Accusations and recriminations are already ringing out throughout the Democratic Party. How did Kamala Harris lose this demographic or that demographic, why did millions of white women still vote for Donald Trump, why did Trump make such inroads with the Latino vote? One of the most startling post-mortems on the election is the analysis of the “Gen Z vote” though. Democrats have always, always made direct appeals to younger voters with the implicit understanding that younger people are always going to skew more liberal than their parents and grandparents. Not Gen Z. Young white men aged 18-29 voted for Donald Trump in droves. As it turns out, an astonishing number of white men under 30 are basically Hitler Youth, radicalized by Joe Rogan and internet fascists.
Donald Trump and his authoritarian vision for the country swept to power on Tuesday. While several demographics played into the Republican takeover, a survey of 120,000 voters conducted by the Associated Press found that young men played a critical role in his win, voting decisively for the MAGA leader.
Men between the ages of 18 and 29 turned away from Democrats in droves, shattering illusions that Gen Z—a cohort that statistically reads fewer books, comprehends less information, and predominantly gets their news from social media—skews more progressive than previous generations. The key demographic of young men has shifted nearly 30 points to the right since 2020, when they voted for President Joe Biden by a margin of 15 percent, according to the AP.
Millennial men also continued the growing trend of deference toward Trump at the ballot box. In 2020, men between the ages of 24 and 39 voted for President Joe Biden by a margin of 20 percentage points, according to data from the Pew Research Center. Even that result was a radical shift from the demographic’s politics four years earlier, an increase of eight percentage points in Trump’s favor from 2016.
A 30-point swing in four years is fundamentally insane. While Kamala Harris won other youth demographics, she didn’t win by the kinds of margins she expected to, especially given the campaign’s very youth-oriented social media and campaign style:
Despite the Brat Summer hype, all the clever and demure posts from KamalaHQ, and the promise of generational change, in the end it turned out that Gen Z wasn’t very interested in Kamala Harris. It became clear early enough on Tuesday evening, when the exit polls arrived and certain counties were going sideways for Democrats, that Harris was underperforming old man Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers with younger voters.
Back then, Biden won 18-29 year olds by a massive 25-point margin. Harris won them by only 13 points. Put bluntly, her performance among young voters was an abject disaster for Democrats and a troubling omen for the party’s political future. The youth gender gap that was supposed to favor Harris—with an army of young women showing up under the battle flag of abortion rights—never really materialized. Yes, Harris won young women by 20 points, but she was supposed to do better: The gold standard Harvard Youth Poll had her winning those women by 30 points just a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, Donald Trump won young men by 10 points, flipping them from Biden. And for the first time in decades, Republicans won young white voters outright.
The results confirmed what I’ve been seeing all year in my reporting, for Puck and Snapchat: Trump and Republicans have made real inroads with Gen Z. But not just with the “Trump bros,” who have occupied so much of the media conversation, and not just by hanging out in the manosphere talking to Joe Rogan and Theo Von. Sure, young white dudes broke for Trump. But Harris also underperformed with almost every kind of young person: white women, Black voters, and young Latinos, who went for Harris by only 6 points. Harris even ran behind Biden in cities and counties that are home to big college towns, at the University of Wisconsin, at Penn State, at East Carolina, at the University of Georgia, and so on.
Puck goes on to say that young people’s biggest concern was “the economy,” rather than social and cultural issues which usually drive the youth vote. I don’t buy that, but whatever. I’ll admit that I’m f–king shocked by these demographic shifts. As an old Xennial, I thought that young women would be radicalized post-Dobbs, radicalized by the cultural misogyny that permeates through MAGAland. I thought that younger men would either stay unengaged, or they would follow their female generational peers. I was wrong, and the Harris campaign was wrong.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.