According to court records, I have two children. Because I’m so gosh-darn manly, both my children are boys. (‘Cause that’s how genetics works.) Therefore, I’ve never had to give my kids “the talk” — but I have plenty of friends and relatives with adolescent girls, so I know how “the talk” goes:
“Honey, sit down. It’s time you learned the truth. You have to be careful out there, because boys your age are only after… one thing. It’s all they care about!”
Yeah: That one thing is raising children.
It’s one of the strangest, most unexpected evolutions in modern politics. Almost no one saw it coming: Gen Z men and Gen Z women have switched traditional gender roles on the importance of children.
The gender gap between men and women has been a durable fact of life in American politics — and nowhere is this gap larger than among the youngest cohort of American adults, Gen Z.
But it’s not just politics driving the divide. The latest NBC News Decision Desk Poll powered by SurveyMonkey shows how the political gender gap persists alongside different social beliefs between young men and women.
[…]
Gen Z men who voted for Trump rate having children as the most important thing in their personal definition of success. Gen Z women who voted for Harris ranked having children as the second-least important thing in their personal definition of success.
The friction between single, childless women and married families is the perfect wedge issue for the GOP to exploit, because it speaks to the aspirational goals of both parties: Republican men define success by being wealthy enough to be a father and support a family.
Yet Democratic women define success by being wealthy enough to no longer need a man or a family.
Those two political visions are incompatible. Candidates who cater to the former risk alienating the latter.
The GOP should force the Dems to split the difference.
If politics is a numbers game, then the numbers favor the GOP: There are roughly 268 million Americans over the age of 15. Just 42.7 million are women who’ve never been married. (Another 14.6 million are divorced women.)
By contrast, there are over 136 million married Americans. Married couples — plus all the Gen Z men who aspire to be married — are BY FAR the more important demographic.
It’s a helluva dilemma for the Dems, because you can’t be all things to all people. The priorities of families and the priorities of unmarried women are simply different. The fault lines are obvious. (And increasingly unavoidable.)
Unmarried women care about the Patriarchy, toxic masculinity, shattering glass ceilings, equal pay, DEI, #MeToo, and abortion on demand. Illegal aliens aren’t their job competition — they’re (super-cheap) dog walkers, housemaids, landscapers, repairmen, and nail technicians. So why on earth would anyone be against illegal aliens?
Additionally, unmarried women tend to view men as a “problem” that must be fixed.
Married couples — especially ones with little boys — are utterly repulsed by that mentality. They recognize it as a serious obstacle to their children’s happiness.
But unmarried women have become one of the Democrats’ most reliable voting blocs. Unmarried women voted 61% for Kamala Harris. (For unmarried men, it was a 48% to 48% split.) The Dems can’t win elections without a loyal army of unmarried women — and they can’t drive ’em to the polls without selling ’em juicy red meat on the campaign trail.
Yet the same red meat that motivates unmarried women will further alienate married men, married women, AND unmarried Gen Z men.
So the Democrats settled on a novel strategy: They’ll still cater to unmarried women… but deliver their message via an “avatar” who cosplays as a macho dude.
That’s the holy grail for the Dems: A man who thinks and behaves exactly like a radical feminist, yet looks and sounds like a rough-and-tumble Alpha male.
It’s the strategy behind Graham Platner’s senatorial bid in Maine. (‘Cause what could be more manly than a Nazi tattoo?) It was the strategy behind Kamala Harris’ V.P. selection of “America’s coach,” Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.). And it’s the strategy behind their latest scheme to turn Texas blue, the Senate campaign of the Dems’ current “it boy,” James Talarico. There’s a lot riding on Talarico’s unique brand of masculinity.
But the Dems are already fretting about Talarico’s masculinity being (ahem) neutered.
From The 19th: “Republicans Want to Make the Texas Senate Race About Manliness”
Republicans are focusing on one question in one of November’s top races: Is the Democrat a real man?
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, who clinched the GOP’s nomination for U.S. Senate on Tuesday night, released a new ad Wednesday — his first of the general election — accusing his opponent, state Sen. James Talarico, of being too “low-T for Texas.” “Low-T” is a reference to testosterone levels and often used as an insult by influencers in the so-called manosphere, who say low testosterone makes someone weaker.
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the architect of President Donald Trump’s immigration policy and one of his top advisers, picked up on a similar line of attack, posting on the social media platform X on Wednesday that Democrats had nominated the “their first transgender senate candidate.” Talarico is cisgender and identifies as an LGBTQ+ ally; he is in a relationship with a woman.
Well, Talarico claims he’s in a relationship with a woman. So far, he hasn’t revealed her name — a fact that Jesse Watters of Fox News had fun lampooning.
“He says just recently that he has a girlfriend and that they’ve been together for four years. He called her his best friend,” Watters said. “He’s not revealing her identity because he wants to respect her privacy and keep her safe during the campaign.”
“Does she live in Canada?” another co-host chimes in.
[…]
“Why haven’t we ever seen her before?” Watters added on Fox News. “Does she exist? We’re gonna find out. If he wins, are they going to have a coming out party? Or is she still gonna stay the secret girlfriend?”
(In defense of Talarico, when I was in high school, most of my girlfriends were imaginary, too.)
That’s the biggest PR problem with Talarico’s brand of masculinity: He’s a feminist’s idea of the perfect man. (So was Tim Walz.) In fact, Talarico actually claimed that “Jesus Christ himself was a radical feminist.”
But he’s not what other men aspire to be — which is why his PR campaign will fail.
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 28, 2026
It’s a clever strategy for his GOP opponent, Ken Paxton, because hammering Talarico’s (inadequate) manhood forces him to either double down on his masculinity — which will demotivate his base of unmarried women — or forfeit his Man Card and be branded as an anti-meat, six-gendered, God-isn’t-binary feminist nutjob.
Talarico’s #1 weakness is that he’s astonishingly out of step with Texas values. Attacking him as “Low-T” is a gateway accusation that also shines a bright light on his litany of weird posts, radical tweets, and “cringey comments”:
White skin gives me and every white American immunity from the virus. But we spread it wherever we go—through our words, our actions, and our systems. We don’t have to be showing symptoms—like a white hood or a Confederate flag—to be contagious.
— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) May 8, 2020
Meanwhile, Texas men are less concerned with the “virus of racism” and more concerned with affording a family of their own. Married Texans want a candidate who’ll make life better for them and their children — including their male children.
But unmarried women want something else.
Over the long-term, the Democrats must change how American men view masculinity: If they can get us to accept James Talarico, Tim Walz, and Graham Platner as modern models of masculinity, they’ll win in a landslide.
That’s their ultimate PR goal — and they’ll move heaven and earth to make it happen.
Farfetched? Maybe, maybe not: Look what happened to Gen Z women.
Who would’ve predicted that partisan politics would supersede the maternal instincts of an entire generation of women?
There’s a gender war coming. Better get ready. And better start swinging, à la Ken Paxton.
Because in this war, it’s better to be on offense than defense.
Recommended: Just When You Thought the Bidens Couldn’t Go Any Lower, They Grab a Shovel and Dig Straight to Hell
One Last Thing: 2026 is a critical year for America First. It began with Mayor Mamdani declaring war on “rugged individualism” and will reach a crescendo with the midterm elections. Nothing less than the fate of the America First movement teeters in the balance.
Never before have the political battle lines been so clearly defined. Win or lose, 2026 will transform our country.
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