Similar improvements for Trump among younger voters were cited in CNN’s 2024 exit polling of more than 22,000 voters. In the last election, Biden beat Trump in this demographic by 23 points. This year, Harris’ lead over Trump among those aged 18 to 29 was 13 points, a 10-point dip in the key demographic.
I’ve been sus about people proclaiming that somehow certain “generations” (we all would do well to remember that the idea of “generations” is a rather suspect one: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11277726/millennials-adam-conover) were somehow just inherently better, more savvy and media aware than their elders. There is no reason to believe that just because you were on the 'net since you were a baby, and had smart phones nearly your entire life that you are somehow immune to all logical fallacies inherent in such things.
I for one am not buying it. If anything, boomers, Gen X, and millennials have set up platforms and have been influencing people in the Gen Z age range (as well as Gen Alpha) to buy into totally toxic, moronic and just plain wrong things. Someone is watching all that algorithmic content, and it’s not all Gen-X or boomers or even all Gen Y.
Whether it’s to buy into qanon/pizzagate bullshit, or buy into tankie narratives about “genocide joe” so that they either flat out vote for a dirtbag like the convicted felon, or vote third party, or sit at home, all of those outcomes help the Republicans. If the Republicans can capture these people young, they’ll have them consumers for life - just like other brands strive to do.
They fucked themselves. Trump will absolutely further the killing of the planet with reckless abandon.
I’ve been saying this for a long time. Before Trump even. The left could not rely on liberal youth defaultism forever. I hate being right.
What really drove it home the direness was nobody else has been seeing it. Culturally younger people are just different some how. I mean every generation has its idiosyncrasies but people just couldn’t get past that idea. Sounded like I was speaking in tongues to them I’m sure.
I could not put my finger on it. It’s not the current slate of political issues like housing or whatever. It predates this. I used to chalk it up to internet skull fucking kids minds in ways the older generations cannot grasp.
I had hoped the political mega minds would be able to hone in on these things. Turns out they’re all fucking clueless. Just winging it.
Yes. It’s shit like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Youtube and Facebook and Tiktok and so much more…boomers had their parents yelling at them about the “boob tube”, but the algorithmic skew is soooo much more insidious than even the worst television could have hoped to be.
It’s rather common to point this out these days, but people talk about experiments where you spin up a new VM (use Proxmox or what have you, or maybe use a container even), and just click into Youtube and let it run its course…and they get pushed toward right wing content eventually.
I sure do wish that Gen Y, Gen Z, Gen-A and whatever is coming next are somehow smarter, immune to the usual emotional strings that are pulled, know how to spot logical fallacies better than anyone that came before, are more auto didactic, and actually know how to “do your own research” more than anyone that came before…but my cynical self knows that is just wishful thinking. Without a stellar liberal education, they’ll be just as prone to the manipulation as any other set of people.
Everything has to be a meme. Lower taxes, healthcare, or racism isn’t exciting. Couches, weird, eating pets and out of context outbursts get way more engagement. Mostly, because people have given up.
I don’t think they’ve given up because the issues the care about matter to them but it has to be communicated in the form of inside joke meme-speak. Republicans seem to have cracked this nearly a decade ago. That’s how long a head start they’ve got on Democrats. By now they’ve thoroughly indoctrinated a generation with their own baseline.
I think what’s breaking older peoples minds is how far fetched all of this is. Not only do the kids speak in coded language. They cannot be reached by speaking normally to them. You have to use the codes.
Keep in mind that part of the reason I think they’ve given up is because there’s no reason to believe the promises made will ever be delivered. They may care about taxes, but you’d probably get more engagement by making an AI generated tiktok video of a dinner table splayed with food in the image of rich oligarchs. There just isn’t much left but the jokes, it’s not code - it’s that if everything is going to be bullshit, it might as well be entertaining.
Anyone who hasn’t read Kill all Normies by Angela Nagle, buy a copy (and ignore the name, it’s anti-Trump). It’s written about the first Trump election but seems more relevant now than in 2017.
The Right was able to weaponize online spaces far better than the Left, against all conventional wisdom that the Dems were the party of the young people and the Repubs for the older ones.
I hear Hamas is modeling their insurgency after the vietnamese, so I’m reading Kill Anything That Moves about how the US prosecuted counter insurgency operation in vietnam, and why and how they won.
We should probably all start reading and prepping about how to keep safe under unsafe regimes.
Is that book anything like Killing Hope by William Blum?
Does anyone have another Kill the ______ book recommendation so I can complete the trifecta?
Killing Hope, by William Blum.
Great, now I’m at the point of the post election grief cycle where I’m getting a bunch of books to try to figure out what happened. I remember this phase from 2016. Thanks for the recommendation for my list!
Check out Democracy in Chains.
It’s convenient that they’re already all written because we’re repeating history.
It’s really short, I read the entire thing last night, but it probes into the right-wing online space deeper than any other scholarly resource I’ve read.
Unaffordable higher education, lifetime debt, unaffordably housing, no real chance of owning a proper house, no prospect of employment which might pay for a comfortable life, a life their parents and especially their grandparents afforded easily.
Gee I wonder why young people are so pissed off.
What age range are these parents and grandparents, I wonder? The really, really old people had the Great Depression. Boomers lived through things like stagflation and oil embargoes and went through multiple rightsizings/downsizings/offshoring/outsourcing, as well as NAFTA. Gen X started in the workforce after all this fun stuff began and got to experience the dot-com crash. Gen Y was just starting their careers when the 2008 financial crisis really brought things down.
Seriously, I don’t want to play down things being tough for Gen Z - but it is not as if the economy only targets a certain age range, and it’s not like other people have not seen their share of ups and downs that mostly seem to harm the lower and middle class…
Yup and electing Trump will definitely make that better. Good luck with that.
Don’t get me wrong, you want to watch the world that’s unfair to you burn? That’s fine by me, I’ll bring the chocolates and marshmallows, just don’t want to hear the youngins complain about the heat.
Especially since the fucking asshole CEO of BlackRock that is buying all the homes to have us rent forever is one of the top 10 Trump donors… Any hope of homeownership in my lifetime is completely gone.
I dont know that that is even what his supporters want. Like half my co-workers vocally support him, and they seem to legitimately believe that he will just wave his magic wand or whatever and make gas and electricity and groceries cheaper, and make crime go away, and that then all the democrats will admit he wasnt so bad after all. Im not even sure what is worse, disillusioned anger being directed in completely counterproductive places, or whatever sheer delusion believing every promise in his word salad is
and make crime go away
And what crime, anyway? Just what measurements are these people looking at, anyway? Crime has been trending down for decades. It’s like these people live in an alternate reality - crime keeps going down, the economy is way, way up under Biden, and the low-info and donnie himself proclaim it’s the Great Depression or something.
Why are you surprised that Trump voters are mentally defective?
Because these same people I know act pretty normal, even reasonable, whenever Trump isn’t the matter at hand. It’s like Trump comes up and suddenly a switch comes on in their brain and they’re cheering for him like a football team. It’s bizarre and surreal and infuriating to see them act that way about a man that makes me fear for my life and that of people I care about.
Yup and electing Trump will definitely make that better.
What other options were there? Electing the “go on like this” candidate? Or protesting, getting ignored or vilified by the media and thrown in jail?
In a world without options I can’t blame anyone for wanting to burn it all down.
So… you’re saying the options were ONLY:
- Vote Harris and
go on like thishave a chance at actual reform - Vote Trump and
burn it all downwatch access and affordability evaporate
What do you mean what other option is there? It was quite clear that Trump intends to abide by Project 2025, and what it spells out for the future of America’s education system is bleak. He had no intention of making it more affordable, and every intention of making it pay to play.
Maybe he’ll fix the affordability aspect as a side-effect of his mass deportations, but that won’t matter all that much when the general public fails to qualify for tertiary schooling. That public-private education quality divide is just going to snowball and make higher education even more of an elitist activity.
- Vote Harris and
In a world without options I can’t blame anyone for wanting to burn it all down
Maybe if they are 14. But FFS, an adult, thinking like that? Pure nihilistic bullshit and I don’t sympathize with it at all.
Biden tried numerous times with loan forgiveness. It was the conservative judges that kept blocking it.
Loan forgiveness isn’t a solution. It’s something the immediately help, but it does nothing ti address the growing costs of the higher education that is needed for any sort of comfortable life.
Not sure what you’re arguing here. Are you saying that Trump’s attempts to improve the education system are somehow better? And what exactly are those attempts?
He plans to support increased privatization of education, reduce funding for public options, and gut the DoE. So limited oversight of educational standards at a time when our standings on the international education stage are slipping?
It isn’t the best solution, sure, but I really hope you aren’t making the argument that because what Biden attempted was more of a bandaid fix we should roll the dice with the Trump University guy.
Hey if you don’t want the status quo while slowly getting the progressives into office then hey that’s your guy’s choice here.
I’m old enough to remember that the crazy train that is MAGA took over twenty plus years of my life to get to this end game, putting their money and efforts on the long game that’s won them whatever the fuck this is.
But hey again, if you think that was your only choice, which it isn’t, that’s fine and you want to fascist it all the way down, cool just don’t fucking complain after this. Heck I might even throw in a little fuel on the fire myself.
I didn’t have any choice in this, but I’m still gonna be fucked by it.
Are you not an American citizen? Or are you under 18?
I’m not an American citizen. But the US military budget makes whatever the fuck you do in your country my problem, too.
Weird that you would be here bothsidesing rather than recognizing that the party that was just elected will cause many more military issues all over the world. American politicians will probably never reduce the size of our military (too much lobbying influence), but the only path to doing that would be to put Democrats in and progressively push them to be more progressive.
We all are man, we all are.
Hey if you don’t want the status quo while slowly getting the progressives into office then hey that’s your guy’s choice here.
Why are you talking like this person is personally responsible for Trump winning? And what progressives? When the party platform is shifting to the right every election? Not saying electing Trump is the right answer but any solution that includes maintaining the status quo is failing or has already failed.
Even it that was true, „go on like this“ is better than „make it worse“.
Even framing it as an active choice is wrong. People who become disillusioned with life and don’t feel like politics has answers for their problems just stop engaging and stop thinking about it as something important. It wasn’t an active choice, they just didn’t care.
This. I get people are angry but they need to step back and look at this for what to was. It was a bad Democrat campaign, from a party that is out of touch with voters. I don’t blame Harris for this, I think she was a decent candidate given an impossible task.
The Dems did not contest Biden running despite obvious health concerns, then let him hold on til the bitter end dismissing all concerns, then had a coronation for Harris. Not very democratic and yet they made this election about democracy. And then they focused on abortion, as the main issue.
Yet voters concerns in the exit polls were clear - the number one issue was the economy. The dems failed to sell their message on the economy, they let Trump control the topic.
Why then vote for the guy who will kill any chance of having any sort of non post apocalyptic future ever again?
I’d imagine a certain percentage just want to do it as punishment. If they have to suffer and feel hopeless, everyone else can too. My guess is the biggest percentage, though, just have no idea what is going on and what any of this means.
Yeah, Gen Z had better not talk about the lack of housing or how hard it is to make a living again after this. Whatever happens, you all made your bed and you best hope that you’re getting what you voted for.
Typical boomer leadership. You lot shit the bed trying to take bribes and sell everyone out, then blame everyone but yourselves when you end up failing at literally everything, as if every Democrat owed you compliance with your horrific BS.
The democratic party lost ground in literally every single demographic thats measured, but you want to finger point as if one group is to blame. None of you should be in charge of anything.
When will you learn that the party was a coalition and that you dont have the power to go it alone and succeed, hrm? And that the right wingers are not your friends, and reaching across the aisle to people who want plainly evil outcomes is not some sort of virtue-- it just makes you weak and prone to lose. You have to make people want to come to you, no make deals to sell out your own to entice them onboard.
This is the sort of attitude that gifts power to repulicans ever more.
Instead of blaming voters, blame the Democrat party. It needed to appeal to voters concerns and needs. It needs to ask why it failed to convince younger voters, and address what their priorities are.
The obvious answer at the moment is the Dems failed to campaign well on the economy. Harris defended the last 4 years as a success but for many lower income people of all ages it will not feel that way. Middle class voters who own their own homes were shielded more from inflation than renters whose housing costs due rent inflation sky rocketed as well as all other living costs - they were hit doubly hard.
The Dems decided to focus on women’s reproductive issues and a fear of democratic loss, and hoped women would come out and vote balancing our other groups. This failed. It’s clear Harris and the Democrats should have campaigned hard on economic change and offered a different vision to trump.
So don’t blame voters. Blame the Democrats for this and many other failings in this election (no real contest at their primary, Biden hanging on til late with patronising dismissal of concerns over his health by the Dem leadership, and then a coronation of Harris who also inherited Bidens team rather than had time to build her own campaign).
Looking at the overall vote count the Rep vote seems largely similar to 2020, or slightly up, but the democratic vote has fallen significantly. This is largely due to the Democrats failure rather than due to Republicans success.
Weird how Republicans do literal nothing to help their voters but they still turn out. Democrats at least make marginal improvements but don’t do everything that every one of their voters wants, so the voters don’t turn out. It’s the voters’ fault.
Yep, and both the “liberal media” and the Enlightened Centrists ™ and tankies pile on with this framing, as well. The qons wreck the place, set it on fire, and smear shit on the walls. The Democrats get a tiny bit of power and are expected to fix it all in 2 or 4 years, with qons kneecapping them the entire way…and because of course they cannot fix everything in this time frame and in these circumstances, they get blamed for this.
Republican voters don’t care about being helped. They simply want somebody to blame for their problems. They would happily jump on a grenade so long as they could jam an immigrant underneath them on the way down.
The Republican voter doesn’t believe that they’re poor - they’re just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Any day now, the money will drop out of the sky and into their laps. So they happily march to toe the party line as it hurts them over and over, because they think that one day they’ll be the ones stepping on everybody else.
Republicans give them the red meat they want. They piss off the people they hate. Their campaigns are all about making the base happy.
We need a lot of stickers that say “Trump 2024 - You Did This” put it on gas pumps, in front of stores, hospitals…
Honestly they’ll probably provide massive subsidies to the oil companies to lower the price of gas while preserving the 2017 tax cuts and proposing more for rich people while Gen Z’ers will lose their college forgiveness but get a very temporary, very low tax cut.
Apparently young Americans don’t want a future.
I’m sure they do. Shame they chose poorly.
People who supported a genocide shouldnt be lecturing anybody about anything after their poor campaign platform alienated the voters and lost the election.
Young Americans know to Never take advice or criticism from people you dont respect.
Young Americans know to Never take advice or criticism from people you dont respect.
Where were they during the election, then? Listening to influencers and donnie himself?
Ah yes trunk definitely won’t support the genocide or start one here
Basically democrats are losing: the youth, minorities, and the working class. They’re gaining among white college-educated. They’re also mildly gaining among women, but they were already the party of choice for non-white women. Crazy to see the democrats becoming the party of white privilege.
When the initial disbelief wears off a little it becomes more clear that the democrats are not a very good alternative for people. If they were they should have won this by a landslide. Their current path seems like a dead end and they need some new thoughts.
This is a global problem, too.
The majority just wants bread, and all the left offers is morality.Maybe your left, I think the global left is trying to offer a lot more than that. Don’t conflate Dems with useful politicians.
Tbf, Democrats are centrist not left. It’s just us politics collectively is so right leaning you folks don’t have a real representative left leaning 3rd party. A real left party would institute policies to give everyone access to bread (so long as it isn’t in short supply). It’s absurd a country as big and rich as the US has such poor social support programs.
Half a century of sabre-rattling and proxy wars with another superpower with an opposing ideology will do that to a country. It’s going to take a long time before “socialism” isn’t a dirty word here, if ever. The Cold War fucked us, ideologically. We still cling to raw capitalism like the Bolsheviks are hiding around every corner. This stuff is still huge in living memory, my own included. As a kid spending my childhood under Ronald Reagan, I’d often hear about the Berlin wall and how it was being used to keep people from escaping to the West. Which is true, yes, but it was definitely also used as a propaganda tool here, a showcase of what “socialist thinking” can bring.
Morality is easy in some sense, it just requires thinking to figure it out, and in practice being the moral choice when the other side is this bad requires doing basically nothing at all. Retooling the economy to increase the wealth of average people, directly against the forces of the already wealthy seeking to suck up all the available wealth for themselves, is both much harder and requires being given an amount of power that’s rarely won these days.
Absolutely. And nobody seems able to stop the trend. We’re in dire need of some good thinking right now.
all the left offers is morality.
Gun waving, immigrant banning, genocide supporting, is… morality?
Dems lost among the white college educated this cycle.
