Democrats’ long-term strategy for electoral dominance depends on capturing three demographic groups (as they define them): the youth vote, the minority vote, and AWFLs.
They are losing their grip on two out of the three–rapidly.
NYT writer says Dems are ‘getting destroyed’ as data show Gen Z ‘most conservative’ generation in decades | Alexander Hall, Fox News
Ezra Klein suggested that Democratic assumptions about youth support have proven ‘completely false’ amid President Donald Trump’s return to power… pic.twitter.com/AJaW34deqL
— Owen Gregorian (@OwenGregorian) March 22, 2025
AWFLs are their most reliable group, and if you expand the definition to include increasingly effeminate men who are overeducated and who value virtue signaling as much as AWFLs, the Democrats have a lock on this demographic grouping. In fact, their lock is getting stronger, not weaker, over time. Suburban women used to be a swing vote but now are almost as reliable as a group as the harridans of The View.
But as for the other two “demographic groups,” their grip is slipping, and slipping very fast. Ironically, one of the reasons for that slip is the failure of these demographic groups to self-identify as actually being groups–Latinos are diverse in their opinions, not some unified block whose politics are determined by the color of their skin. Blacks are fragmenting as a voting bloc, and the youth vote is no longer unified.
In other words, “brown” people are similar to white people–they may identify with their smaller ethnic group–Mexican, Cubano, Columbian–but are not defined by their skin color or even their ethnic background. Irish-Americans may have some common pride as a group, but think of themselves as defined by other social signifiers.
So that means immigrants swung far more than the median of the electorate.
That’s exactly right. It’s really hard to know exactly what happened — working-class immigrants don’t answer a ton of surveys. But our best guess is that they swung 23 percentage points against the Democratic Party.
The crazy thing is, if you believe this — and there’s some uncertainty, but I think some version of this is probably true — then something like half of the net votes that Trump received came from immigrants.
This wasn’t efficient for him, and it’s one of the main reasons the bias of the Electoral College decreased by so much this cycle.
In the battleground states, Trump’s vote share swung by maybe half a percentage point, or one percentage point, and that was enough for him to win. But if you look at the four biggest states where immigrants are concentrated, New York, California, Texas — Trump did extremely well. It wasn’t very efficient for him, but in terms of people changing their mind, it was a massive percentage of the story.
Do you think of yourself as generic “white” in any meaningful sense? It is just stupid when you think about it. I am white, aware that I am white, but I feel no particular loyalty to white lefties in Sociology departments, who I tend to expect to be pretty awful people. I prefer to be around my black and brown neighbors than in a faculty meeting in the Political Science department I used to teach in.
The same is now true of younger voters, who are becoming as conservative as Generation X voters who grew up in the Reagan years. And for much the same reason.
This is the subject of the recent Ezra Klein show, in which he and David Schor discuss the cratering of support for the Democrats over the past few years.
Here we have Harris’s support by age, year, race and gender. One thing you can notice is that among 18-year-olds, women of color are the only of the four that Harris won. Trump narrowly won nonwhite men.I find this part of this chart shocking. I sometimes talk about narrative violations, and if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it was that young people didn’t like him. And Republicans had been maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors.But if you look at this chart, 75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than 20-year-old white men.
It is mildly surprising that young white women swung so far to the right, but I suspect that alphabet ideology plays a role. That young men have swung right is the opposite of surprising–they are the most demonized group by lefties in America.
It is a real shift. This is the thing I am the most shocked by in the last four years — that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.
Still, the gender gap is HUGE. Young women are vastly more liberal than young men, which may be due to the fact that our school systems demonize and penalize young men for their gender and race, elevating women to near the top of the intersectional hierarchy and loudly proclaiming men to be the oppressors in our society. Every deviation from the leftist orthodoxy is proof positive of growing racism and sexism, and it’s natural for men and boys to be repelled by the accusations–and in some cases, become what they are accused of. Hence the growth of support for the Tate brothers.
And for voters over age 75, it’s even lower. So a fairly low gender gap among older voters.
I think that a lot of people underestimate how recent the gender gap is. Historically, Republicans did better with women than with men. This was true across most of the West, that center-left parties did better with men than women. That shift happened in the United States during the Clinton era and has remained stable since then.
What’s crazy is that if you look at people under the age of 30, the gender gap has exploded. Eighteen-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Donald Trump than 18-year-old women, which is just completely unprecedented in American politics.
This is a backlash I have been expecting for a decade–as men become fed up with being demonized, they swing farther “right,” and at times in ways that aren’t any healthier than the people who demonize them. This is still a small cohort, but we should keep an eye on it and push back on the young men whose reaction to misandry is, unfortunately, misogyny. The insistence that misogyny explains male alienation creates even more male alienation, and the male alienation turns into a sense that not just leftists but females themselves are becoming an enemy. When men rightfully think they are being passed over for women, they naturally resent not just DEI ideology, but the women who benefit.
I feel like the story you’re implying you believe here is that this polarization among young men and women is driven by young men who were in high school and online during Covid.
This was around the time when #MeToo was cresting, Jordan Peterson became a big figure and Andrew Tate was rising. You have what’s now called the manosphere.
But there’s a sense the Democratic Party is becoming much more a pro-women party and in some ways, sort of anti-young men. And that, in turn, had a huge effect on young men’s political opinions.
I do want to stress that this seems to be a global phenomenon. And I don’t want to overcenter the specific things the Democratic Party has done but rather focus on the broader cultural shifts.
Intersectional politics is, by its very nature, divisive–that is the whole point. Slice and dice the population, insist that they are inherently opposed to each other, and incite a cultural war of all against all. Even the name says that “inter” and “sectional”–between the groups. The idea is to set blacks against whites, Hispanics against both, and men against women.
Democrats are getting destroyed now among young voters.
I do think that, even as the idea of the rising demographic Democratic majority became a little discredited in 2016 and 2020, Democrats believed that these young voters were eventually going to save them. They thought that this was a last gasp of something and that if Donald Trump couldn’t run up his numbers among seniors and you had millennials and Gen Z really coming into voting power, that would be the end of this Republican Party.
That is just completely false, and it might be the beginning of this Republican Party.
I have to admit, I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems I was wrong. The future has a way of surprising us.
The flip side of this is that Democrats made a bunch of gains among older voters, and I’m sure that they’ll be happy that they did that two years from now, in the midterms. But if we don’t do anything about this, then this problem could become very bad.
Democrats were obviously hurt by their policy incompetence and extremism–setting the stage for a Trump victory. But the huge demographic shifts have deeper roots in their reliance on intersectional politics. The war of all against all has backfired because it generates huge resentment, a sense among younger voters that the Democratic Party is focused on issues that are far less significant or attractive to most voters. It only appeals to people at the very top of the intersectional hierarchy–you are best off if you identify as a genderqueer black woman filled with a sense of entitlement and worst off if you are a “cis-gendered” white male or any shade of male at all.
No wonder young people, aside from younger women of color, are flocking to the Democrats, and men are running as fast as they can to the Republicans. It would be stupid not to.
Many Democrats in the political class are genuinely attached to these radical policies, but many more promoted these ideas because they mistakenly believed that being radical was a good political move. The lefty bubble in which they exist reinforced the radical shift to the left, and the result has been a collapse in support.
Democrats have created a toxic brew in which their ideological positions–which they insist are the only path to “justice,” push an increasingly large number of voters away from them, and their intersections strategy makes unifying the center-left and far-left in a common project. Liberal men are demonized as much as conservative men because the category they are tossed in is “men,” not fellow liberals. Republicans tend to welcome newcomers into the coalition–see how many gays are enthusiastically moving Right and how Republicans have embraced them as a new part of the coalition.
Trump’s cabinet is filled with gays, and some of the most successful conservative podcasters are gays.
The new Republican coalition appears to be ascendant, while Democrats keep shrinking their base.
I would never have guessed that Gen Z would become a key part of the Republican winning strategy, and as importantly neither would the Democrats have seen that coming.
