“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.” – Bernie Sanders
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.
If you look at zoomers, there are some really interesting ways that they’re very different in the data. They’re much more likely than previous generations to say that making money is extremely important to them. If you look at their psychographic data, they have a lot higher levels of psychometric neuroticism and anxiety than the people before them.
What you see here is, if you look at the top issues that voters care the most about — cost of living, the economy, taxes, government spending, the deficit, foreign policy and health care — other than health care, where Democrats have a narrow lead, Republicans have massive trust advantages of about 15 points on all of the issues that voters care the most about.
What I have here is the share of voters who get their news from TikTok, broken down by year. The share of young voters who get their news from TikTok has more than quadrupled in the last four years.
This is the biggest and probably fastest shift in media consumption that has happened in my lifetime, and it closely correlates with support change. TikTok users are younger, they’re less politically engaged, and it’s not surprising that we dropped among this group. This is what you’d expect given these demographics.
But if you run the regressions, there’s clearly a causal element at play. And when you zoom in specifically on people who get their news from TikTok but don’t care very much about politics, this group is eight percentage points more Republican than they were four years ago — which is a lot.
Lots of interesting data and graphs: Democrats Need to Face Why Trump Won – as usual, it’s (still) the economy, stupid.
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