Nate Silver on Why Young Men Are Leaving Democratic Party

If you spend any amount of time on X, it’s impossible to miss the pattern. 

Democrats are angry. Depressed. They scream at the camera. They fantasize about violence against “oppressors.” They film themselves weeping, wailing, and gnashing their teeth. Just as you can be reasonably certain that anybody who flies an American flag is a Republican, you can be equally confident that everybody who wears a mask in 2025 (or back in 2024, 2023, or 2022) is a strong Democrat. 

~50% of liberal women under 30 say they have a mental health condition. (Pew Research)

There’s an entire demographic who take antidepressants and go to therapy, and then think we should all listen to them on how to run the country…

Pretty insane when you think about it. pic.twitter.com/SYSpy52CTy

— Geiger Capital (@Geiger_Capital) February 14, 2025

Democrats scream about “feeling unsafe” when people disagree with them. They get deeply upset, even frantic, when their core beliefs are even mildly challenged. They claim that using the “wrong” pronouns is “genocide,” because disagreements are a rejection of their “reality.” “I don’t feel seen.”

Happy Warriors vs. The Depressed Left: Mental Health and Political Identity

Scott Adams explores the stark contrast in mental health between Republicans and Democrats.

Republicans, with their focus on external factors like family, faith, and country, embody the… pic.twitter.com/k5MS5nKUi3

— jay plemons (@jayplemons) November 14, 2024

Unhappiness is a core part of their identity. Feeling oppressed, or feeling guilty about being an oppressor, or worrying that the world will end by…some date or another…is an obsession. 

Clearly, this isn’t true of all Democrats, but as a class, it is impossible to miss. 

Nate Silver casually pointing out that democrats (people who have serious mental health issues and take antidepressants) shouldn’t be issuing opinions to anybody. pic.twitter.com/WaW2wfUsnA

— MatCPCL (@MatCPCL) June 3, 2025

Nate Silver, in his latest blog post on why Democrats are losing young men at a scary (to them) rate, makes the connection: young men, as a class, are repelled by the deep neuroticism of the Democrats. 

My observation about the difference between the two parties is not based on “feelz.” Survey after survey shows that Republicans are much less likely to be diagnosed with a mental illness, and they also report, when surveyed, much higher satisfaction with their lives and better mental health than Democrats. 

Nate Silver’s latest blog post notes that conservatives are up 31 points among those with self-described excellent mental health, and down 26 among those with poor mental health.

Democrats have turned themselves into the party of the neurotic, the unstable, and the miserable.… pic.twitter.com/qKsNikSeGV

— Jesus (@Jesus197538) June 2, 2025

The division between Democrats’ mental health and Republicans’ is most obvious among the young, which is probably why the politics of young men and young women is so stark. Our culture and especially our education system seem tailor-made to encourage neuroticism. The more mentally unstable one is, the more celebrated and empowered one becomes. 

As “Social and Emotional Learning” spread through our K-12 system, children have become far less happy and mentally stable. Suicide rates have skyrocketed–the statistics are shocking–and you can literally see that a whole generation has been taught to be emotionally incontinent. 

So it’s not just that emotionally broken people are attracted to the Democratic Party–the Democratic Party is grooming young people–especially young women, to become less and less happy and stable. Kids are then fed drugs, which pretty obviously don’t have the advertised effects. 

Liberal academics have explained that conservatives are happier because we are nastier people–we don’t care about others. It’s a neat trick to pull, since the results are so stark and so unappealing to liberals. 

American adults who identify as politically liberal have long reported lower levels of happiness and psychological well-being than conservatives, a trend that mental-health experts suspect is at least partly explained by liberals’ tendency to spend more time worrying about stress-inducing topics like racial injustice, income inequality, gun violence, and climate change.

Now a team of Columbia epidemiologists has found evidence that the same pattern holds for American teenagers. The researchers analyzed surveys collected from more than eighty-six thousand twelfth graders over a thirteen-year period and discovered that while rates of depression have been rising among students of all political persuasions and demographics, they have been increasing most sharply among progressive students — and especially among liberal girls from low-income families.

The authors, who include Columbia professors Katherine M. Keyes ’10PH, Seth J. Prins ’16PH, and Lisa M. Bates, along with graduate student and lead author Catherine Gimbrone, speculate that left-leaning teens may have been deeply affected by Donald Trump’s election as president, the US Supreme Court’s subsequent lurch to the right, rising socioeconomic inequality, and worsening political polarization. “Liberal adolescents may have therefore experienced alienation within a growing conservative political climate such that their mental health suffered in comparison to that of their conservative peers whose hegemonic views were flourishing,” they write.

But this explanation, aside from all its other flaws, exposes a deeply rooted assumption that is in itself hostile to mental health: that we are helpless victims who cannot thrive unless the world is perfect. 

American conservatives tend to rate their mental health more positively than their liberal counterparts. One explanation for this finding is that conservatives may be more likely to justify existing inequalities in society, leading to a palliative effect on their mental health that does not happen for liberals.

The world is never going to be perfect, and if the standard of morality is that anybody being happy while others are not shows they are awful people, then mental health and happiness are redefined as negative traits. 

That is insane. One does not have to be indifferent to others’ suffering to be happy and mentally healthy. Inventing a connection between mental health and moral worth is, of course, exactly the sort of thing that liberals like to do–any claim to oppression and/or disability elevates one morally.

Lots of us struggle with mental health issues, and the connection between mental health and moral worth undermines our ability to overcome it. If depression, anxiety, and general neuroticism are seen as signs of being especially worthy, it just makes the journey to health and happiness that much harder. Worse, it encourages people to become ever less resilient to the inevitable ups and downs of living in the real world. 

Of course, being happier doesn’t mean you are a better person, just as suffering from mental illness doesn’t make you a bad person. But there is a reason why Democrats attract unhappy people: it is much easier to embrace mental illness than overcome it. Democrats seem to encourage an addiction to neuroticism instead of encouraging people to overcome it. 

Anybody who has struggled with addiction knows how challenging it is to overcome it–if you ever smoked, think of how many times you tried to quit! 

Democrats are the enablers. 

Silver’s observation that young men are fleeing the Democratic Party at least partly because they are tired of Democrats celebrating neuroticism rings true because ambition and drive are masculine traits associated with testosterone, and young men are full of testosterone. 

Preaching helplessness and depression is a pretty bad strategy to attract young men back into the fold.