Democrats keep saying they want a dude. What about Mamdani?

After two successive women lost the race for president — and with the GOP increasingly claiming the testosterone-fueled “manosphere” — a lot of Democratic insiders are starting to worry the party is a bit too low-T. Even its successful new faces, like Jon Ossoff and James Talarico, might still be too soft. (This might explain why a recent Instagram post from @Democrats showed Talarico gnawing on meat.)

They’re racked with anxiety: Where are the masculine Democrats? They believe American voters need a manly man, someone who isn’t “smoothgroined,” who can drink beer and watch video games and eat a hamburger and have sex without a condom, who “has the solid physicality of a man who makes his living outdoors,” who will bring young men back into the Democratic fold. They want a bro.

But wait: Actually, the newest icon of Democratic power fits that bill almost exactly. He’s a Carhartt-wearing, marathon-running, fully bearded dude who loves to chow down. He’s obsessed with the Knicks and recently made a basketball-themed campaign ad. When he was campaigning last year, he toured the edgy “manosphere” podcast world and easily traded riffs about bench pressing and shitposting. Analysts describe his politics using testosterone-forward metaphors like “muscled,” “power broker,” and “kingmaker.”

This is, of course, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani — who’s able to go one-on-one with President Donald Trump, wears the hell out of a suit, and channels the populist energy of Bernie-bro politics more effectively than anyone else under 80. “His vision, whether you like it or not, is incredibly bold and in your face,” which is a traditionally masculine attribute, says Pawan Dhingra, a sociologist at Amherst College.

“Zohran’s a good hang,” streaming star and certified bro Hasan Piker said of Mamdani in a 2025 interview with the New York Times. “He’s just a dude, and it’s good to be a dude sometimes.”

So, why isn’t Mamdani the Democrats’ new icon of masculinity?

Instead, the pro-masculinity discussion has mostly held up Graham Platner, the controversial Democratic nominee for Maine’s Senate seat, as the butch future of the party. Ken Klippenstein approvingly described Platner as “tatted up, ex-Marine riff-raff” in contrast to the “asexual, Harvard-educated McKinsey consultant” he feels represents the classic Democratic machine candidate. Sebastian Junger wrote that Platner “doesn’t scan ‘Democrat’” (a good thing, in Junger’s estimation) because he “might be the only Democratic candidate or congressman I wouldn’t want to mess with.” James Carville, who has been vocal in his belief that Democrats’ image is too feminine and naggy, mused that while Platner might be “fucked up” from his time at war, perhaps “we need a combat veteran right on that Senate floor who is fucked up.”

But while Platner hasn’t yet proved he can win in a general election, Mamdani has. What’s more, he’s achieved that misty goal Democrats are always chasing: He’s proved he’s able to connect with men and with Trump voters while also energizing the Democratic base. In the 2025 New York City mayoral election, registration surged, general election turnout hit a 50-year high, and exit polls showed that he picked up a solid half of the male vote — more than any other candidate — as well as 9 percent of 2024 Trump voters. Earlier this week, Mamdani’s get-out-the-vote effort helped push three Democratic Socialists of America allies through their primaries, in a clear demonstration of his political might.

Mamdani and Platner are both highly masculine figures. They both have populist platforms. And they’ve both run as party outsiders (and one of them has won a general election). So why does only one of them keep showing up in think pieces about why Democrats need to embrace and appeal to men?

The real issue, Dhingra says, is that when people talk about getting men to vote Democrat, “there’s a male vote and there’s a masculine vote.” Those are two different things.

The male vote is what we can confidently say Mamdani won in 2025. The masculine vote is what pundits are talking about when they say Democrats need to win over men, and that is a lot more vibes-based.

“We have a notion of masculinity that’s kind of white, middle-working-class, muscular, patriarchal to some degree,” Dhingra says. When they’re talking about the masculine vote, political commentators and strategists look for evidence of that specifically white masculinity, even if they don’t say that outright.

Platner, with his military background, his embrace of guns, and his career in manual labor, fits that white working-class image, despite having a wealthy family. Cosmopolitan Mamdani, who attended a private liberal arts college and was a campus activist and a comedy rapper in his youth, does not. Even his love of sports is a little off, Dhringa says. Mamdani is a soccer guy, and in the United States, soccer is coded as suspiciously European. “The fact that it’s sports but it’s not like that is a metaphor,” Dhringa says. “He’s getting the male vote, but he’s not masculine.”

Dhringa, the author of the forthcoming book Success Won’t Save Us: How Asian Americans Can Fight White Supremacy, sees this issue as part of a bigger pattern. “We’ve consistently reduced masculinity to white maleness and femininity to white femaleness,” he says. Outside of politics, conversations about the crisis of masculinity tend to focus on the problems affecting white guys, like high rates of suicide. “We’re only talking about the plight of white men,” Dhingra says. “Does anyone even know about the friendship experiences of Black men? No. We know that white men suffer from this.”

Dhringra points to mass incarceration, which disproportionately affects Black men and is overwhelmingly talked about as a race problem. “It was not a crisis of manhood,” he says of these discussions. “But now that more white men are ending up in jail or showing these other negative social indicators, now we have a crisis of manhood.”

It’s certainly possible that at least part of this disconnect is about Mamdani and Platner’s policies. To some of the commentators who are deeply concerned about Democratic masculinity, especially Carville, support for Israel is a requirement. But Mamdani has repeatedly reiterated his belief in Israel’s right to exist, and Platner, who opposes sending US aid to Israel (and wore a Nazi tattoo for years), is not exactly Israel’s staunchest ally. And Carville’s concerns are not universal: Klippenstein, another Platner fan, has been enthusiastic about Mamdani’s “magic” — just not necessarily about his dudeliness.

And while Mamdani’s criticism of Israel might trouble some Democrats, it speaks to the younger generation of voters Democrats are theoretically trying to woo. In contrast, Platner’s campaign has been plagued by one scandal after another, including allegations of “unsettling” behavior with ex-girlfriends. His partisans argue that such a grimy past adds to his real dude cred — but it remains a weak spot for a party that still relies on women to power its voting bloc, regardless of how much effort it’s putting into courting men.

Calling all political weaknesses (generously) even, it’s more likely that race is playing a role in the Mamdani paradox. But Dhringa says Mamdani’s mysterious absence from the masculinity conversation has more to do with his general not-whiteness than with his specific Indian heritage and Ugandan upbringing. Dhringa says that 20 years ago, South Asian American men were overwhelmingly stereotyped as nerdy and effeminate, but their image now is more complicated. He cites a plethora of powerful South Asian American CEOs like Google and Alphabet’s Sundar Pichai, as well as political figures like Mamdani for the Democrats and Kash Patel for Republicans.

“Twenty years ago I had a pretty simple answer I would give” on how Americans view South Asian men, he says. “Now I don’t.”

Vox reached out to Carville and Klippenstein for comment and did not hear back from them. Junger declined to comment.

Ultimately, the manliness conversation has other downsides: It also flattens masculinity into one violent, unintellectual stereotype. “Masculinity has different dimensions to it, and one person never embodies all the dimensions,” Dhringa says. Manly men don’t have to be as solitary and withholding as John Wayne in an old Western. They can be leaders who use their masculine charisma to connect with and protect other people.

That’s the kind of manliness Mamdani represents. Democrats have the opportunity to embrace him as an avatar of the party, to try to leverage his confidence and swagger to boost other candidates, to learn from the strategies he’s employed to connect with the base they’re looking to cultivate. They have the opportunity to look for and cultivate talent in other Mamdanis: men who might not fit the white working-class profile, but who do know how to hang with the dudes when they have to.