Can Congressman Pat Ryan Help Democrats Win Men Back?

On the second Saturday in December, I found myself at the epicenter of American testosterone production: the Army-Navy football game. For a few glorious hours, in a stadium outside of DC, elite future soldiers from the US Naval Academy and West Point brawled for God, country, and a gargantuan football trophy. Some 60,000 fans ringed the arena, waving signs with such provocations as “Confirmed: Navy has bigger decks.”

The stadium grounds were overrun with men—women, too, but mostly men—particularly young ones, the exact kinds of voters that Democrats had wiped out with in November. These were men with blue foam ships on their heads. Men in camo and polarized sunglasses. Men doing pull-ups in the parking lot, or clutching 25-ounce beers while shouting, “Navy is for nerds.” When the president-elect appeared on the jumbotron, raising a fist from his suite high above the field, the crowd emitted a deafening roar, the sound cascading down the stands.

“That was a cheer for Army football,” joked Congressman Pat Ryan, a second-term Democrat from New York’s Hudson Valley. We both knew it wasn’t true.

Congressman Pat Ryan at the Army-Navy football game in December.

I was following Ryan around because he seemed to have thoughts about men. He’d just been reelected in his rural-ish, purple district with an astonishing 57% of the vote—and the campaign he ran had looked conspicuously male. In his ads, the 42-year-old jogged through the suburbs in an Army shirt and posed before a ludicrously big American flag, which he’d twice gone to Iraq to defend. He talked tough—on billionaires, sports blackouts, and border security—and wrestled on the floor with his sons. He showed his independence from the party. In July, he was the eighth Democrat in Congress to call for Biden to suspend his campaign. Swing voters loved it; Ryan outperformed Vice President Harris by more than 11 points.

After the election, Ryan’s phone began to ring—party leaders, reporters—all wanting to know what had worked. “It’s extraordinary to see someone this new to the Congress command this much attention,” Pete Buttigieg told me in December. “I think he's shown a way of approaching a swing district that many Democrats can learn from.” To the media, Ryan explained that his campaign focused on affordability, that he went after corrupt elites, that his party melted down due to a “system-wide failure to be connected to fucking reality.” But he also raised the issue of men, who’d broken for Trump by about 12 points.

On CNN, Ryan decried the MAGA movement’s “selfish, narrow, I think isolating view of masculinity.” On Pod Save America, he said that Democrats should provide an alternative, a masculinity that’s healthier and more patriotic than Trump’s. He didn’t claim to have answers, but in the wound-licking delirium of those raw November weeks, he was at least willing to enter the fray. Young men want to be part of something bigger, he said: a family, a community, a nation, a team. “We have an opportunity—and I would say an obligation—in the Democratic party to offer that.”

Meanwhile, Republicans offered something else: Donald Trump has returned to power with an onslaught of naked machismo, surrounded by tech-world “broligarchs” and celebrity fighters like Hulk Hogan and Jake Paul. He menaced Canada, freed Proud Boys and Capitol rioters from prison, and put federal DEI workers on leave. On The Joe Rogan Experience, Mark Zuckerberg recently urged corporations to embrace “masculine energy” and “aggression.” In a Senate confirmation hearing, the new secretary of defense discussed the number of push-ups he can do.

Everywhere, men seem ascendant in their most cartoonish and bellicose form. Democrats need a plan to win them back. While Ryan hadn’t laid one out publicly, I figured that he must have ideas, so I asked if we could chat about men. By the time we did, though, his thinking seemed to have changed: Pat Ryan did not want to become a thought leader on the man crisis. He felt it was the wrong conversation to have.

A few days before the football game, Ryan and I met at his wood-paneled office by the US Capitol. We sat around a coffee table filled with military challenge coins, a button for the “Congressional Dad Caucus” tucked into the array. He’d just returned from a vote wearing a crisp blue suit and immediately excused himself for a “costume change.” “My team makes fun of me, but I like to wear ties as little as possible,” he said, pulling a gray West Point windbreaker over his head. Once he was comfortable, I asked why Democrats are bleeding men. He looked like he’d touched a hot stove.

“I get that you’re wanting to write about that,” Ryan said, “but I don’t personally—no offense—think that’s the right way to think about it.” Democrats have issues with a variety of groups, not just men, so he hesitated to narrow our focus. Besides, he didn’t want to distract from the bigger takeaway: that the economy was the primary factor in this election, that the dynamic was “everyone versus elites.”

Basically, Ryan didn’t want to talk about men, and I couldn’t blame him. Such discussions tend to devolve. Republicans often claim that men are demonized unfairly, while Democrats insist that as long as women are suffering, men and their problems can wait. He also seemed aware that the blowout victory of a six-foot-three Army veteran who wrapped himself in the flag might seem, to some on the left, like a step backwards—a retreat into a retrograde and militaristic masculinity, one that glorifies violence and brawn. I figured that was part of his discomfort, that he’d grown wary of becoming an avatar of liberal maleness, despite what he’d previously said on the news. 

Congressman Ryan with Maryland Governor Wes Moore, a fellow Army veteran.

Ryan’s own masculinity was shaped by the Army, but maybe not in the way that you’d think. He grew up near Kingston, New York, in a middle-class, Catholic family. His parents seemed vaguely conservative, though they didn’t discuss politics at home. At 18, Ryan enrolled at West Point with a “kind of starry-eyed, movie version of what military service was”—a sense that it would be like what his grandfathers experienced in the Navy during World War II. The year was 2000, so he didn’t expect to see combat. Then, when he was a sophomore, came 9/11.

In their first two years, cadets can leave West Point without incurring any service obligation—but reporting to class on the first day of junior year seals an eight-year debt to Uncle Sam. Ryan’s class was the first to make that choice in a post-9/11 world, where returning to school meant almost certainly going to war. He thought about quitting but didn’t.

That winter, during the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, Ryan took a class on American politics. The professor assigned an analysis of the Bush administration’s shifting justifications for war, which left him profoundly disturbed. The government’s rhetoric seemed empty and incoherent, dangerous in a way that might alter the course of his life. By springtime, the stakes were clear. Whenever West Point alums were killed in action, it was announced in the mess hall to the Corps of Cadets. The first time he remembers it happening, “it was a ‘Sit up in your seat’ wake-up call,” he said. Classmates he’d known were dying in Iraq. He was probably headed there, too.

In 2003, Ryan watched president Bush stand “cluelessly on an aircraft carrier, nowhere near Iraq” and declare “mission accomplished.” One year and hundreds of casualties later, he was “not too happy” to hear Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld speak at West Point’s commencement. Afterwards, Ryan deployed to the Sunni triangle in Iraq where he was an intelligence officer for an infantry unit, often sent outside the wire on patrols. When he describes it, he still sounds furious. “We had no strategic direction,” he said. “Literally, we didn't have the basic equipment to keep us safe. We're getting blown up by roadside bombs—multiple guys in my unit killed, horrific incidents—while leaders back here are like, ‘Oh, everything's fine, don't worry about it.’”

Ryan returned from that deployment feeling “real salty” and anti-war. He was proud of his service but felt venomous toward the “corporate and political elites” who “sent us to war, kept us at war, never asked hard questions about what the fuck we were doing, never had a conversation with the American people about how we’re going to pay for these wars while everybody's taxes were getting lowered and we’re accumulating trillions of dollars of debt.”

The experience made Ryan a Democrat, and it also gave him a sense of what he thinks masculinity should be. “When the shit hits the fan,” he said, “you're literally going into fire not for love of our country—I mean, I still get chills at the national anthem, but that’s not why. You do it for love of the people next to you,” for your fellow soldiers, whom you’re desperate to protect.

On his left wrist, Ryan wears a silver bracelet engraved with the names of all his West Point classmates who have died: 23 soldiers, more than any class since Vietnam. In his office, he touched it for a moment then said that’s why he had “such a visceral reaction” when I first asked him about masculinity. “If you don’t have that love, masculinity is just bullshit,” he said. It’s “fake, dangerous, and ultimately not fulfilling.”

In Ryan’s moral vocabulary, fight is among the most important words. He fought for his country, he fights for his district. He’s a brawler, a pugilist—a man who protects people from bullies. This is, in a sense, the most traditional masculinity possible, the kind that’s always been vaunted. But combativeness has become so conservative-coded that my teenage son, when he heard a Pat Ryan ad from across the room, said, “He’s a Republican, right?”

Swaths of the left have grown uneasy with masculinity, seeing it not as neutral or positive, but as a flaw for men to overcome. It’s an understandable reaction to eons of male brutality, much of it still ongoing. But when Democrats say that masculinity is toxic and the future is female, some men become defensive and aggrieved. Maybe you don’t find this to be a legitimate social problem, but it’s certainly—if you’re a Democrat—an electoral one.

In October, the conservative strategist Frank Luntz led a focus group of 15 men who’d previously voted Democrat but now supported Trump. They had the same concerns as most voters—the economy, immigration—but Trump struck them as aspirationally masculine: “strong,” “powerful,” “someone you can count on to keep you safe.” He built an empire and spoke his mind, while Tim Walz, as one guy said, was “a happy dog following his owner on a leash.”

To be clear, these weren’t men who simply refused to elect a woman; most voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016. But Republicans made men feel welcomed, explained Richard Reeves, who founded a think tank to study boys and men. Sometimes, it was with odious rhetoric about women (Trump’s sneering defiance at being found liable for sexual abuse, JD Vance denigrating women for pursuing careers). Mostly, though, it was vibes: fist-pumping bravado, rambling YouTube chats about crypto and golf. Republicans seemed to like men. They asked for their vote. And when they told men that Democrats didn’t care about them, the message landed. “Democrats didn’t see men as having problems,” Reeves quipped, “they saw them as being the problem.”

In this political environment, Ryan played up his strength. He was unapologetically male. He campaigned on various fights he’s picked—with the overcharging local utility company, with Wall Street investors driving up housing costs, and even with President Biden. Ryan publicly scolded the president about border security before urging him to suspend his campaign. None of this tough talk, Ryan told me, was explicitly calculated to appeal to men. But it did happen to speak to them.

Men have drifted away from institutions like government and higher education, from traditional media and vaccines. Ryan’s resonance with them, Buttigieg said, was “not about triangulating some position that's halfway more conservative than the typical Democrat”—it was more about seeming headstrong and independent and fiercely anti-elite. As Luntz put it, Ryan won by communicating “a down-to-earth, common-sensical approach to life, which is, ‘You fuck with me, or you fuck with my constituents, and I will fuck you back.’”

During Ryan’s second deployment, a roadside bomb in Mosul obliterated five guys in his unit. He still holds himself accountable, since he was on the team that sent them out. As the intelligence officer, he feels that he should have known better—that the road was too perilous to travel. “I still think about it often,” he said, “of the names and faces of the people we lost.”

Lots of American soldiers died because of what Ryan called a military-intelligence “boondoggle.” The military “was spending billions of dollars on software that was total crap”—that wasn’t properly informing officers about the intricacies of tribal alliances or historical patterns of roadside bombs. So when he got out of the Army, he moved to DC and worked at a string of defense-tech start-ups. He wanted to prevent catastrophes like the ones that dogged him in Iraq, to get better data into the hands of the military officers who make decisions about where to send their troops.

While Ryan worked in tech, he met his wife, they moved back to New York, and Donald J. Trump—whose dubious case of bone spurs spared him from serving in Vietnam—became the commander-in-chief of the United States military. It was “such a direct affront to all of the values I’ve tried to live my life by,” he said, to have a president who seemed “incapable of understanding what selfless service is.” Ryan had never been terribly political; he voted for Bush in 2000, then for Democrats thereafter. But on Memorial Day weekend in 2017, he wrote an email to his friends and family announcing his decision to run for Congress.

Ryan lost his first primary to Antonio Delgado, who’s now the lieutenant governor of New York. (“I had no clue what the fuck I was doing,” he said. “It ended up being one of the most competitive races in the country, so I did okay given that.”) Then, after a few years as a county executive, he won a congressional seat in 2022.

In an ad from that race, Ryan buckles what appears to be military gear—but when the camera zooms out, it’s a Baby Bjorn. For the next 20-some seconds, he bops around town with his baby strapped to his chest, meeting with constituents and business owners and cops. The messaging was canny, assuring more conservative voters that he didn’t threaten the traditional family, and liberal ones that he shared the load with his wife. But none of that, he told me, ever occurred to him; he just made “a very deliberate decision that we are going to be positive and normal and center who I am, which is, like, I'm kind of obsessed with my kids.”

Ryan often positions his parental achievements (reading hundreds of bedtime stories) as on par with his political ones (lowering property taxes, stemming the flow of illegal drugs). “I think it meets a lot of people where they are,” Buttigieg told me when I asked him why that works. More and more dads are deeply involved in the care of their children, he said, adding that “nothing—including running for president and serving in uniform—has demanded as much of me as having twin toddlers.” As we spoke, his kids babbled in the background of our call. He once muted the phone to adjudicate a dispute.

This generation of men, Reeves said, has been told by the right to be more like their fathers and the left to be more like their sisters—to either return to the heyday of patriarchy or apologize for their masculine traits. Given that choice, many lurch rightward, the option that at least affirms them. That’s what he likes about Ryan; he’s a guy who isn’t running from his masculinity, but expanding it. He’s strong and warm, tough and tender—a patriot, provider, protector, and nurturer. A blend of hard and soft.

In our interviews, the closest Ryan came to a roadmap for left-masculinity was actually a plea for balance. Good leadership, he said, requires a “mix of—and this is your language, not mine—but masculine and feminine, or toughness and care.” Leaders of any gender need to be willing to fight for what matters, but that fight has to come from a place of empathy and love, otherwise it’s a “morally devoid surface toughness” like what he sees from President Trump.

Republicans have grown excessively belligerent, Ryan said, while Democrats have gotten too soft, drowning in care and empathy that aren’t often backed by any teeth. “I think we need to show our fight more as Democrats,” he told me—not as a pretense to impress men, but to put muscle behind the party’s ideals. “Even if we don't succeed, we need to be clear that we're hearing you, that we know what you want us to fight for and we’re willing to get bloodied up.”

Ryan doesn’t have a grand plan for Democrats to win back men, but he does think his party should help them. Young men are struggling in school, flailing in the labor market, and killing themselves at shocking rates. In the past half-century, the US economy has bled male-skewed manufacturing jobs while growing in female-heavy sectors like teaching and nursing. For men, the conventional path to the American dream has narrowed, while for women it has finally grown.

That’s partly why Ryan’s top non-district priority right now is to craft a national service bill. It's been floated for decades—by both parties at different times—to engage young people in the future of their nation by funding an array of public-interest jobs. In Ryan's vision, that would include teachers, cops, firefighters, and physicians. A climate and conservation corps too. Basically, he hopes that young people—especially young men—might find what he had in the military: a sense that they belong, that their lives matter, that they can serve a greater good.

For a while, at the Army-Navy game, I was puzzled by why I was there. Ryan's team had proposed it, but I wasn't sure what they'd hoped I would see. Was it the bellowing? The brawling? The flyovers of Apaches and F18s? Maybe it was Ryan shouting "Beat Navy!" at the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. But actually, I think it was the cadets.

On the way to the field, I'd been caught in a flock of them—literally thousands—thronging the stadium concourse, about to march onto the field. They wore identical gray wool overcoats and flat hats with black brims, gold buttons and chevrons on their sleeves, the women’s hair braided and sprayed into buns. They jostled each other and laughed, took occasional calls on cracked phones. These were not disaffected young people, gaming and Redditing and failing to launch. They were training rigorously for a life of service, cultivating a disciplined and principled strength.

Ryan doesn’t want Democrats to be more like him. He doesn’t want the party to run tall, white, heterosexual veterans with two bronze stars and a contrarian streak. “What so many voters are feeling right now is an inauthenticity from politicians,” he said—so it would be the wrong approach to create a formula for winning back men, to take what worked in his district and copy-and-paste it somewhere else. If he has any playbook at all, it’s this: Democrats should find out what’s important to voters and then fight like hell on their behalf. He figures if his party did that, they’d do better not just with men, but with basically everyone.