The Democratic Party's widely ridiculed campaign to spend $20 million on a "strategic plan" to "study young men" was spearheaded by the former president of a left-wing activist group that supported efforts to "defund the police," denounced the Supreme Court nomination of "frat boy" Brett Kavanaugh, and attacked "white women" for upholding "the patriarchy."

Politico reports that Ilyse Hogue, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America (now known as Reproductive Freedom for All), cofounded the Speaking with American Men project, or SAM for short, along with MSNBC contributor John Della Volpe and former Democratic congressman Colin Allred. In an interview with the Virginia-based news blog, Hogue argued the widespread mockery of the group's efforts, which include "super charg[ing] social listening" and analyzing the "syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality" in male online communities, proved that they were on the right track.

"Democrats are seen as weak, whereas Republicans are seen as strong," Hogue said. "Young men also spoke of being invisible to the Democratic coalition, and so you've got this weak problem and then you’ve got this 'I don’t think they care about me' problem, and I think the combination is kind of a killer."

Hogue, a professional left-wing activist who worked at groups such as Media Matters, MoveOn.Org, and Greenpeace before joining NARAL in 2013, is perhaps uniquely ill-suited to the task of helping Democrats win back male voters. In July 2024, for example, when her activist husband helped organize the widely mocked "White Dudes for Harris" fundraiser, Hogue was initially skeptical, but eventually came to see it as "sexy." (It was not.)

NARAL, which Hogue led until 2021, routinely endorses unpopular left-wing policies it says are necessary to advance the cause of reproductive freedom, and often deploys the sort of academic jargon most American men would find ridiculous. "We have to meet this moment by dismantling the systems of oppression that are still so entrenched in society," NARAL wrote on social media in April 2021. "We have to defund the police. We have to achieve racial justice. We have to end the Black maternal mortality crisis. Reproductive freedom won't be possible until we do."

NARAL, which supported efforts to defund the police as recently as May 2024, has also lobbied Congress to extend Medicaid benefits to illegal immigrants, attacked "white women" as bad feminists who "uphold the patriarchy," and denounced the "culture of white supremacy" in the United States that must be dismantled along with other "structures of oppression that prevent us from ever reaching true reproductive freedom." As president of the organization, Hogue organized protests opposing Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the Supreme Court. "We'll be DAMNED if we're going to let five MEN—including some frat boy named Brett—strip us of our hard-won bodily autonomy and reproductive rights," NARAL wrote in 2018, several weeks before Christine Blasey Ford claimed (without compelling evidence) that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the early 1980s.

Hogue's personal views appear to be no less extremist than the views espoused by NARAL. "When I talked to people, I’m usually the most radical person in the room," Media Matters president Angelo Carusone said in 2017. "I don’t feel like that when I talk to Ilyse." As a Greenpeace activist in 1999, she was arrested and briefly jailed during the infamous "Battle for Seattle" protests against the World Trade Organization. In recent years, Hogue has posted on social media about how "climate deniers share a common bond with misogynists," and defended woke terminology such as "pregnant people" and people who menstruate" for promoting "accuracy, not controversy" because "[f]ighting for trans rights is mutually reinforcing with fighting for women's rights." In August 2020, Hogue said she was "proud" to have signed a letter urging Congress to "divest from policing and invest in black and brown communities." She pals around with Linda Sarsour, the left-wing activist who has been widely condemned for her anti-Semitic views.

The activist's Instagram account is rife with obnoxious left-wing memes and punditry. On Mother's Day in 2018, she posted a reminder that the holiday was "founded by a radical feminist, activist, and suffragette," and urging her followers to celebrate by "owning the power of all women." She has compared the anti-American football activist Colin Kaepernick to civil rights icon Rosa Parks, and repeatedly expressed her admiration for the late Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who described Kaepernick's refusal to stand for the national anthem as "dumb and disrespectful."

On Hogue's watch, SAM has been using its enormous budget to hold focus groups with young men who have outlined the (obvious) reasons why Democrats are hemorrhaging support among their demographic. For example, a man of the racial identity formerly known (by Democrats) as Latinx complained that Kamala Harris focused on, "Oh, I got Beyoncé on stage with me. Oh, I got Lady Gaga on stage," and "it just kind of felt like, what does that have to do with me? I'm trying to move up in life."

Kamala Harris won just 42 percent of the male vote in 2024, the lowest figure on record.