Kamala Harris has blamed the influence of online “manosphere” figures for losing young male voters in the 2024 presidential election.

In her new political memoir, 107 Days, published this week, the former vice president admits that she was “devastated” to learn that she “lost some ground” with male voters under 30. “Pundits speak about the ‘bro vote’, the ‘frat boy flank’,” she writes. “I don’t think of them in those reductive terms. Instead, I think about these young voters coming of age during Covid, unnaturally isolated, their lives lonely when they should have been at their most social.”

The 60-year-old argued that the pandemic created a vacuum in which young men turned to online influencers for connection and guidance. “At the very moment their world should have been widening, it had contracted,” she writes. “For some, the voices that filled the void belonged to Andrew Tate, Myron Gaines, and others who grab attention with get-rich or fitness content, then deliver arguments that feminism is damaging to masculinity and women ‘need to know their place’.”

That shift, Harris claims, shaped how many young men viewed her candidacy. She also expresses surprise that these same men prioritised “their perceived economic interests” and not “hot-button issues like reproductive rights, Gaza, or climate change”. She adds: “In a postelection study conducted by Tufts University, 40 percent put the economy and jobs as their top issue. The next priority was abortion, 13 percent. Climate change was a top issue for 8 percent; foreign policy, including Gaza, 4 percent.”

In the book, Harris insists her campaign had laid out policies aimed squarely at young people — from renter protections and student debt relief to boosting opportunities for non-college graduates and expanding access to capital. But those plans, she concedes, failed to break through.

“My policies … had not cut through the false notion that Trump was some kind of economic savant who would somehow be better for their personal financial position,” Harris writes. “In 107 days, I didn’t have enough time to show how much more I would do to help them than he ever would. And that makes me immensely sad.”

Since the book’s release, Harris’s promotion tour has been met with criticism from fellow Democrats and some members of the media. After writing that Pete Buttigieg was too big a “risk” to tap as running mate because he was gay, the former presidential candidate responded that he was “surprised”. He added: “You earn trust with voters based mostly on what they think you’re going to do for their lives, not on categories.” Former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel also criticised the decision, saying that Harris should have “gone with her gut”.

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James Billot is UnHerd’s Newsroom editor.

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