We just had the first presidential election since the Dobbs decision erased the basic rights granted to women by Roe v. Wade. Now we face not only a calamity, but a mystery: How did the election that Democrats were going to win with a surge of support from women become the election Republicans won with a surge of support from men?

Going into the final weeks of the 2024 election, Democrats believed abortion rights were their ace in the hole: They would win on a wave of women voters, no matter what else might go wrong. There was a lot of evidence to bolster this theory. In every contest since President Trump put Justice Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in 2018—a move widely and correctly perceived as the death knell for Roe—angry and fearful women had carried Democrats to victory. After voters affirmed abortion rights in a 2022 upset in deep red Kansas, more and more Democratic candidates embraced their support for abortion rights as a mark of their commitment to American freedom. Festooning Harris-Walz rallies with reproductive freedom banners seemed like a no-brainer, appealing both to swing voters and a base fired up to elect their first female President.

That’s not what happened. Instead, while voters overwhelmingly supported most of the abortion rights ballot measures this November, Harris—the career champion of those rights—lost to Trump, who did away with them. Shifting exit polls are as much a hallmark of elections as the hand-wringing and finger-pointing of the losing team, but the current picture is jarring. White women voted for Trump at about the same levels as previous elections. The first woman of color in American history to be a major party’s presidential nominee appears to have lost ground with Latinas. Like their female counterparts, white men voted at margins comparable to 2020, and Black men’s support for the Democratic ticket dropped off only slightly. The biggest swings were a massive 35-point shift by Latino men toward Trump, according to CNN exit polls, and a 13-point shift to Trump by voters under 30, powered overwhelmingly by young men.

How the Trump campaign pulled off this victory—by sidestepping on abortion, redefining freedom, and aggressively courting men—not only explains what just happened. It tells us a lot about the state of the MAGA coalition and where they intend to go next.

Trump’s backers voted for him in spite of his position on abortion, not because of it. Support for abortion rights remains strong in this country, with men tracking only slightly behind women in how highly they rank their importance. Ballot measures strengthening abortion rights won in seven out of ten states the day Trump won the election, including in Missouri, where Trump won with over 58 percent of the vote.

Republicans have always been on the wrong side of history on the abortion issue, but they never paid a steep price for it until Roe fell and Democrats positioned themselves as freedom fighters against the tyranny of reproductive oppression. The Republicans would rob your freedom to decide, controlling your body and controlling your life. It was a message that not only worked on abortion; it effectively reclaimed the freedom flag for Democrats for the first time in decades.

Republicans quickly pivoted, preferring to cede ground on abortion rights than to cede power. As soon as they felt the fervor in the wake of the Dobbs decision, the party that had run on its pro-life purity since the Reagan era shifted to a new posture: neutral on the moral issue of abortion, but deeply committed to federalism. The architects of the fall of Roe—from President Trump to Mitch McConnell—declared their job complete when the issue was sent back to the states, where they asserted it belonged all along.

The ballot measures—while protecting women—ended up letting GOP candidates off the hook: Abortion rights were winning. Voters began to relax a bit. For good measure, GOP candidates on the front lines began to preemptively disavow the federal abortion ban that had been the holy grail of the pro-life wing of the party for decades. Even Senator Ted Cruz, once a stalwart of the movement, cast this commitment aside when his race to defend his Senate seat got tight. Others looked straight into the camera and swore to voters that they would not support such a proposal. Donald Trump—a businessman more than a true believer—said he wouldn’t sign one that reached his desk. The plan worked: In state after state where the ballot measures showed up, a significant number of voters split their tickets, voting for abortion rights and for Donald Trump.

Far from a bait and switch, this new posture is indicative of the reorganization of the GOP coalition ushered in by Trump’s upstart campaign in 2016. Trump needed the establishment right to win his first election, and he happily traded them his Supreme Court nominees for their support. The elites were mollified, elated even. This time, the situation has shifted: Trump’s dominance on the right is unquestioned, and the old hard-right rank and file also represent an increasingly smaller proportion of the electoral equation. The future of GOP power, Trump’s team sensed, lay elsewhere. Part of that future is a subset of Latino men and women who historically supported Democrats but are more comfortable with traditional masculinity and patriarchy. Another part is young men and the ecosystem of online influencers they grew up with.

The Trump campaign deeply internalized the seismic shift going on among men under 30. While young men are historically irreverent and comfortable with chaos, Gen Z cut its political teeth on endless wars punctuated by a global pandemic and racial justice uprisings that rocked the country. Millennial and Gen Z men went into COVID experiencing declines in educational outcomes, upended social status, and high rates of depression. They emerged from quarantine to record-high inflation, a bleak jobs outlook, and a vast surplus of time banked in online forums. There they discussed a liberal culture that had embraced an identity-based hierarchy of oppression that left them at the bottom and a #MeToo movement that many felt made them guilty until proven innocent.

Donald Trump offered a ready-made answer, blaming woke politics for their woes and recasting freedom as a fight for traditional masculinity and against a cancel culture that squashed free speech, and fun. These were familiar refrains for a generation raised on Barstool Sports. And pretty soon the campaign was powered by some of this generation’s biggest stars. In June 2024, Trump launched a full-court press into male-heavy digital media starting with Logan Paul’s show. He had the NELK Boys on stage at a rally; he played with a Cybertruck with Adin Ross on Kick, all with flags flying and anthems blaring. Democrats were bewildered, unfamiliar with most of these characters, and they dismissed these appearances as the fantastical flailings of a failing campaign.

By the time Joe Rogan endorsed Trump on the eve of the election, the die was cast. For these men, the election had become a referendum on the virtues of masculinity (and, by extension, patriarchy) rather than abortion. Early data shows young men favoring Trump by a staggering 14-point margin. When this all shakes out, we’re probably looking at the largest gender divergence in generations among voters in Gen Z.

Understanding that Trump’s second victory completed a long-coming transformation of the right-wing coalition is key to knowing where they are going next. In the MAGA era, Ralph Reed and Jerry Falwell Jr. have been replaced by Elon Musk and stand-up comic and podcaster Theo Von, and their priorities and predilections are very different from those of their predecessors. They’re channeling a voting bloc that cares less about religiosity than about social and economic realignment. Since the Trump Administration will be short on both ideas and incentives to address economic concerns, the red meat it will feed to the base will be that of scapegoating: immigrants are why you can’t have nice things, liberal elite universities have turned society against you, and anyone attempting to weed out hate speech and disinformation on online platforms is violating your fundamental freedom to information. In addition to some version of the mass deportation that was a cornerstone campaign promise, look for them to defund colleges and sue them for perceived violations, and to outlaw any kind of moderation of information flow, curbing efforts to neutralize the impact of disinformation and cognitive warfare on our politics. This is the “freedom” they seek.

They proclaimed that the chokehold of the censorious left had been broken and men were free to be men again. And no doubt this will lead to both social and policy excesses. In red states where the old guard still reigns, there will still be attacks on abortion and no-fault divorce, and other efforts to keep women in line. It’s tempting to write off young male Trump voters as an irredeemable cohort of incels raised by 4chan, and in fact, many on social media seem poised to judge them by their most toxic elements. Which is precisely what internet trolls and Trump supporters like self-styled white supremacist Nick Fuentes achieved when they got “Your Body, My Choice” trending in the 24 hours after Harris’s defeat. The more we write young men off, the easier it becomes to radicalize them.

But the influencers of a generation are not a monolith. It was Jake Paul, another hypermasculine man for Trump, who smacked down Fuentes’s jeers immediately, saying, “Stop creating more hate and division when you know that shit isn’t true.” It’s critical to highlight those voices—and recognize others inside that coterie that serve as a bulwark against the worst manifestations of Trumpism—while we build our own inclusive base. Liberals and progressives won’t align on many core values with this dissenting faction inside MAGA, but surviving the next four years is going to be an exercise in making common cause among people who have divergent views on many policies and principles—and may not even like each other—but agree on the need to beat back authoritarianism. For liberals to seize power from the movement organized around Trump, we’re going to have to offer a more pluralistic view of the future, not just to the young men who have defected in the face of perceived hostility, but to many voters who have rejected an approach to political power-building grounded predominantly in disparate identity rather than shared, common experience. The good news is that when we do, we have a majority of Americans who agree with us about a lot more than the right to decide about abortion. We own the future freedom of our country.