In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Democratic strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was 18-to-29-year-olds,” a polling expert and former adviser to Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign said. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”

-

In last year’s Presidential election, Democrats lost support with nearly every kind of voter: rich, poor, white, Black, Asian American, Hispanic. But the defection that alarmed Democratic strategists the most was that of young voters, especially young men. “The only cohort of men that Biden won in 2020 was 18-to-29-year-olds,” a polling expert and former adviser to Joe Biden’s Presidential campaign said. “That was the one cohort they had to hold on to, and they let it go.”
Political strategists have opinions about what happened. The 2024 Presidential campaign was the first to be conducted largely on live streams and long-form podcasts, a medium that happens to be thoroughly dominated by MAGA bros. The biggest of them all, Joe Rogan, spent the final weeks of the campaign giving many hours of fawning airtime to Trump—and to his running mate, J. D. Vance, and his key allies, such as Elon Musk—before endorsing Trump on the eve of the election. Many young men seemed to have bought the pitch that, of the two parties, the Republicans were less censorious. This may have been a miscalculation, but you can’t convince voters that they’ve been misinformed simply by lecturing them. “The lecturing is part of the issue,” Andrew Marantz writes.
After the election, Democratic strategists argued that the anti-Trump coalition needed to make inroads with young men. Hasan Piker, one of the biggest stars of the live-streaming site Twitch, offers a model of what that could look like. His audience skews young, male, and disaffected. “At no point was I, like, ‘Only I, a dickhead on the internet, am qualified to teach these kids why we need a functioning welfare state,’ ” Piker told Marantz. “I just felt like no one else was really in these spaces trying to explain these things. Certainly not the Democrats.”
Marantz talks to political commentators, strategists, and sociologists to understand why young men have gone MAGA.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

“On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory.” In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Emily Roxy Witt writes about New York at the beginning of the pandemic—the uncertainty, the fear, the loss, the protests, the rage, the loneliness—and the end of a relationship. The Last Rave The Last Rave In the summer of 2020, I felt as if I’d entered the wrong portal, out of the world I knew and into its bizarro twin.

-
Image
  “On March 6, 2020, Andrew and I went to a rave. If it weren’t for what happened later, I don’t think it would have stood out in my memory.” In an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Emily Roxy Witt writes about New York at the beginning of the pandemic—the uncertainty, the fear, the loss, the protests, the rage, the loneliness—and the end of a relationship. The Last Rave In the summer of 2020, I felt as if I’d entered the wrong portal, out of the world I knew and into its bizarro twin.
Read more

The Mexican director Sara Gómez, who died in 1974, made about 20 short documentaries in her short life, starting in 1961, two years after the Revolution. In 1974, she shot her only feature-length film, “One Way or Another,” completed posthumously, which mixes a romantic drama with documentary sequences. Gómez, the first woman to direct movies in Mexico, created “a body of work that was in the creative and political forefront of its time and, in many ways, remains so even now,” Richard Brody writes. “Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both.”

-
  The Mexican director Sara Gómez, who died in 1974, made about 20 short documentaries in her short life, starting in 1961, two years after the  Revolution. In 1974, she shot her only feature-length film, “One Way or Another,” completed posthumously, which mixes a romantic drama with documentary sequences. Gómez, the first woman to direct movies in Mexico, created “a body of work that was in the creative and political forefront of its time and, in many ways, remains so even now,” Richard Brody writes. “Gómez, with her blend of documentary and fiction, of drama and intellectual analysis, devised a new cinematic method, which she used to express a powerful vision of her country, her time, and her own place in both.”
Read more

The entrepreneurial ethic addresses a central tension of capitalism: people need to work to earn a living, but stable, fulfilling jobs are hard to find. In times of economic inequality, the prospect of becoming your own boss holds a lot of appeal.

-
  The entrepreneurial ethic addresses a central tension of capitalism: people need to work to earn a living, but stable, fulfilling jobs are hard to find. In times of economic inequality, the prospect of becoming your own boss holds a lot of appeal.
Read more