iran as “diabolical.”
“What regular person is this helping?” he said on an April episode of “This Past Weekend.”
Podcaster Shawn Ryan, a former Navy SEAL, has all but renounced his support for Trump over Iran. Joe Rogan, who hosts the most widely listened-to podcast in the world and endorsed Trump in 2024, has routinely criticized the war and also ICE’s immigration enforcement tactics, comparing them to the Gestapo on his podcast.
Yes, much has changed from two years ago. At the time, memes circulated online that lampooned the inevitability of a new war under a hypothetical Harris administration. Some of the videos garnered as many as hundreds of thousands of likes and comments on Instagram and TikTok. But the vibe is very different among young men in 2026, as the memes have been replaced by the reality that more than 20 U.S. servicemembers have already died in the war with Iran.
“ Nobody fucking wants this,” says Mendoza, who notes that he has friends currently stationed at bases involved with war. “And all these people that died … It’s all for nothing, dude.”