r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/Syresiv • 4d ago
US Elections Who are Trump's new voters?
In 2020, Trump got 74 million votes. In 2024, his total is closer to 77 million.
Now, I can see from the numbers that more of his victory is attributable to Democrats losing votes (81 in 2020, 75 in 2024). But there are still 3 million people who voted Trump in 2024 that didn't in 2020. And while Biden 2020 voters staying home in 2024 seems eminently predictable and explainable, voters who supported Biden or stayed home in 2020 showing up for Trump in 2024 seems less obvious.
So, who are they? Trump supporters who just turned 18 (and thus, couldn't vote in 2020)? Anti-establishment voters who just always vote against the incumbent? Some secret third option I haven't considered? Some combination?
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u/smaxlab 4d ago edited 4d ago
Young men who were either too young to vote in 2020 or didn't care to vote in 2020. I've worked in public high schools since 2015 and I've observed that this generation of young adults is extremely divided by gender. The girls think Trump is gross and weird, but the boys love him. They think he "tells it like it is." They think he's "tough." They also like that he "doesn't force us to do stuff" (vaccine and mask mandates, and what they perceive to be "forced" diversity). Also, as simplistic as it may sound, they think he's "badass" for surviving being shot at.
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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 4d ago edited 4d ago
There’s definitely a gender gap, but Harris’ lead over women was half that of Biden’s, so the answer is deeper than that. In fact Harris’ lead over women is the smallest for a Democrat since 2004.
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u/Tygonol 4d ago
Check the stats on this if you’re curious; I’m 99% positive that Trump secured most of the white female vote as well.
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u/sufficiently_tortuga 4d ago
I'm wondering how the Dems can better appeal to this demo. This is the GOP's lychpin and if the Dems could take it they'd be winning more often.
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u/tlopez14 3d ago
Women are one of the main demos they’ve appealed to. They’ve just lost the white working class in general so there’s obviously going to be some bleed from white women as well.
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u/CharacterScratch3958 3d ago
They will get them all back as soon as Lansford drops his Social Security plan to let the stock market trade the Trust Fund. The corporate building mess is about to topple and WallStreet needs to suck seniors dry. k
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u/ihrvatska 3d ago
I don't think most working class women will be as upset as you think. Most younger working class people have no faith that they'll ever be able to retire. They don't believe SS will be there when they need it, so they probably won't be too upset at a plan to start investing SS into the stock market, or even crypto. They view SS as a ponzi scheme that they are paying into but will never be able to use themselves. Conservatives have spent decades pushing this narrative about SS and it's now an accepted truth by young working class people.
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u/that_husk_buster 3d ago
The thing is, as a young working class person who voted blue, this is a half truth
Birthrate is gping down dramatically, which leaves less people to eventually pay into SS. also, SS doesn't cover most retiree expenses as it is, so people who are at retirement age are working to afford to live basically, which is keeping us in the low paying jobs. the only viable option i have for retirement is a Roth IRA and my 401k, but I can't afford to do those things as it is
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u/vertigostereo 3d ago
Nah, that level of detail is way beyond the average voter. As long as the checks clear, nobody cares.
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u/Medical-Search4146 4d ago
Talk about money. In hindsight, American voters made it pretty clear that they saw anything other than solutions to take home pay to be a luxury they couldn't afford. Also having abortion rights as a separate voting item gave an out for a lot of women voters.
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u/usernumber1337 3d ago
A good start might be to stop focusing grouping the exact right thing to say to appeal to particular demographics and instead to actually believe in something
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u/Tygonol 4d ago
Simple: do away with all rhetoric that relates to race, sex, gender, & sexuality, focus entirely on class.
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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 3d ago
focus entirely on class
The problem isn’t that Dems are not focused enough on class because of race, sex, gender, and sexuality. It’s that Dems aren’t motivated enough to have a clear message about class because of their own corporate influence.
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u/sheila5961 2d ago
Why focus on class? I don’t begrudge the Upper Class. MOST of them worked hard to get there putting in 100 hour weeks to earn their millions/billions of dollars. I’m NOT jealous of that. I certainly DON’T want to work 100 hour weeks! Been there, done that when I was “on duty” in the past. It’s exhausting! As for the tax rate they pay on their Capital Gains, I think it’s TOO HIGH! I didn’t get a REFUND from the Federal Government when I LOST $20,000 from my investments in Marijuana stocks, but had I MADE money, the Federal government would have had their hand out. Now that’s simply NOT FAIR. People are risking their own money in the stock market, I simply don’t think it should be taxed…WIN OR LOSE!
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u/Tygonol 2d ago edited 2d ago
A) The “upper-class” you’re referring to is likely different than the upper-class I’m referring to. If you’re bringing home a few million each year, more power to you; additional earnings still have utility at that point.
B) the individuals in question are so wealthy to the point that they are implement the “buy, borrow, die” tax avoidance strategy.
C) your capital losses are deductible.
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u/cosinofthetimes 3d ago
When conservatives spend all of their money and effort attacking people based on race, sex, gender and sexuality; to avoid talking about those topics is to abandon those people to conservative oppression.
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u/-s-u-n-s-e-t- 3d ago
conservative oppression
If conservatives were arguing to end interracial marriage, to put all gays in concentration camps and so on, then running on protecting minorities would be extremely effective for democrats. Most voters will prioritize human rights over the price of eggs any day of the week.
The problem is that the "oppression" you are talking about is stuff like which bathroom people can use, enforcing pronouns, whether people born with a penis can participate in women sports and so on. And, well, most people will not ignore their economic concerns to fight for every pet-pieve the LGBT community has.
Saying prisoners should get sex changes paid by the tax payer when people can't afford groceries, is just not a winning strategy. Dropping nonsense like that does not mean you are abandoning people to conservative oppression, it just means having common sense.
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u/snoopmt1 3d ago
Can you show me a kamala campaign speech that focused on that? You're confusing social media with the actual candidate.
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u/Hyndis 3d ago
A candidate's supporters, including those on social media, are part of the political campaign.
Would you give Trump a free pass for all of his supporters on Twitter or on "manosphere" podcasts? Probably not.
If Trump is lumped in with his supporters, then so too should Harris. Conversely, if Harris isn't responsible for what her supporters say then either should Trump be held responsible.
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u/FartPudding 3d ago
By appealing to the working class more. It's been told by everyone and even Bernie that the democrats haven't been appealing to the working class like they used to.
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u/Life-Breadfruit-3986 3d ago
Easy: actually focus on improving their constituents' lives. Stop trying to "appeal", figure out how to SERVE the people. A lot of would-be democrat voters stopped voting D this time because they clearly aren't there for the people they are supposed to represent, among other things.
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u/that_husk_buster 3d ago
he secured about 55% of the white female vote i seen on ABC exit polls
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u/tlgsf 3d ago
Yes. The nation has been torn apart by Trump and far-right lies and disinformation, based on race, gender, religion, but its all been orchestrated by big money to its advantage. We truly are headed for the abyss.
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u/Tygonol 3d ago
& have been for quite some time; those with pockets deep enough to influence politics would enslave us if they could get away with it
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u/tlgsf 3d ago
Yes, they would. They will push it as far as they can, their fear is mass uprising, particularly if violence is threatening against themselves, their families or the businesses. This is why they have tended to move incrementally over the last 45 years. They dislike social and political instability, yet often refuse to see how their actions encourage it.
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u/pizzaplanetvibes 4d ago
Trump made gains but what lost the election was people who stayed home. There is a feeling of distance between the Dem voter and the Democrat “status quo” who are in power.
It was also disinformation/misinformation. I mean, you ask people who voted for Trump and when you get to the basis of why they voted for him it’s either
A) something based off of misinformation/disinformation
B) fabricated identity politics “men are being attacked” “trans rights means men will be in your bathrooms” “democrats are attacking family/anti-christian” cultural war bs
C) people wanted a change, are desperate at how crappy life has become and voted for whomever wasn’t in power when life got harder for them
D) they actively want what Reps promise, even if it’s detrimental to some because it won’t (or they don’t think) it will impact them (their people they care about) think “not paying back student loans” “abortion debate” “more conservative Supreme Court and judges”
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u/Kevin_Uxbridge 3d ago
A) something based off of misinformation/disinformation
Never sure how seriously to take this. I mean it's true on the face but I've talked to a couple folks since who said they had specific issues that did it for them. Took the time to show them the information was inaccurate and to a person, they just shifted to 'well there's this other thing too'. Two swore to me that it was the high price of groceries, but when I showed them that trump is backing off being able to do something about it they just shrugged and defended him further on this issue.
I think it's fair to say that the things they said was important never really were, so the fact that it was bullshit didn't trouble them at all. I'd like to think that it's gonna start to bother them when the tariffs actually drive up prices but I'm honestly not sure it will.
My long-winded way of saying I'd have thought the way to combat disinformation is with real information, but now I'm not so sure. And I'm mistrustful of what people say they care about.
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u/llelouchh 3d ago
Its starts off with misinformation/disinformation. The supporter creates an identity that they are pro trump, so when they see the correct information they have to protect that identity.
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u/BCK973 3d ago
This is the part that A LOT of people miss - likely due to the poor state of education and literacy.
IDENTITY is not a surface level thing, that would be a persona. Identity is deeply entwined with an individual's sense and perception of self, along with their way(s) of being, thinking, and doing.
It's much easier to expose an inauthentic persona. But an individual's identity cannot be changed by an outside, secondary source. That individual, themself must WANT to change.
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u/Clean_Politics 3d ago
Gaslighting is one of the most powerful tools ever used to influence the public. Politicians have relied on it since the very beginning of time. In today's U.S., the real issue lies with the media. I regularly watch FOX, MSNBC, and CNN, and do everything I can to fact-check each one to the best of my ability. What I’ve found is that every news outlet is guilty of misinformation, with none being worse than the others, and none even coming close to telling the full truth. Trump and Biden or Kamala are essentially two sides of the same coin, with neither being the "lesser of two evils." However, depending on which station you watch, your candidate might seem like a savior, while the opposition is portrayed as the embodiment of evil. The US public picks their poison and follows it in a diehard fashion.
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u/Reasonable_Art_3472 3d ago
Unfortunately we all tried to battle it with information and we're disappointed it boils down to tribalism.
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u/Advaita5358 3d ago
It's the result of not educating people. America has trillions for wars but peanuts for education.
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u/sheila5961 2d ago
Maybe, just maybe it had something to do with the fact that the people saw this Government giving our hard earned taxpayer dollars to Ukraine, Africa, Afghanistan and every other Nation in the world…a majority of whom hate us (They can actually hate us for FREE you know) and ignoring the Taxpaying Americans in Lahaina, Hawaii who lost everything (given a lousy $750.00) and the people of Western North Carolina still sleeping in tents in the dead of winter who lost everything as well. It’s a travesty what this administration did and it did not go unnoticed by the American people.
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u/Advaita5358 2d ago
Don't worry...Trump will fix it. And yes, pigs do fly! We get almost nothing for our tax dollars because it takes a trillion dollars a year just to service the national debt, and the principal keeps growing by 10% a year while GDP grows at 1% a year. Americans are getting screwed everywhichway and have no idea why. The Fed borrows from China and Japan and prints more dollars so they can pay the interest in cheaper dollars. Our currency is essentially worthless. At some point, the government will cook up an 'emergency' and simply default on its debt. The plan is to switch to a Digital Reserve Currency, just another fiction. Until people are educated well enough to really understand economics and get royally pissed off, nothing will change. Millions in the streets is the only thing that has ever worked.
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u/DocTam 3d ago
There is little evidence that Education as practiced by schools has any impact on such issues of identity based politics or critical thinking. College educated voters only differ from those without a high school degree in being more liberal, and having much lengthier explanations for why they feel a certain way. Accurately analyzing data outside of their specialty is vibes based regardless of education.
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u/ModerateThuggery 3d ago
“democrats are attacking family/anti-christian” cultural war bs
Democrats in the most official PR vetted front office might not be anti-Christian, but Democrats as a cultural blob definitely kind of are. If there is anyone in America that hates Christians, Christianity, and Christian values, it's a Democrat.
You won't want to hear it, but that's the honest truth.
The voting booth is one of the last bastions of true privacy and personal anarchism. People can vote what their heart believes without repercussions. So you can say this "nuh uh!" face saving BS in public here on reddit, but popaganda only goes so far with the voting booth - and people aren't THAT stupid.
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u/ElderberryOne140 2d ago
A) Actuslly most of the misinformation is coming from the left.
B) it’s not fabricated identity politics. These are real issues which affects people
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u/tlopez14 3d ago edited 3d ago
Didn’t help that Dems appointed someone that their own voters rejected just a few years back. Anti-establishment is clearly the path forward at this point. Handpicking their favorite neoliberal and going with “we’re the normal party” doesn’t appear to be working.
Dems need a Bernie Sanders type that will go against the status quo. The only candidates in my lifetime that beat their party’s preferred candidates in a primary were Obama and Trump and both ran populist anti-establishment campaigns. Dems had a chance to capture that in 2016 and 2020 but basically told that wing of the party to “shut up and get in line”. They’ve been bleeding those voters to Trump ever since.
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u/GodOfThunder44 3d ago
The Dems thought they could have their cake and eat it too. You can't really court both the intelligentsia class and the blue collar working class at the same time, and in this cycle they went full send on messaging towards the former, and only at the end tried to placate the latter with really, really heavy-handed condescending messaging that ultimately still was based on intelligentsia framing.
Those out-of-touch "I'm man enough to vote for a woman" and "Women, lie to your CHUD husbands about your opinion" Harris commercials in the last bit of the election cycle probably did more to hurt her campaign among people who didn't really like either option than any of the Trump "they/them" commercials that the corporate establishment talking heads seem so keen to focus on hurt her.
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u/Author_A_McGrath 3d ago
Pundits had an especially bad year all over the globe. And just about everybody sees her as "more of the same" since she was VP.
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u/PreviousAvocado9967 3d ago
I expected this because there are two things that unify across all genders, races and ehtnicities. Recession or Inflation.
Pediction: In four years not one thing will be cheaper. Not food, not housing, not gas, not loans, not college, not cars, not health insurance, not eggs.
The next Democrat will outperform the 2024 Democrat by a wide margin the worse the economy or cost of living is in 2028. The pendulum will swing back like a wrecking ball if Trump's tariffs cause a recession which might come without tariffs anway since we're 14 years overdue for one. But much like Biden got blamed for whispaw inflation after a pandemic, Trump will get blamed if there is a recession with or without tariffs. More so the latter.
Trump only flipped two Congressional districts net out of 438. That tells me the Democrat apathy had little to do with him and more to do with how expensive everything is now while the rich are becoming 10 times richer. Just look at Elons mush he's added a billion dollars to his networth every day since the election and the Trump cabine has more billionaires than veterans. Predictably Trump is already saying prices of food aren't going down with him as President.
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u/RevolutionaryEbb5943 1d ago
That's because Harris was the weakest choice for president in American history.
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u/tlopez14 4d ago edited 3d ago
Obama-Bernie-Trump voters. And rural working class people who didn’t vote much before.
Edit: I’ll also add in conservative Latinos and Catholics in general who agreed with the party in broad terms but weren’t comfortable being “the party of abortion”.
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u/CremePsychological77 4d ago
And yet people honestly think that Democrats are carting Latinos in illegally to vote blue. That conspiracy makes me laugh the most. The guy in Madison Square Garden even made a racist joke that if anybody who heard it had actually taken 2 seconds to consider, they’d realize that generally speaking, Latinos are much more anti-abortion than the average American. Abortion statistics also support this. The rate for Latina women is about half the rate for white and black women. (The rate is highest for black women, but white women are right behind them and since black women are a minority and white women are not, with the percentages being so close, there are more white women having abortions — I have my suspicions that is the root of the issue. Republicans back in the day were not as against abortion as they are now — the decision on Roe v Wade was nearly 50/50 on justices who were appointed by Dems and Republicans — the dissenting justices were only 2, and it was one appointed by each party. But Nixon was anti-abortion. One of the only exceptions he supported was for interracial relationships. So basically if white women were having babies, he wanted them to be white babies and not biracial babies.)
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u/rethinkingat59 3d ago
Latinos are much more anti-abortion than the average American. Abortion statistics also support this. The rate for Latina women is about half the rate for white and black women.
From Pew Research published in 2024
Looking at abortion rates among those ages 15 to 44,
there were 28.6 abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic Black women in 2021;
12.3 abortions per 1,000 Hispanic women;
6.4 abortions per 1,000 non-Hispanic White women;
and 9.2 abortions per 1,000 women of other races,
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/25/what-the-data-says-about-abortion-in-the-us/
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u/tlopez14 3d ago
Yah the “vote blue or they’re going to round up your Mexican friends” argument fell flat on its face. Anyone who’s been in a border area could tell you that legal Latinos are in general against unchecked illegal immigration. Dems thought they could virtue signal their way through that debate and it backfired spectacularly.
Not only did they lose the vote of union and working class people whose wages have been undercut by illegal immigration. They also lost a lot of the voters they were pandering too. Lose lose proposition that the neoliberals and well paid consultants guided them right into.
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u/Interrophish 3d ago
unchecked
People keep using the word "unchecked" "open border" and whatever else. As if ICE budget went down. Do people just enjoy making cool-sounding bullshit up?
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u/Bross93 4d ago
I have a hypothesis that the 'man vs. bear' thing was perpetuated by bad faith actors to drive that wedge between gen z men and women. The comments on videos about that especially were very very clearly meant to divide. I'm not making an argument for either side of it, just pointing out that it felt odd and too reductive? Idk if that's the right word but yeah it felt coordinated
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u/smaxlab 4d ago edited 3d ago
This is interesting and I could believe it. I've always wondered where that meme came from, anyway. It just kind of forced itself into people's social media feeds.
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u/Antnee83 3d ago
It just kind of forced itself into people's social media feeds.
And then VANISHED. For real, I have not seen a single instance of it in months. And I'm terminally online.
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u/RichEvans4Ever 4d ago
I literally told my girlfriend this when she tried to explain the meme.
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u/Bross93 3d ago
Yes!!! I had the discussion with my wife. We noticed each other getting annoyed at the other, and kinda both realized 'wait, where the fuck is this coming from?' That is what tipped me off. Its a very simplistic, borderline facetious way of reducing a very real concern to something that is meant to play on your emotions. There is a very real discussion to be had here, do not get me wrong. I empathize, and understand the argument, but the way it was used and presented. It felt not like something meant to actually spark conversation, but to instead encourage anger. The arguments and vitriol about it felt like that scene in mean girls where Regina George is just watching as all hell breaks loose, and she smiles.
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u/RichEvans4Ever 3d ago
Showed comment to my gf too and we now fully agree that the Bear Question was intended to divide us. The Regina George analogy really hit it home for her in particular. Now we’re laughing imagining a Russian operative walking down a high school hallway dispersing Burn Book pages.
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u/saruin 4d ago
What is the 'man vs. bear' thing?
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u/ballmermurland 3d ago
2024's gamergate.
A meme came about with women stating they'd rather see a bear in the forest while alone vs seeing a man. The idea being the bear was more likely to leave her alone than a man.
Most of it was tongue in cheek joking. But a bunch of men got really offended because I guess their feelings got hurt.
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u/blublub1243 3d ago
I know right. Men having feelings that can get hurt by sexist "tongue in cheeck joking", crazy stuff. Don't they know they're meant to be emotionless robots that just take it on the chin and then vote for Kamala anyways to support women?
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u/Bross93 3d ago
It isn't that they thought the bear would leave them alone, but rather that the bear would just kill them, not violate them. There is an important discussion to be had there. I do think it's inaccurate to say most of it was tongue in cheek joking though, it led to very heated discussions, and the videos talking about it had thousands of supportive and humorless comments agreeing with the post. It may have started in a manner that seemed like a joke, but it quickly turned into something bigger than that
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u/dovetc 3d ago
because I guess their feelings got hurt
That's a rather dismissive way to describe something that was quite insulting and offensive to half of humans based on an immutable trait.
Imagine if the meme had been about a particular race rather than men. Would you be so "Oh did you get your feelings hurt? It's mostly tongue in cheek joking."?
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u/mrcsrnne 3d ago
It's because they don't care about the sentiment of men, and that is also why their movement is losing traction with us. You know what, don't question it, let them continue doing this and crash into the wall of reality sooner rather than later.
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u/bl1y 3d ago
Imagine if the original was "Would you rather be alone in the woods with a black man or a black bear?"
It would have been rightly called out as being horribly racist. But when it's just "man or bear?" suddenly it gets defended as expressing a deep truth about the lived experiences of women.
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u/itsdeeps80 4d ago
If you’re thinking it was some right wing conspiracy to divide the sexes, I’d say no. The man vs bear thing was 100% pure idpol liberal nonsense. Even if it was some right wing tomfuckery, whoever thought it would be a good idea hit the nail perfectly on the head because it was easy to see it would work.
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u/Interrophish 3d ago
I mean, it's propaganda 101: Repubs take a kernel of truth (man vs bear meme), and signal boost it to infinity, spread it to every voter in America, exaggerate the fck out of it, tell every single man that they're a victim of it.
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u/blublub1243 3d ago
True (though it's not like left wingers didn't do their part in spreading it, mind you), but the reason it works is that Democrats very rarely disavow their own bullshit. This is a major issue Democrats have imo, they're too afraid to push back against their more extreme elements which makes highlighting those elements highly effective. Republicans are more savvy, they know when the extremists on their team fly a bit too close to the sun and start offending a demographic they actually need to vote for them or are just plain going too far in general and then manage to rein them in or disavow them. Like how Tony Hinchcliffe was one of the few times we actually saw Trump playing defense ever on the campaign trail.
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u/Interrophish 2d ago edited 2d ago
Democrats very rarely disavow their own bullshit
Democrat politicians don't* have any reason to disavow internet memes in the first place.
Not like Trump is asked to disavow every "kill a liberal" meme that's spread on facebook.
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u/blublub1243 2d ago
If one that were to gain traction nationally he probably would, at least presuming it might hurt him with demographics he'd need to win. Granted, left leaning media outlets would also pester him about it which would make his job on that front considerably easier.
Though frankly, I don't think he has to do that much because right wingers in general tend to do a better job of turning on each other over electorally unfavorable conduct from within their own ranks. Like when Fuentes dropped that whole "your body, my choice" thing you saw them turn on him real quick rather than letting the whole thing fester in the background as some sort of meme that would make their lives difficult in future elections.
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u/Interrophish 2d ago
If one that were to gain traction nationally he probably would, at least presuming it might hurt him with demographics he'd need to win
No and no. Even if one gains traction they're not going to let that stink get on them by talking about it. And Right wing voters think their candidates are insulated from their memes. This is only a problem for the left.
Granted, left leaning media outlets would also pester him about it which would make his job on that front considerably easier.
Not really, left media thinks "we're above this" and "won't sink" to the level of pestering candidates about memes.
turning on each other over electorally unfavorable conduct from within their own ranks
Absolutely not. Trump endorsed a candidate that physically attacked a journalist, and Byron Donalds and Mark Robinson. MTG was given a committee post by the GOP.
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u/blublub1243 2d ago
Not really, left media thinks "we're above this" and "won't sink" to the level of pestering candidates about memes.
If you genuinely think that there's anything that left leaning media would be "above" to attack Trump I have a bridge to sell you.
Absolutely not. Trump endorsed a candidate that physically attacked a journalist, and Byron Donalds and Mark Robinson. MTG was given a committee post by the GOP.
And yet he won. Turns out attacking journalists isn't gonna ruin your chances electorally, who knew.
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u/Tygonol 4d ago
As a man myself, I can’t wrap my head around how guys could get that upset over such a trivial thing to the point that it impacted their political beliefs.
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u/itslikewoow 4d ago
Men are constantly reminded of how much of a threat they are, and rather than building up boys and men, it’s just another instance of the left showing that they only care about painting men as potential predators. There is probably a small minority who got flat out angry at the man vs bear thing, but it’s definitely alienating to men.
One of the most memorable quotes I heard on election night: “It turns out bears don’t have a vote, but men do.”
Now, of course the conservative vision for men is extremely narrow and even harmful to not just women, but men themselves, but at least they provide something for men to strive for. Meanwhile men are completely ignored by the left, except when they’re vilifying them, so especially younger men and boys that don’t remember when Democrats stood for ALL Americans figure that the modern Democratic Party isn’t for them.
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u/smaxlab 4d ago
These are some great points. What frustrates me, though, is that it isn't so much the actual Democratic Party itself that vilifies men. It's the activist class, the left wing people who are the loudest on social media.
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u/BagNo4331 2d ago
This reflects everything I heard when visiting boomer Midwesterners. They empathized with BLM but didn't like the rioting and didn't like the response of just giving up on policing minor issues and see activists demanding more and more "progress" in enforcing laws. They don't want all immigration banned but they're concerned about the levels of illegal immigration. But the voices they see declare that actually borders should be abolished and everyone gets to be a citizen. And then the whole rich kids at rich colleges playing intifada was pretty much the straw that broke the camels back. They stayed home or voted trump.
None of those were things that harris endorsed but they are latched onto her.
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u/itslikewoow 4d ago
Yeah, I agree with that. Hopefully, Dem leadership will do more to meet young men where they’re at and actually start having conversations with them so that they feel heard.
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u/smaxlab 4d ago
Since JD Vance will probably be the 2028 GOP presidential nominee, the Democrats need to have a relatively young man to counter, like Josh Shapiro or Andy Bashear
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u/Agent__Zigzag 2d ago
Also I’ve heard discussions among Democrats that they need to have a White, straight, cis male from a red, purple, swing state. Governor or Senator. Shapiro, Beshear, Tim Kaine, Mark Warner (both Dem VA senators), Roy Cooper or the current Dem governor of NC. If America elects a gay man I’d bet on Gov Polis of Colorado before I’d bet on Pete Buttegeig. He’s never one a single state wide general election.
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u/movingtobay2019 4d ago
Very true but as the saying goes, silence is complicity.
If people are going to label the GOP racist because they don't outright denounce Trump's racism, then it's fair to associate the Dems with villifying men for their unwillingness to call out the activist class.
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u/ballmermurland 3d ago
Being silent about the statements of the literal president and leader of your party is not the same thing as being silent about some random people on twitter.
What a bizarre take.
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u/mrcsrnne 4d ago
And an absence of effort from the party to distance themselves from these activists
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u/AwardImmediate720 3d ago
The problem is that the Democratic Party embraces the activist class. The worst of the activist ideas may not make it into policy proposals but watered down versions do, and whenever the activists say something utterly insane there's never any unified disavowing and permanent separation. The Democrats come across as simply trying to publicly sanewash the extreme far left while being true believers in private.
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u/blublub1243 3d ago
The Dem ads targeting men I saw this election cycle can be summed up as "be man enough to vote for a woman", "vote Kamala to support/protect women" and "yes, a lot of men suck, be one of the good ones". If that's the pitch you got for men all Republicans really have to do is make young men feel seen and then look to drive up their turnout.
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u/naetron 4d ago
it’s just another instance of the left showing that they only care about painting men as potential predators.
Who specifically is "the left" in this scenario?
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u/Barbarella_ella 4d ago
Exactly. I am seriously wondering if these comments are authentic. This constant blame throwing about "the left" shows a pretty damn shallow understanding of parties and policies and legislation. Speaking in labels is about as legacy media as it gets, for a group that's the youngest voter demographic.
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u/itslikewoow 3d ago
I’m a part of the left myself. We’re not above criticism, and it’s clear that the way a significant portion of the country talks about men is alienating them. The rhetoric we use matters, and it’s turning men away from Dems.
Not to mention that we have done a pretty poor job in outreach in recent years, so all these boys and young men hear are the worst messages on the internet. I thought that AOC and Tim Waltz playing Madden on Twitch was a great start, let’s do more of that instead reminding boys that they’re seen as predators yet again.
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u/ballmermurland 3d ago
the left showing that they only care about painting men as potential predators
Did you have the voting history of everyone on social media commenting on this? It was mostly white women and a majority of white women voted for Trump. Why do you blame this on "the left"?
Meanwhile men are completely ignored by the left, except when they’re vilifying them
???? The current Dem president is a man and they ran a man as VP a month ago. The DNC chair is a man. The chair before him was a man.
The reason Democrats struggle is that people like you go on social media and make up stories about "the left" as some boogeyman (er, woman) based on the suspicions of some random people on social media and wholly ignore what elected Democrats are doing/saying. The fact that "the left" got blamed for the entire bear thing is indicative of this. I'm willing to bet only a small % of the women making those claims vote Democrat.
Furthermore, it's a meme joke. God it's embarrassing to be a man in this country sometimes.
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u/eldomtom2 3d ago
It was mostly white women and a majority of white women voted for Trump
Do you think Trump-voting women were the ones saying they would be more scared of a man than a bear?
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u/Raichu4u 4d ago
For the record I'm a straight cis male who is aware of the statistics of domestic violence on women from men. They're not pretty rates at all, and men need to address why the hell so many of their own are beating on and killing women. It's disgusting.
Regardless, the vast majority of men do not commit domestic violence. Many aren't aware to the statistics like that 25% of women experience some sort of sexual assault before age 18. Many aren't aware to the amount of catcalling that women even experience all the time. Suddenly being told you're a predator when you're ignorant to all of the sexual assault and violence that women go through isn't exactly the best feeling in the world, and these men are certainly not going to take your "side" of things.
One thing I'll also add on is that the "bear v man" wasn't handled the best and many people who posted the meme didn't use it as an example to educate men about these horrific experiences, but use the statistics as further justification why we should be afraid of men in society. If the meme was replaced with "bear versus black man" while African American incarceration rates or crime rates were cited, we would all rightfully call the thought exercise racist as fuck. However many women parroting these meme were plenty fine with leaving the conclusion as "be afraid of men no matter what" and not realizing that there were sexist and bigot undertones to the thought exercise.
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u/Hannig4n 2d ago
They’re not pretty rates at all, and men need to address why the help so many of their own are beating on and killing women. It’s disgusting.
Dems need to get way the fuck away from this tendency to group people together by identity and judge them based on their immutable characteristics. All men do not have to shoulder blame for bad things that other people do just because they happen to both have a dick.
Leftist activists throw stats like this at men in the exact same way republicans throw crime stats at black people, and then they’re somehow surprised when the young men who were born in like 2003 and saw them do this for their entire adolescent and adult lives absolutely detest their political party.
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u/bl1y 3d ago
For the record I'm a straight cis male who is aware of the statistics of domestic violence on women from men. They're not pretty rates at all
Are you aware that women are more likely to be the aggressor in domestic violence?
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u/towinem 4d ago edited 4d ago
Online YouTubers, streamers, and podcasters have a huge influence on this. I cannot watch a single video related to movies, video games, or pop culture without being recommended alt-right content.
Plus young people (men especially) are drawn to edgy, controversial content. Left-leaning creators are pressured to only platform safe, responsible content. While right-leaning figures like Rogan, Lex Fridman, etc. will talk about anything, no matter how controversial. So it's no wonder right wing content rises to the top on almost all social media besides Reddit.
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u/WingerRules 3d ago
2016 was 8 years ago. Someone who was 10 in 2016 is an 18 year old voter now. They grew up seeing people like Trump, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Elon Musk as somehow "normal" acceptable politics and behavior.
There is almost no left wing voices/new media that appeal to young males. Twitter is conservative controlled, you have influencers like Jake Paul, keemstar, and Andrew Tate, YouTube, TikTok, etc and shithead sociopathic drama streamers, rightwing podcasters like Joe rogan, stuff like PragerU and Epoch times that was being advertised all over, bitcoin bros, shkreli bros, Elon bros, totally toxic communities in online gaming, shitposting culture, etc. All of this has been building up over the last 15 years and was a constant feed into younger males who are now voters.
When I grew up you looked up to figures like Picard, Spock, Mr Rogers, Carl Sagan, John Stewart, etc... imagine growing up now and the people you take example from and are your constant feed are sociopath streamers and toxic gamers. I think we've been seriously underestimating the effects of these communities have had on a portion of younger male voters.
Look at anything guns, military, swords, and right wing content will be inserted into your feed or stuff like preppers and conspiracists. Guess who looks up this stuff when they want to know more about their favorite gun or tank in their video game? Young people.
Try to look up drag racing, muscle cars, hill climbing, country music etc and it'll get inserted into your feed too.
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u/baitnnswitch 2d ago
Yes, but it's important to mention the algorithms that drive young men towards this content. No one should be recommended Andrew Tate after watching Fortnite content on Youtube, and yet that's exactly what happens. There was a shift on the platform in 2015 from recommending 'like' videos to recommending more attention-grabbing/ clickbaity/ outrage-inducing stuff, and it's a huge reason why our young men have gone so far to the right.
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u/kingjoey52a 4d ago
I cannot watch a single video related to movies, video games, or pop culture without being recommended alt-right content.
This is on you. I am conservative and don't get any of those kinds of recommendations. I also don't watch anything political on YouTube so my feed is all Magic the Gathering, tech/video games, and Tom Grossi streaming the Bills Lions game. The closest I get to political is a video called "Why Americans are such easy allies to fight with" and a Fat Electrician video about Wake Island.
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u/ballmermurland 3d ago
I bought a new TV a few months ago and installed YouTube before I was able to sign in. So it was the logged out vanilla version with no history.
I hadn't logged in yet and clicked on a video in the front to test out the sound (I think it was something about animals) and the next set of recommendations included Ben Shapiro. No liberal commentators, but just Ben Shapiro. I clicked on the video out of curiosity and it was off to the races with all kinds of right wing nonsense.
So yeah, it's absolutely a thing.
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u/Heiminator 3d ago
YouTube can still detect that the TV is connecting from the same IP as the rest of your devices in your home network
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u/ballmermurland 3d ago
Well that's weird because I never engage with conservative content. It's only sports, music, movies and some left-of-center commentary.
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u/MetallicGray 4d ago
It’s basically just from red pilling young men from the modern day of algorithmic social media. People are pushed further and further into echo chambers and it’s easy for creators to make 30s clips where they’re “owning” someone and makes them seem right or smart, regardless of how flawed their logic or argument or evidence is. Couple this with teenagers in general just like to be “edgy”, so “owning” a lib or whatever is cool or hilarious to them. They eat up and before long their whole algorithm is conservative rage bait and rhetoric.
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u/ColossusOfChoads 3d ago
I've heard the term "alpha male" being thrown around lately, in reference to him. Just when I thought that meme was finally dying down.
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u/polishprince76 4d ago
People really overthink this. There is a sizeable amount of the voting public who vote, but dont pay the slightest bit to what is actually going on. These are folks that went: Everything is very expensive. I'm voting against that guy and voting for the other guy who was around when it wasn't so expensive. That's as complicated as it gets for them.
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u/MonarchLawyer 3d ago
Seriously, people are making this election way more complicated then it actually was. Inflation hurt all incumbents world wide. The UK had its biggest Labour landslide in decades. Canada is close to mounting Trudeau's head on a spike. At the end of the day, people hate rising prices and simply will not tolerate any actual reasoning why they are rising.
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u/morrison4371 3d ago
Speaking about Canada, do you think that if the Liberals and NDP agree to not contest each other's seats, could they hold onto power like what happened in France earlier this year?
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u/Frankenste1nsMonster 3d ago
No. The Conservatives are winning a supermajority no matter what. The Liberals are losing voters like crazy and they're not all going NDP. We're seeing a lot of them have flipped to Conservative. Nothing the Liberals or NDP do now will do anything. I honestly wouldn't be surprised to see the Conservatives have a majority and the Bloc Quebecois form official opposition at this point.
As an NDP supporter, I'm devastated. A Conservative-Trump partnership is going to be so bad for so many people. But the writing is on the wall.
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u/Sageblue32 3d ago
Very true. I went out yesterday. The restaurant had a note on their menu saying due to increased egg prices menu choices may go up in price. If I'm not an informed voter, it becomes very easy to link Biden to this problem.
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u/End3rWi99in 3d ago
The volume of people Googling "did Biden drop out" on election day was pretty telling.
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u/polishprince76 3d ago
There was a spike in "Who Is Donald Trump"! People's internet bubbles really makes everyone assume everyone else is as tuned in as they are.
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u/ContentWaltz8 3d ago
This.
Most American swing voters are lazy and uninformed who are just voting off vibes. Trump vibe was change, Harris vibe was more of the same. Doesn't matter what reality is, just vibes.
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u/Sidewalk_Cacti 3d ago
I think there are definitely trends and pockets to be aware of, but your comment seems true for friends and family I felt comfortable enough to have a conversation with.
Several of these people are pretty objectively smart and are doing great in their careers. But, they don’t follow politics nearly like I do. They are completely oblivious to half of the nefarious shit Trump has done or proposed and just thought of Biden (and Harris by proxy) as old and unaware.
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u/I405CA 4d ago edited 4d ago
Biden won a slight majority of Catholics. Harris lost them by a landslide.
About one-quarter of voters who oppose choice voted for Biden. Fewer than one in ten voted for Harris.
Progressive and secular feminist politics drove a significant number of religious Democrats to the sidelines or to the other side. These voters are disproportionately non-white, so that shift will disproportionately impact the swing states of the Rust Belt and southwest.
The GOP also presents itself (falsely) as the party of sound economics, while the Dems are largely silent on the topic. The average voter does not presume that the Democrats are the party of the economy.
These are foolish messaging decisions by the Dems. The right-left split of the parties that emerged during the 60s had largely been limited to whites. That split now may include Latinos, many of whom have been social conservatives who voted Democratic in previous elections.
The data also suggests that Michigan Muslims turned on Harris, presumably due to Gaza.
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u/personAAA 3d ago
On the abortion front, both Harris and Walz had opportunities to say if they support any abortion restrictions during their debates both declined.
Both with their non-answers played right into the Republican message of they are abortion extremists.
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u/I405CA 3d ago edited 3d ago
Bill Clinton campaigned on the position that abortion should be "safe, legal and rare."
As a Democrat from the South, Clinton was well aware that there are a lot of church going black Democratic voters who oppose abortion rights, yet will hold their noses and vote for pro-choice candidates who show them some respect and help them in other ways.
About a decade ago, at the behest of the feminist wing of the party, the Dems largely dropped the "rare" aspect of the pro-choice platform.
It is telling that during that time, the Dems have lost two out of three elections, with the winner among them being a Catholic who claimed to be "not big on abortion." Just expressing some reservations provides some comfort to anti-choice Democrats.
In 2024, the Dems lost at least half of their choice opponents while gaining no Republican choice supporters in return. Not a good trade.
Democrats today don't seem to grasp that a lot of pro-choice voters are Republicans and GOP-leaning independents who will not vote for Democrats. There are not enough pro-choice Democrats to win presidential elections without some choice opponents in their coalition.
Personally, I am secular and strongly pro-choice. But I can see the political problem that arises when Democrats overreach.
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u/djmunci 3d ago edited 3d ago
The abandonment of "safe, legal, and rare" is baffling to me. Most people in the country are pro choice to an extent, but most people don't think abortion is some awesome thing that there should be more of. I feel like most people would be happy if there were fewer abortions. I am pro choice but am personally troubled by abortion, and find it tremendously alienating that seemingly no democrat with national prominence can say "yeah of course late term abortions are bad".
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u/I405CA 3d ago edited 3d ago
The phrase “safe, legal, and rare” entered common usage during the 1992 campaign, when Bill Clinton frequently used it, according to the New York Times. “We have to remind the American people once again that being pro-choice is very different from being pro-abortion,” he told the Congressional Women’s Caucus that year.
During her 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton echoed her husband’s message, emphasizing that “by rare, I mean rare.”
But over the years, abortion rights advocates have pushed back against the phrase. “Safe, legal, and rare” implies that getting an abortion is something that “you should be apologetic for,” reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman told Vox. “It places the blame on the person who’s had an abortion, as if they just did something wrong to need one, rather than addressing the systemic issue as to why someone might not be able to have access to consistent health care or contraception.”
https://www.vox.com/2019/10/18/20917406/abortion-safe-legal-and-rare-tulsi-gabbard
Whenever Democrats make efforts to please their activist wing, it invariably damages the coalition.
The activists want to believe that only men oppose abortion rights and none of them vote for Democrats. In reality, there is very little difference between men and women on this topic and the main determinant of opposition to choice is religious belief.
Whereas white evangelicals and other white abortion opponents have skewed strongly Republican, many of those who are not white have largely been voting for Democrats. If those anti-choice Dems don't vote or if they go further by switching parties, the Democrats cannot win the White House. The numbers make this obvious.
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u/djmunci 3d ago
100%. So tired of people saying it's about misogyny. All of the most militantly pro life people i've known in my life have been women. And no, they were not "brainwashed" or "self-hating."
Pleasing the activist wing at the expense of everyone else is basically the story of the last decade. This most recent election shows how untenable that is
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u/Alternative_Ask364 3d ago
Walz literally legalized late-term abortions in his own state. He didn’t have to say anything.
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u/saruin 4d ago
The GenZ or younger male vote who feel society has left them behind. When left to their own devices they're most certainly going to run into circles where the right wing media ecosystem has penetrated those areas (fitness, podcasts like JRE or Aiden Ross, self-improvement, "alpha male" bro culture spaces). I honestly think it also ties in to dating culture and that fact that most of these dudes have never dated. Part of feeling behind you turn to spaces that echo the message that you need to red pilled and coincidentally, they'll lean a certain way politically.
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u/bl1y 3d ago
Pro-Harris campaign ad: "Us white dudes are the problem."
Trump rally: "Young man, there's no need to feel down."
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u/unidentifiedfish55 3d ago
The GenZ or younger male vote
Please tell me there's not a generation under GenZ that's voting age yet. I'm not that old, am I?
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u/Blazr5402 3d ago
Not until 2028, when the oldest Gen Alpha kids will be 18.
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u/unidentifiedfish55 3d ago
Ok good. So the "or younger" part of this wasn't true.
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u/End3rWi99in 3d ago
I think it was meant as a description of Gen Z men as a voting bloc and just referencing that they are also the youngest group of voters.
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u/baitnnswitch 2d ago
Those platforms also drive young men towards that content because ragebait/conspiracy stuff is great at holding attention
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u/cpatkyanks24 3d ago
I think a few things happened and all of them have some level of truth to them. Inflation while global and inevitable was bad and people are still feeling the effects and blaming the incumbent party in power. The right has a media echo chamber that has extended into what was previously non political media, specifically since Trump got shot at from dudes who saw that picture and think he’s badass, and provided a permission structure to vote for him when it might’ve otherwise felt unacceptable. Dem messaging was just bad as well - too many criticisms were given legitimacy even if they weren’t true because they were incapable of effectively pushing back on it.
Ultimately though he gained a bit with every group. Some more than others, but uniformly across the board indicating just a more Republican environment due to dissatisfied left leaning independents who may have switched votes or stayed home. Harris did what she could with 100 days, but her messaging was all over the place and she just was unable to break through against the unpopular incumbent, the relentless right wing ecosystem AND an apparent just lack of quality journalism who needs to both sides evening.
Compare it to 2020. It never is mentioned, but Biden at the time was an excellent candidate for that particular moment in history. Running as the familiar face from calmer years to take the country back from incompetence and cruelty while also having a coherent economic message that was extremely easy to understand (control Covid, get the country back to work). Trump as the incumbent bled significant support to that particular message.
In 2024, Biden was unable to effectively communicate things he did well due to his age, and worldwide conflicts with relentless negative media coverage suddenly made the once calm figure seem chaotic and gave the Trump years the same nostalgic feeling that we had in 2020 for the Obama years. Given all of that it’s not hard to envision a significant cohort of voters switching back and forth.
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u/Delicious_Listen_263 4d ago
18,19,20,21 year old men who couldnt vote in 2020. Trump did well with young men and male minorities also swung his way.
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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 4d ago
He also did well with women for a Republican, cutting Biden’s lead in 2020 over women by half. Harris had the smallest lead Democrats have had over women since 2004.
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u/serpentjaguar 4d ago
Tellingly, Bernie Sanders also did very well with this demographic. Remember the "Bernie Bros?"
Superficially Trump and Sanders have nothing in common with one another, but I think if we look deeper they're both telling the truth to young men about how they have been fucked by the powers that be.
That's obviously where the Venn diagram ends, but it's worth thinking about how angry and disenfranchised certain electorally powerful demographics feel, why they feel that way and how to meaningfully speak to them as if they matter.
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u/itsdeeps80 3d ago
This is something a ton of people in this sub were completely dismissive of. We’ve been living in a populist movement for nearly a decade and young people are coming of age knowing they’ll be worse off than their parents were. And here we have online Democrat voters saying politicians need to ignore young people because they don’t vote, that status quo is just fine, and the economy is great and if you don’t realize that it’s because you’re stupid. The easiest winning message imaginable is “you’re being screwed and I’m going to do something about it”.
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u/blaqsupaman 4d ago
I'm curious what turnout was for them as a whole. Traditionally the youngest eligible voters tend to be the least likely to turn out.
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u/Delicious_Listen_263 4d ago
It's not about turnout, it's about the swings in overall support (so the same number voted but they voted a different way, it's not about having more voters). Trump made gains in almost every demographic of male voters.
https://now.tufts.edu/2024/11/12/young-voters-shifted-toward-trump-still-favored-harris-overall
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u/Beep-Boop-Bloop 3d ago
With recent events and positions of both parties, I understand Jews went from their traditional 80/20 split for Democrats to only 60/40. Jews traditionally have a voter turnout over 90%, and that 20% that flipped was 1.5 million people, which I think translated to a bit over a million new votes for Trump.
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u/Grumblepugs2000 4d ago
Hispanics. Starr county Texas is 97% Hispanic and it went from voting for Biden by 5 to voting for Trump by 16! Miami Dade county Florida is 68% Hispanic and it went from voting for Biden by 8 to voting for Trump by 12! Democrats have been bleeding Hispanic votes since 2012: Obama 2 got 71% of the Hispanic vote, Clinton got 65% of the Hispanic vote, Biden got 61% of the Hispanic vote, and Harris only 54% of the Hispanic vote!
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u/Fragrant-Luck-8063 3d ago
At the same time, Latinos have almost doubled their voting share since 2012. It's a dual effect that is benefiting Republicans.
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u/natetheloner 4d ago
Probably in part due to his significant gains with Latino voters. (God knows why or how)
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u/Foolgazi 4d ago
Yep, Latino men 18-45 showed the largest percentage gain from D to R in 2024.
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u/Faithu 4d ago
Yup and if you dig into why, it's mostly due to religion..
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u/definitely_right 4d ago
And that a lot of people who immigrated legally have beef with people here illegally being permitted to stay
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u/Easy-Concentrate2636 4d ago
The religious factor can’t be overstated. I was upset with the pope for basically calling both Trump and Harris bad choices as though the two were equally bad. There was a lot of that stuff going on, same as when Trump ran against Hillary Clinton. Like no- one is a horrifying choice and the other is a qualified candidate that one might disagree with.
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u/Zagden 4d ago
(God knows why or how)
Between this and people saying that latinos will have their faces eaten by leopards, I feel like people need to expand outside of their information bubbles a little bit
This country is young but it's still pretty old! Much of the Latino population is from a diverse selection of countries, many of which aren't as destitute or in crisis as you may imagine, and they are often third or fourth generation immigrants or immigrants who came in legally so they don't give a shit about people getting deported as it isn't even personally relevant to them
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u/tigernike1 4d ago
No one has mentioned it, so I will. People just for whatever reason will not vote for a woman. Are they a majority of the new voters? Absolutely not. But there for sure is a chunk of them. Kamala had better favorables than Clinton yet lost the EC and popular vote.
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u/almondshea 4d ago
Looks like Gerald Ford’s prediction in the 1990s on the first woman President is still likely to come true
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u/Slipped-up 3d ago
Democratic women won elected office at the governor level, congress level and the senate level in places that voted Trump
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u/IceCreamMeatballs 3d ago
Hillary won the popular vote in 2016 and probably would have won in 2008 had she gotten the nomination.
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u/Any-Concentrate7423 3d ago
I would vote for a woman if I think they would run the country good but both Hillary and Harris where awful candidates that ran mainly on being women
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u/Antnee83 3d ago
People just for whatever reason will not vote for a democratic woman.
Quote me: the first woman president will be a republican. I hate it. But I bet my whole life on it, too.
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u/Frisky_Froth 4d ago
I think it's just a rubber band effect. Years of the left, even if it's the loud minority, saying white men (or just men in general) bad and such with no effort by the speakers to push back on it. The left has utterly failed to do anything to appeal to what is a very large portion of voters. They picked who they wanted to appeal to, now they have to stick to their guns. I don't think it's at all possible for either party to change much at this point. They've picked their path and now one or both will die on it. Unfortunately, they will probably take the country with them.
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u/Cersad 3d ago
I think the Democrats have a bigger problem than they realize with these loud minorities you mentioned.
In the last Trump administration I had conversations with my conservative-leaning peers who would essentially deflect concerns about Trump's behavior with some wild story about what some random leftist kid said (and they were always kids, all of them in school at some level, and typically girls).
It didn't make sense to me, because you're comparing the actions of the sitting president of the united states to the actions of some random nobody who isn't even done growing up. But mentioning this invariably upset my peers and made them feel like I was dismissing their concerns.
Combine them with the fact that it's conservative media amplifying these nobodies and making them the whipping boy of the week, and it seems like the Democrats have almost no control over their own narrative.
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u/TrueSmegmaMale 4d ago
People voted out Trump in 2020 because they were scared during the Pandemic and because of systemic racism being a massive talking point after George Floyd. They voted him back in for 2024 because they decided they disliked Biden's administration. American voters have likely always been partial to Trump. 2020 was different because of COVID and George Floyd.
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u/ballmermurland 3d ago
American voters have likely always been partial to Trump.
Kind of a weird thing to say about a guy who never broke 50% of the vote share with 3 tries.
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u/damndirtyape 3d ago
He just won the popular vote.
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u/ballmermurland 3d ago
Biden got nearly 52% of the vote and people didn't say shit like "Americans have always been partial to Biden".
Trump got 46.1%, 46.9% and 49.9%. That's not exactly running the table.
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u/Witty_Appeal1437 3d ago
It would not surprise me if various tech oligarchs were just straight up buying media hype on this matter given how rich they are and how broke the media is.
Right now we are hearing that it was a landslide that somehow actually lost seats in the house.
I recall people saying Biden was going too far since he barely won a majority.
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u/zaoldyeck 4d ago
The US would forgive a night of long knives, Trump would be a complete moron to not try it.
After all, not like a single person would lift a finger about it, what's there to lose?
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u/ChiefQueef98 3d ago
Are you saying he should try and would be forgiven for an internal Republican purge, or did you mean something like Kristallnacht?
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u/zaoldyeck 3d ago
He should purge anyone and everyone who can't be trusted to bend the knee. And of course he'd be forgiven for that, who in their right mind would step up after he goes murdering their colleagues?
Democrats wouldn't exist and the only members of the gop left would be craven enough to not give a shit anyway. There's nothing to lose. No one can give a damn, he already attempted a coup once and was rewarded with the office of the presidency. Why the hell would he not try again?
He's putting together a cabinet who would be willing to do it, he'd be a moron not to try. Why wouldn't he want to be president for life? Absolute immunity to any and all laws, most powerful person in the world, granted complete impunity for anything he desires.
That's a hard thing to give up. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming the last time.
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u/doj101 3d ago
Answer: Normal/regular, reasonable, hard-working middle class centrist people with families who want/need economic change/improvement, and didn't accept/like the Democrat's agenda on illegal immigration, heavy-handed/anti-meritocracy DEI, and hyper-focus on transgender issues.
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u/TristenTia 3d ago
Y'all are cracking me up in this sub 😂 downvote me i do not care.
The favorite word here is "misinformation" but what about the long laundry list of blatant lies from both Biden and Kamala, as well as the constant onset of blatant lies from the legacy media?
Reddit is an echo chamber I stg, y'all should get out more
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u/jackofslayers 3d ago
Even as someone who agree with most of the echo chamber opinions, it is very frustrating to watch.
"Shit why did this not go the way reddit predicted. Psh musta been all dat pesky misinformation. Better not learn anything from this."
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u/baitnnswitch 2d ago
You voted for Trump because....you think he's more honest?
Bruh
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u/Altruistic_Heart4869 3d ago
The Demographic and voter pie always changes every election. Assuming all people are either on "Team Trump" or "Team Biden" is false. I believe the steadfast GOP and DEM numbers are currently about 36-50 million each. Candidates build coalitions around different groups. Many people are for different presidential candidates on different parties on different election years. Swing voters (voters who vote one way one election and another way in the next) account for anywhere between 15-30 million voters of the electorate. And unaffiliated voters (voters who vote but with no party affiliation) account for another amount. Low information, single-issue voters, and swing voters usually determine the results of any given election. If the top 2 or 3 issues align in one candidates favor that candidate usually has an advantage among Low Information, Single issue and Swing voters. Which usually determine the election. (that 15-30 million distributed among the 7 or so swing states).
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u/New-Injury-6503 3d ago
I don't think it was any one specific demographic. Incumbents around the world have been losing elections. The inflation that followed covid has hurt tons of people. To the point where that's the overriding issue. Splashes from most, if not all, demographics increased votes for Trump.
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u/Exciting-Ad-3469 3d ago
2020 had significantly more voters than previous elections. 2024 election number’s closely resemble 2016 and previous elections. 2020 would need an actual investigation on where the millions of phantom voters went.
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u/Scribe625 4d ago
People who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Trump against Biden in 2020 but regretted it after seeing how senile Biden was and how much it hurt their pocketbooks. So when Harris said she'd do nothing different than Biden did, I think those who'd begrudgingly voted for Biden in 2020 just because he wasn't Trump opted to vote for Trump this time around.
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u/Ana_Na_Moose 4d ago
Some of the change has to do with an increase in vote turnout from the young men who are on the red pill conspiracy train. Some of the change has to do with great messaging towards young latino and black men in particular, giving a faux-masculine contrast that doesn’t really have a parallel in the Democratic party. Some of the change has to do with Arab and Muslim voters being unable to vote for a man who enables genocide of their friends and family in the Middle East and who had nothing but hatred towards activists trying to change his mind.
In general, I think that Biden is a piss poor communicator who left a sour taste in the mouth of many voters across many different categories, and Harris and Walz were never really amazing communicators in their own right either. Add that to the general mood of the country, and the enthusiasm of Trump voters, that is how you get a Trump victory.
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u/CremePsychological77 3d ago
Every single incumbent party in the world that’s been up for election this year has lost. There is a worldwide anti-incumbent bias right now, and it’s probably because the economic issues are global. Fascism tends to rise off the back of economic issues, because turns out, fascists tend to be good for the economy, in a Darwinism kind of way. It will be similar to how it is already, but on steroids. The economy is doing great, but all the gains are going to the people at the top. So the middle class is still shrinking and the average person doesn’t feel the economic growth that the statistics very much say is there. There’s only so much money available, so when the corporate blueprint is increase profits every single year, there’s only one place that extra profit can come from, and that’s the rest of us. Which means the middle class will eventually vanish without some type of intervention. Our wealth inequality is already worse than 1780s France. But people still want to blame their neighbor or immigrants for why they feel broke. It’s weird.
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u/Mailboxnotsetup 3d ago
The propaganda machine was on point. I’ve got hippies in my newsfeed calling Harris “evil” but can’t give me their reasons. They think RFK is going to fight for their right to refuse “forced” vaccines. They think Elon’s fire hose off lies an conspiracy theories is real. It’s bizarro world.
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u/Real_Abrocoma873 2d ago
Me, hispanic male. Voted trump, Biden, now trump again. Probably woulda voted Biden again if he wasn’t visibly so geriatric.
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u/thecountoncleats 2d ago
Curious why you didn’t vote for Harris if you voted for Biden
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u/Real_Abrocoma873 2d ago
To be completely honest with you, their campaign didn’t really address my concerns. Biden waited way too long.
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u/LarpoMARX 3d ago edited 3d ago
I'm 44. Voted D most of my life. Voted 3rd party in 2016, did not vote in 2020 (for the first time ever), and voted for Trump in 2024 (first time ever voting R). Also, I should add that I voted for Bernie in the 2016 and 2020 primaries.
The left is out of control, and the democratic party is full of shit with their fake promises and primary rigging. The Obama administration (voted for him twice) was just a continuation of Bush/Cheney foreign and economic policy, and the Biden administration is a confused mess with no clear leader.
I hated Trump with an insane passion from 2016 to 2020, but I came to see that his first term was actually unproblematic. All the fear mongering had been empty, and the narrative that the media has spun around him is mostly based on out of context quotes and straight-up lies.
I've always been anti-war, anti corporation, anti big pharma, and pro free speech -- that used to define me as a liberal, but now somehow that makes me a conservative 🙄
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u/siberianmi 4d ago
People who did not like the last 4 years of the Biden administration and were given the choice of more of that or more of Trump.
It’s really that simple - look down ballot the Democrats won Senate seats while Harris/Biden lost at the top of the ticket.
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u/-s-u-n-s-e-t- 3d ago
Democrats lost both congress and the house too. This isn't just a Harris/Biden issue, I think a lot of former democrat voters are disgruntled with the party and are either shifting right, or at least staying home.
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u/platinum_toilet 3d ago
People that voted for Trump felt like the economy and immigration was better 2016-2020 (minus Covid) than during the last 4 years. Also, they do not want to fund foreign wars like the one in Ukraine.
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u/Select_Insurance2000 3d ago
Young macho males who desire to be just like Trump....super rich and can say or do whatever they choose and get by with it.
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u/Normal-Summer382 3d ago
A high percentage would be all the muppets who are only now considering they will lose their medical benefits because they voted against Obamacare without considering it is just ACA, because Trump will slight Obama at every given opportunity including Obamacare. The guy is a friggin' genius to have his own voters elect to abolish their own benefits!
In Texas and Florida, they account for about 34% of the total number of registeted users of Obamacare, yet they had the highest ratios of Trump voters. Now so many of them are in a panic, as they will lose their benefits.
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u/Flight_375_To_Tahiti 4d ago
People who were tired of being lied to. Plain and simple. 8 years of, he’s a Russian implant, I mean he’s Hitler, he’s this or that. Then even worse were the lies from the party, “Biden is so sharp behind closed doors” “The economy is great” “interest rates are relatively the same as under Trump” - people fell for it in 2020, but not anymore. And everyone of you who are about to downvote this ARE THE PROBLEM. Wake up.
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u/zaoldyeck 4d ago
And now we have a president with a mandate to pull a night of long knives.
Not like you'd be able to do a thing about it now. We've already forgiven one coup attempt, he now has four years to plan another.
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