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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
We need a lot of stickers that say “Trump 2024 - You Did This” put it on gas pumps, in front of stores, hospitals…
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Does anyone have another Kill the ______ book recommendation so I can complete the trifecta?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Biden tried numerous times with loan forgiveness. It was the conservative judges that kept blocking it.
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.
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 then vote for the guy who will kill any chance of having any sort of non post apocalyptic future ever again?
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.
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…
