Politics — 2026 Midterms

When a Texas Republican and a Pennsylvania Democrat are reading from the same script about your party’s collapse with male voters, maybe it’s time to listen.

There’s a version of this conversation that’s easy to dismiss. Ted Cruz on Sean Hannity’s show, firing off zingers about AOC and “soy latte” Democrats — it’s a familiar cable news ritual, and plenty of people will scroll right past it. That would be a mistake, because buried inside the performative outrage is a political argument that the data actually supports: Democrats are bleeding young men, they know why, and with midterms approaching, they still haven’t figured out how to stop it.

The setup for Cruz’s segment was a clip of Sen. John Fetterman — not exactly a conservative ally — saying the quiet part out loud. The Democratic Party, Fetterman argued, made young men feel like they were “part of the problem,” and that’s precisely why there’s been such a dramatic migration away from the party. “We forgot that we are in the business of addition, not subtraction,” he said.

“We forgot that we are in the business of addition, not subtraction.” — Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)

Cruz, predictably, took that ball and ran with it. His version was less measured — invoking “transgender witches,” dismissing AOC’s bartending background, and delivering lines that were clearly written for the clip reel. But strip away the theater, and his core point isn’t wrong: if the only thing a political party tells young men is that masculinity is inherently toxic, those young men are going to find somewhere else to park their vote. They did, in 2024. And they may do it again.

+14

Point swing toward Trump among men 18–29 from 2020 to 2024

-10

Point drop in Democratic support among young men since 2018

2

Democrats openly naming this problem on national TV: Fetterman. That’s mostly it.

The more interesting part of the segment, actually, was the back-and-forth about the American Revolution. AOC had argued the revolution was fundamentally a fight against the wealthy — Cruz called it “Marxist history” and went deep on Robert Morris, George Washington’s personal fortune, and the Founders pledging their lives and fortunes. It got a little lecture-y. But the underlying tension is real: there’s a genuine argument happening in American politics right now about what the country’s origin story means, and who gets to tell it.

Cruz is right that capitalism has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system in history. He’s also, characteristically, using that fact to do a lot of heavy lifting — framing every progressive policy idea as a step toward Soviet-style collectivism, which is where the argument loses altitude. There’s a lot of ground between Henry Ford and AOC that he’s choosing not to acknowledge.

WHO SAID WHAT

JF

Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA)

“If you identify anybody as a problem or blame them for something, you are going to lose. That is really why we lost in 2024.”

TC

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

“If you are a Democrat and the only thing you have to say about men are the words ‘toxic masculinity’ — I don’t think being a man is toxic. I don’t think being a father is toxic.”

What makes this moment politically significant isn’t Cruz. He’s going to say whatever fires up his base, and he does it well. What matters is Fetterman — a Democrat, elected from a swing state, saying on national television that his own party treated an entire demographic as an enemy and paid the price for it. He is, as Cruz acknowledged with what seemed like genuine respect, “a good friend” who has “shown a lot of courage.” That Cruz is praising a sitting Democratic senator tells you something about just how far outside the party mainstream Fetterman’s honesty has pushed him.

With midterms less than six months away, the question isn’t whether Democrats have a problem with men. They do, and the polling is unambiguous. The question is whether anyone in a position of power within the party is willing to do anything about it besides quietly agree with Fetterman in private and say nothing in public. So far, the answer looks a lot like silence