The Growing Political Divide Between America’s Young Men and Women
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American factories are losing steam and bracing themselves for a downturn. And the U.S. is running out of generic drug makers, causing shortages of some vitally important medications. Plus,

The political divide between American men and women under 30 is growing deeper, adding a new twist to the 2024 presidential race. The biggest shift is happening on the young men's side. They're rapidly moving to the right. And in fact, you're seeing a complete flip from where they were in 2020. It's Monday, July 29th. I'm Francesca Fontana for The Wall Street Journal. This is the PM edition of What's News, the top headlines and business stories that move the world today.

After a post-COVID boom, U.S. manufacturers are bracing for a downturn. The companies that make long-lasting items like your car and washing machine, tractors, and other industrial equipment are expecting falling demand and rising inventories. They face higher interest rates, rising operating costs, a strengthening U.S. dollar, and lower selling prices for commodities. And executives are prepared for these challenging business conditions to last through the rest of the year. Reporter Bob Tita joins us to explain.

Bob, what are we seeing from manufacturers? We're seeing conditions that show weakening demand across the board in many sectors.

A lot of companies are still doing pretty well with inter-earnings, but the outlook is for weakening demand, slower markets. A lot of companies have already started cutting costs. Some have started laying people off. So it's probably going to be a weaker second half for a lot of companies.

The pandemic was initially was like a big shock because everything just stopped and it was like the the economy that the plug got pulled on it and everything just kind of ground to a halt. The expectation was it would take a long time to get the engine back running again. In reality, it came back really fast.

But it seems like the momentum from that has started to drain out, particularly because prices are higher because of inflation and interest rates are higher because of just to try and cool down that inflation. So it's more expensive if you're buying some kind of item on credit. Who's getting the worst of it?

Well, certainly one of them is like farm equipment, tractors, combines, planters, commodity prices for corn, soybeans, that sort of thing are lower. So that means that farmers have less money to buy new equipment. So that's one weak spot. You know, some other commodity markets, things like steel, for example, was very inflated a few years ago.

And that's kind of worked itself out. And the market has been quite weak for several months now. And some of the other areas that, you know, we think about more consumer discretionary type purchases, you know, people are spending money on other things right now. And the interest rates for that kind of purchase are pretty pricey, too. Is

Is this downturn affecting all manufacturers equally? There are still parts of manufacturing that are still pretty good, particularly anybody that is exposed to the sort of energy industry, things like, you know, data centers, energy infrastructure. Those businesses are doing quite well. These mega factories to build semiconductors, that's still a pretty hot area for

for manufacturers. So it's not universally going down, but certain parts of it are definitely losing momentum. That was reporter Bob Tita. Parts of the U.S. pharmaceutical industry are also struggling.

Prices for generic medicines have dropped so low that it's become nearly impossible for American drug makers to compete with foreign companies. One after another, generic drug manufacturers in the U.S. have been going bankrupt, moving their operations overseas, or cutting the number of products they offer. That's contributing to drug shortages, including some crucial drugs, like the antibiotic amoxicillin.

Our retail editor, Jennifer Maloney, spoke with WSJ reporter Liz Esley-White. Liz, how big is the drug shortage problem?

We actually peaked on the number of drug shortages since we started recording in the early 2000s this spring when we had about 323 ongoing or new drug shortages, according to the American Society of Health System Pharmacists. So this has kind of become an ongoing and desperate problem, really, for a lot of hospitals not being able to get the drugs they need.

You profiled a U.S. manufacturer of amoxicillin. It has gone through bankruptcy and is still struggling to break even. Why has it been so hard for this company to stay afloat? This plant in Tennessee has gone through a number of owners. Each one has faced kind of dark times ever since the patent for the amoxicillin they're making expired and generic competitors entered the scene.

Part of the problem is the generic competitors overseas can just offer such low prices. And antibiotics are particularly difficult to make, and so they're particularly difficult to compete as well with these overseas makers who have lower labor costs and lower production costs. How would boosting American manufacturing of generic drugs help

prevent drug shortages? Part of our problem is that our supply chain is so strung out and fragmented globally right now. So for some drugs, you're getting ingredients from China, that they're then going to India, and maybe they're being mostly made in India, but maybe they're repackaged here. But basically, we're dependent on other nations that a lot of

And there's very few suppliers for some of these ingredients or some of these drugs. So there's a lot of choke points. So because of those weaknesses, it doesn't take much really for a drug shortage to impact American patients. Many hospital chief executives say they support buying U.S. drugs, but it's still hard for this amoxicillin manufacturer that you profiled, U.S. Antibiotics, to get hospital contracts. Why is that?

That's because hospitals don't always play the decisive role in what drugs they buy. They contract that job out to often a group purchasing organization that's trying really just to get the best deal possible. There are a few things that those GPOs can look at besides price, but people in the industry say that the main thing they're looking at is price. So

So even if a hospital has a very strong commitment to buying American, just the way things roll out, they may not be able to actually implement that. In addition, there is a lack of kind of information about sustainability and resilience in the supply chains and which manufacturers are less likely to have production problems.

The FDA is trying to develop some quality measures to fix that. But yeah, a lot of the problem comes down to buyers are buying based on price alone and not based on any other factors. That was WSJ reporter Liz Esley White speaking with our colleague Jennifer Maloney. Coming up, what's driving American men under 30 away from the Democratic Party? And what does it mean for the 2024 election? That's after the break.

Robert Half Research indicates 9 out of 10 hiring managers are having difficulty hiring. Robert Half is here to help. Our recruiting professionals utilize our proprietary AI to connect businesses with highly skilled talent. At Robert Half, we know talent. Visit roberthalf.com today. A new wild card is at play in the U.S. presidential election. The growing gender divide among voters under 30.

This political fault line is pushing young men and women into opposing camps, according to merged Wall Street Journal polls over the last year and data from the 2020 AP VoteCast voter survey. A majority of men under 30 are aligning with the right to support former President Donald Trump and the GOP, while women under 30 strongly favor Democrats. White House reporter Andrew Restuccia joins me now.

Andrew, what kind of shifts are we seeing in the politics of men and women under 30? We're seeing some major shifts. The biggest one is that young men, 18 to 29, are moving to the right in a big way. So young men backed Trump in a merger of journal polls over the last year by about 14 points. And that's a huge shift from 2020 when they backed Biden by 15 points.

Young women, on the other hand, are backing Biden by about 30 points. And that's more or less unchanged from 2020. So what you're seeing is, you know, women embracing Biden and embracing progressive democratic values and men moving to the right. What's driving these changes? Well,

Well, there are a couple of things. There's sort of political and cultural factors at play. What we found is that men and women under 30 have vastly different views on a number of issues, from abortion to climate change to student loan forgiveness to tax cuts to Obamacare appeal to transgender issues. You name it, basically. There are 30 or 40 point, sometimes 20 to 25 point swings on the way young men view these things and the way young women view these things.

And at the same time, there are a bunch of economic factors. Women are going to college at much higher rates than men. In certain cities, young women are now outpacing young men in median annual income. Women are more likely than young men to live apart from their parents. And a larger share of women under 30 are reaching financial independence compared with 40 years ago. And that's not the case for men. Fewer young men are reaching that same milestone compared to four decades ago.

What we detected in our interviews with men and women is on the men's side, a real sort of resentment and a feeling like they're being left behind. Women, on the other hand, feel a real sense of worry that the progress that they say they've made over the last 10, 20 years could be stripped away, particularly when it comes to issues like abortion. And so you have two very different but equally motivated genders that could make a big difference in this upcoming election.

What does that mean for the 2024 election? Voters under 30 have supported Democrats since at least Ronald Reagan left office in 1989. And that could change if young men defect from the party en masse. So it could be a huge shift. We have a new likely Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris. And she has very much so leaned into the same policy agenda that President Biden was pushing before that.

Things like child care and paid parental leave that appeal, you know, they appeal to a large group, but they're less likely to appeal to young single men in particular. And Trump, on the other hand, is leaning really heavy into these sort of culture war issues that have gained a lot of traction in certain circles.

on right-wing blogs and other places. And he's even had Hulk Hogan and the head of the UFC, Dana White, and Kid Rock, and these sort of very testosterone-fueled displays, not only in his rallies, but also at the Republican National Convention. And so you're seeing two very different pictures from these two candidates, and we'll have to sort of wait and see how it all plays out. That was political reporter Andrew Restuccia.

From heat waves to flooding rains, there's been a lot of extreme weather this summer. How have you been affected by extreme weather? And what questions do you have about what companies are doing to counter those effects? Send a voice memo to WNPOD at WSJ.com or leave a voicemail with your name and location at 212-416-4328. We might use it on the show.

Consumers are losing their appetite for McDonald's. The American fast food giant said its quarterly same-store sales were down nearly 1 percent, its first drop since 2020.

The company has been seeing lower-income consumers pull back since last year, but McDonald's CEO Chris Kempczynski said that now the slowdown has deepened and it's broadened across the U.S. and other major markets. He also said that many people are choosing to eat at home because grocery prices have become less expensive than dining at restaurants.

The results from McDonald's serve as a warning for the broader restaurant industry and kick off a string of quarterly reports from U.S. chains this week for investors to digest. And that's What's News for this Monday afternoon. Today's show was produced by Pierre Bien-Aimé and Anthony Bansi with supervising producer Michael Kosmitas. I'm Francesca Fontana for The Wall Street Journal. We'll be back with a new show tomorrow morning. Thanks for listening.