Democrats disdain for young men backfired in 2024 as Trump capitalized on new media and turned Gen Z red

For years, the Democratic political figures, liberal activists, and the resistance movement writ large have drawn morbid comfort from the fact that Donald Trump’s supporters were, frankly, quite old.The Trump phenomenon, they believed, had an expiration date sometime in the near future: Young voters would replace their parents and grandparents as demographics shifted, and all would be right — or rather, left — with the world.The 2024 election has shattered these hopes.Trump’s gains with young people are so massive that Gen Z might as well be called Gen Trump.Data guru David Shor laid bare this stark reality in an interview with The New York Times’ Ezra Klein last week; Shor walked Klein through the ramifications of his polling insights and voter analyses, which reveal a historically unprecedented rightward shift among young people, particularly young males.Trump won voters under the age of 26; white women, white men and black men in this demographic all leaned in Trump’s direction.

The former president won 18-year-old nonwhite men outright.Young people, Shor notes, appear to be “the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”The reasons for this are not hard to grasp.

First and foremost, Trump and his surrogates have become masterful communicators on Gen Z’s preferred media platforms: podcasts, social media and especially TikTok.When Trump arrived on the political scene a decade ago, he was a figure of cable news and reality TV.These are Boomer broadcasting platformers, and thus it’s no surprise that older voters were his key contingent.The 2024 Trump campaign correctly surmised that it would need to reach voters who reside outside retirement communities, and that long-form podcast appearances would play to Trump’s strengths and moreover, the key podcasting personalities — Joe Rogan, Theo Von and others — have come to evince a right-wing sensibility, if not exactly conservative politics.Their vibe is �...