POLITICS: 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.”

Podcast revolution

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 “Barstool conservatism,” a phrase coined by the writer Matthew Walther to describe an ethos that is culturally libertarian — i.e., you won’t find much opposition to gay marriage and abortion in such circles — and yet decidedly Republican in that it is wholly opposed to the hectoring, self-righteous tone of elite progressivism.

And that is the other piece of the puzzle: Democrats lack both an appealing messenger and an appealing message.

In fact, they seem to have forgotten how to relate to young men at all.

For all its current woes, the Democratic Party must blame its cultural gatekeepers: progressive activists, elite media, and the campus radicals who conquered higher education over the course of the 2010s.

Young men who came of age in this environment were met with outright hostility by a brand of liberalism that has no place for them —, that viewed their very existence as an act of violence.

Boys were told to become more feminine to fit with the times and to make room for traditionally marginalized groups, even as their ranks among the educated elite began to plummet.

The MeToo movement, the rise of wokeness, and the enforcement of cancel culture identified some true bad actors, but also spiraled out of control, resulting in a general atmosphere of persecution against young men.

Cancel culture’s toll

In any other era, teenagers who used offensive language would be disciplined appropriately and learn from the experience; but with the rise of social media, it became possible to keep an ongoing log of transgressions — and to punish the offenders in perpetuity.

Is it any wonder, then, that young men have sought solace in media environments where sports and fitness are well-liked and encouraged?

Where free speech is celebrated and political correctness is attacked?

Where it’s OK to tell raunchy jokes and think girls are attractive (and say so)?

And, importantly, where Trump is cast as a supportive figure?

One of the ironclad rules of politics is that young people skew liberal and then become more conservative as they age.

According to a famous saying, often incorrectly attributed to Winston Churchill: If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.

But Trump has reversed this tendency by, winning the hearts of Gen Z.

The Democratic Party on the other hand, has convinced many young males that it hates them.

Robby Soave is a senior editor at Reason.