New York Times columnist Ezra Klein spoke with a Democratic pollster Tuesday about how the dream of an ascendant Democratic majority is imploding as younger voters, especially White men, flee the party.
Klein interviewed David Shor, the head of data science at Blue Rose Research, a Democratic polling firm, for his podcast in an episode titled “Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won.”
When Klein and Shor reviewed numerous charts, including one headlined, “2024 Democratic Support by Age – Split by Race and Gender,” the pollster explained that in this chart in particular, “One thing you can notice is that among 18-year-olds, women of color are the only of the four [race and gender demographic groups] that Harris won. Trump narrowly won nonwhite men.”
The Times columnist seized on one “shocking” finding in the data that defies one of the Democratic Party’s core beliefs.
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“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,” Klein said. “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 a real shift,” Shor agreed. “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.”
The data expert went on to discuss what he called “the scariest chart in this entire presentation,” which shows the massive and historically unusual polarization between young men and women.
“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,” Shor said.
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While he argued it is still too early to explain exactly why, Shor observed there are similar patterns in countries like Canada, the U.K., and Norway.
“There’s a lot of research to do here, but it’s still very striking,” Shor said. “It’s similar to how a lot of people talk about the Democratic young men problem — and it’s still somehow underrated, because the actual numbers are just a lot worse than people think.”
Klein noted numerous factors at play in recent years, ranging from the #MeToo movement and the rise of the Manosphere, to how “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.”
Shor responded by stressing again that “this seems to be a global phenomenon,” saying he seeks to focus on the “broader cultural shifts.”
After discussing a theory that part of the polarization may be driven by how men and women are interacting with wildly different content on social media, Klein spoke again about how Democratic narratives about an ascendant majority from younger generations have fallen apart.
“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,” he said.
“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,” Klein added.
“I have to admit, I was one of those liberals four years ago, and it seems I was wrong,” Shor replied. “The future has a way of surprising us.”
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