Economic concerns and growing disenchantment with both parties is draining support for Trump among Gen Z young men, a key bloc of support during the 2024 election
Male Gen Z voters are breaking with Donald Trump and the Republican party at large, recent polls show, less than a year after this same cohort defied convention and made a surprise shift right, helping Trump win the 2024 election.
Taken with wider polling suggesting Democrats will lead in the midterms, the findings on young men spell serious trouble for the Republican Party in 2026.
Younger Gen Z men, those born between 2002 and 2007, may be even more anti-Trump, according to October research from YouGov and the Young Men’s Research Project, a potential sign that their time living through the social upheavals of the Covid pandemic and not being political aware during the first Trump administration may be shaping their experience.
Gen Z want a radical. Far left or far right doesn’t seem to matter. I can’t blame them for that. Most of them will still say they supported Bernie - at least the podcasters they worship do. There is room for them on the left. Dems have to start by leaving the centrist DNC bullshit behind.
I think most people want a radical.
The current system isn’t working for the majority of normal people.
They’ll vote for change every time, and never get it.
they don’t want radical. they want jobs and a stabilized cost of living. they want to feel like they have a future.
trump focused on economic issues, and got their votes. if the next democrats can push forward economic reforms that improve the economy… they will get the votes. Kamala absolutely refused to run on any agenda of economic reform and endorse Biden’s inflation economy.
This was always true. I want someone who works for the working man and woman. I don’t care if we become socialist, stay in capitalism, what the fuck ever other choice: we as people need to feel taken care of. Any system that ignores its people is doomed.
Just as important is explaining to people why some choices need to be made that we may not agree with. Raising the gas tax? I’m ok with it, because I already know it’s how we pay for our roads. But what about my less aware neighbor? If they simply see the rate jump, and don’t know why, it leaves the door wide open for a conspiracy schmuck to step in with a ragebait explanation.
Yeah, but you’re being reasonable. Most human beings aren’t reasonable. They are not thoughtful or pragmatic. Only a small percentage of people are well-mannered and educated enough to even understand the basics of macroeconomics and public policy that often drives it.
They are driven by raw emotion that is often entirely disproportionate to the thing it’s responding to. Like your example of someone flying into a rage over a minor tax increase. And now in 2025+, these people think they are all geniuses due to a steady diet of social media that constantly reinforces their ignorant and rage. And they block and assault anyone who dares try to dispute their rage and ignorance.
I was in thread about credit ratings yesterday and all the smart factually accurate commentary was down-voted, and all the ragebaiting ignorance conspiracy nonsense was heavily upvoted.
Sure, but at least reminding people of why at the time leadership announces a change removes a lot of ambiguity.
Definitely doesn’t solve the problem by itself, but it’s not much work to include… Presuming the law/change in question was written with a real reason in mind.
I think GenZ might just be stupid if they thought Trump had a more economic reform agenda than Harris. But yeah blame Harris for that too.
trump ran on economic issues. they weren’t stupid. they listened to what he said. they just didn’t think he was lying.
‘no tax on tips’ was resonated with a lot of young service workers. he kept hammering home how he’d stop inflation, etc.
Fair enough. You are right that “ran on” and actual policy are two different things. Pretty clear that Harris fumbled her economic messaging when it comes to what GenZ were wanting to hear I guess.
Yes, sadly a lot of folks can’t grasp that distinction and get really upset about it.
What was really interest to me was listening to post polling interviews with voters on election day. They were very consistent in why they voted for Trump. Young and old alike.
It find the whole thing just… sad because it’s so obvious but the democrats can’t seem to figure it out. Obama and Clinton won on the same issues, economics. H Clinton’s campaign was equally economically tone-deaf as Kamala. So was Kerry in '04.
US mentality is weird. Most countries we understand that a “party” stands for certain principles, and so if you don’t like the party, you vote for a different one. It makes no sense to demand that the party change to accommodate the voter, that’s not the role of a party. The role of a party is to try and change the minds of the population to support the principles of the party. A party exists to convince the masses to accommodate them, not for the masses to accommodate the party.
But Americans always vote for the same parties and always insist that the parties should violate their principles that they are very explicit about and openly declare all the time in order to accommodate the people. When the party inevitably does not do this but instead tries to explore new strategies to win over the population while adhering to their principles, Americans act surprised that the party isn’t bending to their will, but then vote for the same party again anyways.
I see this all throughout bizarre American commentary, where American leftists like Hasan will constantly call the Democrat party “stupid” for not abandoning their principles and running on an entirely different platform. But this, again, misses the whole point of a party. They are not “stupid.” They have a set of principles and want those principles to win, and it defeats the whole purpose of the party of they entirely abandoned their principles.
I mean, let’s say you live in a very racist country but have an anti-racist party, and then the anti-racist party decides to become racist to win the election. Did you really “win”? At the end of the day, the racist party still won, because you would have abandoned your principles to win, so it defeats the whole point of “winning.”
Democrats have a set of principles and want those principles to win, so naturally, as rational actors, they will not run candidates who oppose those principles while also try to push out people who infiltrate the party with ideas that oppose their principles. In any normal country, this is no problem because people understand that it just means you need to vote for a different party with different principles.
What’s even weirder is the Americans who delude themselves into believing the Democrats hold principles they literally do not. They are very open about being a neoliberal nationalist party, but I have encountered weird Americans who tell me things like Democrats all support universal healthcare / “Medicare for All” and they will argue until the cow’s come home that this is true and all evidence to the contrary is Russian propaganda.
Even here on Lemmy, criticizing Democrats by pointing out how they are right-wing can get you downvotes from weirdo Americans who are convinced they are a truly left-wing party. There is a huge delusion among Americans that Democrats are all secret far-left socialists who are just so incompetent that they constantly fumble the ball and mess up getting their policies across and so that’s why they never achieve the working class utopia. If you point out that there is no evidence that the overwhelming majority of Democrats even want these left-wing policies in the first place and they openly say they want the opposite, they will get very defensive and upset with you.
You’re apply logic and rules from completely different nation’s systems and calling the US’s version “weird” because it doesn’t match how other countries do it?
Perhaps in your country it isn’t, but in the US, it is. During the convention of the party, the party chooses its “planks” for its platform. These are chosen within the party itself, and they absolutely change. You can see the 2024 Democratic party platform here if you want to. Here’s the 2020 version.. As you can see there are some large differences. The GOP used to do this same process before it was consumed by the cult of trump.
In your system perhaps. Not in the US system. It doesn’t make the US system “wrong”. Does it have shortcomings? Absolutely, all systems do. Are these various shortcomings equal to each other? That’s subjective. I personally would like more aspects of European-style politcal parties, but not everything that I see with parties there. We, as humanity, have yet to find the objectively “best” system.
I’m losing faith in your arguments because you’re painting a picture that all members of a party share the same beliefs. Again, maybe that’s an ideal from your own country’s party system, but it isn’t in the USA. I would be surprised even in your own party if you have universal agreement on all policy positions.
There are individual Democrats that support Medicare for All. Here’s one example:
Hilary Clinton, as First Lady at the time, lead the creation of the Clinton Healthcare plan of 1993. This was absolutely a universal national healthcare plan:
“The task force was created in January 1993, but its own processes were somewhat controversial and drew litigation. Its goal was to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration’s first-term agenda.”
Does this mean that every Democrat believes in universal healthcare? Of course not. But to claim that none do, as you are, is equally untrue.
You’re going to have to be more specific with an example post, because most of the downvoted posts I see close to this are “both sides are the same!” garbage. Also, I don’t believe many believe the US Democratic Party is “truly left-wing” as would be defined in, lets say, Europe.
Other countries have voting systems designed to support a multi-party system. Before we can have this we need something like ranked choice or STAR voting or approval voting. Otherwise if you vote for a third party right now you end up supporting the politician you like least due to the spoiler effect.
Note that reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect it kind of seems like RCV only helps reduce the impact of spoilers but does not fully eliminate it.
This is also a great article: https://effectivegov.uchicago.edu/primers/ranked-choice-voting
This was shared to me on lemmy. It helped me understand the advantages STAR voting has over RCV.
That said, RCV would still be a massive improvement over FPTP voting.
Electoral Reform Videos
First Past The Post voting (What most states use now)
Videos on alternative electoral systems
STAR voting
Alternative vote
Ranked Choice voting
Range Voting
Single Transferable Vote
Mixed Member Proportional representation
What’s the relevance? The point of my post is that you are voting for a clearly right-wing party and the expectation that they will become left-wing is irrational. The existence of a spoiler effect does not negate this reality. It is incredibly incoherent to say, “we should vote in the right-wingers because we’re afraid of the spoiler effect,” then turn around and say that the right-wingers are "stupid’ for not running left-wing candidates as a right-wing party. It makes no sense. If you think you should never vote for a left-wing party out of fear of the spoiler effect, then you are really conceding that a left-wing government is impossible in the USA under its current form, and only maybe hypothetically in the far future if we ever have a different form, maybe with RCV, would it be possible.
It’s not that weird if only two parties stand a chance. Pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction. Your comment is a long-winded way of saying that the two-party system should be abolished.
The two party system should be abolished.
Not sure why democrats are so afraid of a one party government. Just run in republican primaries and push the party in your favored direction!
No, I am saying that “pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction” makes zero sense. It is like voting for the Racism Party™ and expecting them to run anti-racism candidates, or that you will “push” the Racism Party™ to be anti-racist. That isn’t gong to happen. The Racism Party™ would exist to push racism, it would exist to convince you to support its platform and vote for it.
The internet exists these days. We can all pull up videos going back decades to back when they were black-and-white of people talking about the needs of “pushing Democrats to the left” and yet generations later they are still a right-wing jingoist genocidal party. There is an old saying, “the definition of insanity is dong the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The same strategy is used for decades with everyone insisting that it’s the only strategy that can ever work yet it never works.
How much longer do we have to wait before this strategy works? Will Democrats become a left-wing party election, the election after, the one after that? I guarantee you that everyone will listen to you as they do every election cycle and your strategy will continue to be the one used again, again, and again. So I am just curious in how long you think it will take for your strategy to bear fruits.