In this episode, I sit down with Charlie Sabgir to unpack the "unprecedented gender gap" facing Gen Z. We dive into new research concerning the economic and social behaviors of young men—from the "gamification" of their finances through crypto and sports betting to their surprising nostalgia for unions and traditional stability. The conversation explores why the "manosphere" is winning the narrative war by offering concrete (if sometimes toxic) life advice, and how a positive reframing of masculinity—centered on serving the community—might be the key to re-engaging a generation that feels politically apathetic and economically "screwed."

Charlie Sabgir is the Program Director for the Young Men Research Project, a research organization that studies the political and social trends among young men. He also writes for the Young Men Research Initiative Substack.

Follow their work and read their research here: https://www.ymrp.org/polling

Subscribe to the substack here: https://youngmenresearchinitiative.substack.com

Key Topics & Takeaways:

• The Crypto Paradox: Why holding crypto and sports betting isn't just for the "basement dweller"—it’s becoming a "middle finger to the system" for employed, high-earning young men who feel traditional wealth-building tools (like 401ks) are too slow.

• The Craving for Stability: Unlike the "hustle culture" pitched to Millennials, Gen Z men are showing a strong preference for the stability of unions and apprenticeships over the uncertainty of internships and college debt.

• The AI Gender Gap: Men are approaching AI with excitement and frequent use, while young women report significantly higher levels of anxiety regarding the technology.

• Redefining "Toughness": Message testing reveals that young men respond much better to masculinity defined as "fighting for your community" and "uplifting those around you" (+21 points) than they do to "anti-woke" grievance rhetoric.

• Political Apathy vs. Engagement: Why young men are less likely to vote than women, and why successful campaigns are using "fun" community events (like scavenger hunts or UFC watch parties) to bridge the gap.

Stay in Touch

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter at crosstabspodcast.com for new episodes, insights, and behind-the-scenes content.

📹 Watch video episodes on YouTube @CrosstabsPodcast

💬 Follow us on BlueSky: @crosstabspod.bsky.social and @farrahbostic.bsky.social

📍 Produced by The Difference Engine

📨 You can also email me directly at farrah@crosstabspodcast.com

It's likely that Democrats will retake the House this fall. But the most important question for a new majority is this: what will they use the power for?

This conversation is part of an ongoing series of interviews and explorations I plan to do this year trying to answer a slightly modified version of that question - what should the power be for?

One answer to that question is paid leave for all. In 1993, the Clinton Administration and a Democratic-controlled Congress passed FMLA - the Family and Medical Leave Act, protecting workers with unpaid family leave. Since then, paid leave has become steadily more and more popular, and very nearly passed during the Biden Administration.

Our guest this week is Dawn Huckelbridge, the founding director of Paid Leave for All and founder of Paid Leave PAC. With a career spanning gender policy, political organizing, and communications, she has successfully built and led campaigns to advance paid leave and gender equity across the country.

We discussed what's at stake, their approach to getting The Family Act passed, what they've learned in their polling about support for paid family leave from across the socioeconomic spectrum, how states are leading, and what the movement is up against.

Our Guest

Dawn Huckelbridge is the founding director of Paid Leave for All, a position she has held since 2019. With a career spanning gender policy, political organizing, and communications, she has successfully built and led campaigns to advance paid leave and gender equity across the country.

Previously, Dawn served as Communications Director for Supermajority during its launch and Senior Director of the Women’s Rights Initiative at American Bridge. During the 2016 election cycle, she served as Coordinated Program Director for Community Outreach Group at Planned Parenthood Action Fund, where she directed a team to execute the organization’s largest coordinated campaigns in battleground states. Dawn has also held senior roles with People For the American Way, the Center for Women Policy Studies, and the Barbara Lee Family Foundation and Political Office.

She holds a master’s degree in gender and social policy from the London School of Economics and Political Science and a bachelor’s degree in communications and political science from Northwestern University. Her background in political and issue communications includes work with GMMB and various political and public interest projects. Dawn founded the Paid Leave PAC in 2022 and has served on the boards of several organizations, including Emerge Massachusetts, Family Values @ Work Action, and the DC Abortion Fund.

Dawn’s expertise and leadership have earned her publications in outlets such as Newsweek, The Hill, The Nation, Glamour, and Marie Claire, and she has appeared on radio and network and cable TV.

Further Reading

"Americans Widely Support Paid Family and Medical Leave, but Differ Over Specific Policies" via Pew Research, March 2017

"New Poll Finds Strong Small Business Support for Paid Family and Medical Leave Policies" via National Partnership for Women & Families and Lake Research, October 2024

1. More poll findings here:

Cross Tabs End Notes

The hardest thing to do in polling it seems is to accurately guess who the voters will be. Pollsters get better and better at weighting samples to more accurately reflect observable characteristics of voters, which is why the forecasts keep getting close to the center of the bullseye. But there are still these harder to observe characteristics that it's almost impossible to model... unless you can figure out what they are.

So here's an idea - what if, instead of just throwing up our hands, we found a way to poll people who don't want to be polled?

Kabir Khanna of CBS News did just that - and he came on to talk to me all about what they did, and what they learned.

About the Guest

Kabir Khanna, Ph.D., is Director, Election Analytics & Technical Systems at CBS News. He produces stories on elections, polling, and politics, making sure they are based on best practices and innovations in quantitative social science. He ensures surveys and statistical estimates are representative and accurate, and breaks down results on air. On election nights, he projects races for the network and manages the Data Desk, generating insights into the electorate in real time, as well as estimates of turnout, how ballots are cast, and key voter groups.

Stuff We Talked About

"The voters Mamdani added to the Democratic coalition in New York: CBS News analysis"

"1 year in, Americans call for more inflation focus from Trump, CBS News poll finds"

Polling at a Crossroads, by Michael Bailey

Stay in Touch

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter at crosstabspodcast.com for new episodes, insights, and behind-the-scenes content.

📹 Watch video episodes on YouTube @CrosstabsPodcast

💬 Follow us on BlueSky: @crosstabspod.bsky.social and @farrahbostic.bsky.social

📍 Produced by The Difference Engine

📨 You can also email me directly at farrah@crosstabspodcast.com

We're living in a time ruled by old men.

And honestly, it's not going great. The richest, most powerful men on the planet - billionaires and political leaders alike - are well over 70, on average.

Meanwhile, young people are suffering from the high cost of living, unaffordable housing, high consumer debt, and political unrest.

Based on recent polling, they're not happy.

The right has made a long term investment in their political goals. The left has not.

That's where Amanda Litman and her organization, Run for Something come in - helping to get people under 40 elected to local office. They've been incredibly successful, and are now focused on battleground states and other places in which Democrats have historically underinvested, as well as encouraging renters to run for office.

Amanda Litman is the co-founder and president of Run for Something, which recruits and supports young, diverse progressives running for down-ballot office. Since launching in 2017, RFS has elected more than 1500 leaders across nearly all 50 states, mostly women and people of color.

She’s also president of RFS Civics, a 501c3 that works to end the gerontocracy.

She is also the author of Run for Something: A Real-Talk Guide to Fixing the System Yourself, published by Atria in 2017. Her new book, When We’re in Charge: The Next Generation’s Guide to Leadership, came out in May 2025 from Crooked Media Reads.

"Dems Struggle to Make Their Moderates Go Viral" by Lauren Egan in The Bulwark

"The Voters Who Have Taken a U-Turn on Trump" by Nate Cohn of The New York Times

1. Cross tabs from their study with Siena College

"Run for Something Launches Battle Up Strategy"

"Run for Something Mobilizes Renters to Run for Office"

"How Aftyn Behn Shattered Expectations in a Deep Red District"

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter at crosstabspodcast.com for new episodes, insights, and behind-the-scenes content.

📹 Watch video episodes on YouTube @CrosstabsPodcast

💬 Follow us on BlueSky:

There's an unreality about this political moment. It makes it hard to hold people's attention, to create any kind of focus on any issue or event or action. People don't know what's real, what's certain, what's not just for dumb show.

And that is both by design, and the output, of totalitarian thinking. Aesthetics are ever-present in politics - the color of a suit, or whether someone even wears one can fill a news cycle and constitute a scandal. Fascist and authoritarian ideologies are aesthetic all the way down. They are both authentically held by people who can not tolerate discomfort with themselves, other people, the way things are, or the way things seem to be headed... and they are a convenient cover for people who have real material goals and know that spectacle will dazzle people long enough for them to get away with just about anything.

And this has me obsessing about one of my favorite books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and working through it in a conversation with Cy Canterel, a feral scholar, TikToker, and writer who thinks a lot about systems, aesthetics, sense-making, and how it all works.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's killing, I reached out to Cy to talk about kitsch - something she has written about, and about her concept of a Hater's Discourse, and how this might explain the moment we're currently in.

And then I revisited some of that conversation after the incursion into Venezuela and the murder of Renee Nicole Good. It felt like the right time to talk about this, given that it seems like we're all struggling with how to reckon with real things that seem fake.

Some links for your enjoyment:

Cy's piece on Kitsch: https://open.substack.com/pub/cybelecanterel/p/lost-in-the-kingdom-of-kitsch

Cy's piece on the Hater's Discourse: https://cybelecanterel.substack.com/p/a-haters-discourse

Cy's video on Blackpill Aesthetics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wcw02sEslog

Ryan Broderick's piece on Garbage Day, "The Rise of the Troll State": https://www.garbageday.email/p/the-rise-of-the-troll-state

Don Moynihan's piece on Can We Still Govern?, "Life Under a Clicktocracy": https://donmoynihan.substack.com/p/life-under-a-clicktatorship

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter at crosstabspodcast.com for new episodes, insights, and behind-the-scenes content.

📹 Watch video episodes on YouTube @CrosstabsPodcast

💬 Follow us on BlueSky: @crosstabspod.bsky.social and @farrahbostic.bsky.social

📍 Produced by The Difference Engine

📨 You can also email me directly at farrah@crosstabspodcast.com

Conor Kilgore is a producer of The Focus Group Podcast, and a qualitative researcher at Longwell Partners - and he joined host Farrah Bostic to discuss the value of listening to real people talk about their real beliefs and experiences in their own words. And he brought clips! We also discussed his journey into this work via work on political campaigns, and got as deep into the weeds as possible on how they do what they do.

Subscribe to The Bulwark here: https://www.thebulwark.com

Subscribe to The Focus Group Podcast here: https://www.thebulwark.com/s/thefocusgroup

Find out more about Longwell Partners here: https://www.longwellpartners.com

And find out more about Conor here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/conorkilgore/

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter at crosstabspodcast.com for new episodes, insights, and behind-the-scenes content.

📹 Watch video episodes on YouTube @CrosstabsPodcast

💬 Follow us on BlueSky: @crosstabspod.bsky.social and @farrahbostic.bsky.social

📍 Produced by The Difference Engine

📨 You can also email me directly at farrah@crosstabspodcast.com

Keeping up our monthly Mood Swings discussion of polling and political strategy news that enrages, confuses, and inspires, host Farrah Bostic and guest Lauren Goldstein discuss the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll, which explores American voters' opinions on a wide range of current events. We discussed the question types, answer options, and interpretation of the fairly extensive data - and beg researchers to remember how important it is to provide respondents with 'not sure' or 'don't care' or 'never heard of it' options to gauge true public sentiment.

We also talked about how brands deal with trends or issues that might be salient - but also controversial.

And this month's What's Good focused on the power of satire, humor, and fighting content with content.

Our Guest

Lauren Goldstein is the lead advocacy pollster for Change Research and holds a PhD from UCLA with ten years of experience as a public opinion researcher and social scientist. She has done extensive research and polling on issues related to racial justice (and injustice), criminal legal reform and police divestment, immigration, and reproductive rights. She is the author of the Mind the Gap newsletter.

What we were talking about was...

• Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll December 2025 - https://harvardharrispoll.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/HHP_Dec2025_KeyFindings.pdf
• Jordan Klepper Fingers the Pulse: Give the Man a Prize - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JdvSonnYw-E
• "The hidden axis: the left-right spectrum has a non-ideology problem" by G. Elliott Morris, Strength in Numbers - https://www.gelliottmorris.com/p/not-just-left-vs-right-most-voters

📬 Subscribe to our newsletter at crosstabspodcast.com for new episodes, insights, and behind-the-scenes content.

📹 Watch video episodes on YouTube @CrosstabsPodcast

💬 Follow us on BlueSky: @crosstabspod.bsky.social and @farrahbostic.bsky.social

📍 Produced by The Difference Engine

Farrah is joined by Kevin Collins, co-founder and Chief Research Officer at Survey 160, about the applicability of AI in survey methodologies, the perils of synthetic sample, and the importance of respondent preferences when it comes to survey mode and the respondent experience. We discussed Kevin's findings in some early explorations of available tools about the impact on data quality, the potential role of AI in coding open-ended survey responses, and where there might be opportunity for AI tools to support but not replace human expertise.

We also explored an issue we both have some opinions about - the concept of 'popularism' in political campaigning, how it intersects with different styles of persuasion, and how it influences other decision-making in how campaigns roll out messaging.

Our Guest

Kevin Collins is co-founder and Chief Research Office at Survey 160, a polling firm working to make SMS-based survey collection a staple mode of research to help fuel progressive campaigns. Survey 160 works with high-profile political campaigns at both the national and state level, as well as advocacy organizations and other groups working for a brighter future. You can connect with him on Bluesky @kwcollins.bsky.social or through their website at https://www.survey160.com/

Read their work on AI in survey methods here: The Limits of Simulation in Public Opinion Research

Other Sources Mentioned

• Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples, by Argyle et al
• Predicting Results of Social Science Experiments Using Large Language Models, by Hewitt et al
• Synthetic Replacements for Human Survey Data? The Perils of Large Language Models, by Bisbee et al
• Do AIs know what the most important issue is? Using language models to code open-text social survey responses at scale, by Mellon et al
• Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrieval, by Du et al
• Does AI Actually Boost Developer Productivity? (100k Devs Study) - Yegor Denisov-Blanch, Stanford [video]
• Does accommodation work? Mainstream party strategies and the success of radical right parties,...