I'm not sure how old you are, but shortly after Obama took office in 2009 there was quite a bit of reporting claiming that the Bush administration had been so disastrous and young people had been so thoroughly poisoned by Republican policies, that it would likely be a generation before the Republicans had the chance to win the presidency again. Remember, Bush left office in the depths of the Great Recession. Instead, it took less than 8 years for us to get MAGA.
In the 2024 election, Trump's strongest margins appear to have been with Gen X, where he was roughly +10% over Harris, even stronger than his results among the Baby Boomers.
They didn't in the last couple. Those elections went 49% vs 51%. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the next couple. They feign surprise, but it isn't like it was a mystery as to what he was going to do. He campaigned on everything he is doing.
Which should inform the credibility of anyone declaring one issue or another would definitely motivate voters to come out and vote for whatever policy they want to say is a winner: the last two elections, despite enormous new voter activation, the split in preference followed polling trends anyway.
The great fiction of American politics at this point seems to be the belief that the non-voting population are definitely an election margin who'll definitely come and vote for you provided you support <commentators preferred policy here>.
That's a part of the whole issue, isn't it? People have been trained to disregard (and disrespect) nuanced factual information un favor of political platitudes.
They won't. I have industrial clients who are financially eating shit from all this and they have posters of Trump hanging on their office wall while extolling his antics. The workers think the same way. We're boned unless these morons wake up (they won't.)
It's all cultural. It's pretty bonkers that you can tell who someone voted for in 2024 with a high degree of accuracy just by the shape of their sunglasses lenses.
Here's the problem: as bad as republicans are, democrat governments have the tendency to let most everything they did in place, and even add more as a way of playing a "bipartisan" game. The result is that democrat governments don't change the economy in any substantive way that can give a reason for people to support them.
Voters don’t go and actually look at the data themselves. They rely on pundits and the news to tell them the salient points.
The problem is that the media has essentially lost most of its usefulness as a bulwark against the most egregious excesses of crony capitalism and cozied up to it instead. It feels like the Gilded Age again, but the people are somehow more insufferable. Cramming the “light of human consciousness into the stars” apparently requires we create CSAM generating machines powered by nitrogen oxide belching gas turbines. Even the folks at non-profit news outlets like Pro Publica have leadership that refuses to understand that it is difficult to prevent AI errors at scale. Nobody reviews drafts with such detail, we make a lot of assumptions, we trust that the person/machine is not feeding us trash.
This is, of course, doesn’t even bring up the fact that a lot of people in the US now get their news—similar to folks in India via WhatsApp (that became such a problem that Meta was forced to curtail the number of forwards you could do in the app)—by passing trash, hate fueling articles around on social media.
In essence we took the grand market place of ideas, and then let it get completely owned by a few firms.
The media, where it isn’t outright compromised, is dying to survive on any revenue stream. local news outlets which are the backbone of solving actual Issues for citizen are not profitable and dying.
We have platforms, which instead incentivize for the largest viewer count, so local content is sacrificed at the altar of the zeitgeist.
I don't think it's helpful to suggest that "both sides" are equal in American politics, but I do think you have to be a least a little understanding that the democrats aren't an attractive alternative to most Americans. I'm afraid a pretty large minority of Americans have landed in the lose-lose position of "if i can't make it better, i might as well make it worse faster".
My Bangladeshi immigrant mom and her sister are complaining on Facebook that they were "good Democrats" until "Obama, AOC, and Bernie" brought their "radicalism." Democrats wave away this stuff as "performative," but people feel it viscerally and it subdivides and splits the coalition.
Most people don't vote based on policies and data. They are naturally skeptical about whether your five-point plans are actually going to have the intended effect. Instead, they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.
Anyone who says Obama, of all people, was radical clearly listens to too much Fox News and conservative talk radio (which is an entirely different problem).
The only way Obama was objectively radical as a politician and president was the color of his skin.
My mom watches CNN and liked Obama as President. But my parsing of her comment—I haven’t talked to her about it, just saw it pop up when my aunt responded “me too, sister”—is that she views Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging.
This is maybe an odd view for an American but it makes sense within a Bangladeshi social context. And democrats are the ones who chose to cultivate an electoral map based on immigrants like my mom in states like Virginia and Michigan.
> they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.
You can't really simplify it to such a degree. I believe humans are creatures of action. We like it when things happen. Sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, our morals are downstream of that desire to "be effective". We will align ourselves, no matter the violence we have to do to our own senses, with what is useful.
Specifically, their willingness to skeptically engage with your five-point plan demands that you're actually able to execute it. If you categorically can't make anything happen, then people will cling to an explanation and a morality that can. American democracy has been at a standstill for upwards of 30 years, If the American people have to believe that all their politicians are pedophiles to get some sort of movement again. Then that's what they are going to believe.
According to polls democrats are the worse side, they are the most unpopular party maybe in history and are at an extreme low in terms of their approval rating. Trump is almost 20% more popular than the Democratic Party and they are polling below AI and ICE, they are right around the same approval rating with the American people as Iran.
And still they refuse to back down on a number of policies that have been proven to be extremely unpopular.
Part of that is because progressives also hate the Democrats for being hypocritical and/or ineffective. Doesn't mean they're going to vote for an R, though.
Not based on the special election results the past year, and primary turnout along with gains in polling numbers of Democrats compared to their Republican counterparts. Just look at Texas, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, Alaska, Iowa, even Kansas. Bunch of red seats in play.
Social issues are just as important to voters as the economy and attacking them for caring about this issue, one that very clearly the people have asserted their opinion on, is dumb. If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections.
Anyone voting on the basis of the issue is the dumb one, sorry.
It’s a manufactured controversy with only a handful of trans athletes (usually at high school level) in the entire country. It does not make the slightest difference to the lives of the vast, vast majority of voters. If you let it outweigh factors that actually affect your life then you’re a dumb voter.
It affects woman and parents of girls. It's seen as men taking things women had to struggle to get and safety issues. I can see how it would affects women in general but I agree has little affect on those men who do not watch sports and are not pro women.
No it doesn’t. It’s a new boogeyman to demonize that isn’t actually a factor in almost anyone’s lives. Not to mention that the people pushing this issue are proposing things like genital inspections to ensure the boogeyman never arrives:
The genitals inspections are a result of trans issue. Not concerning yourself with one issue that creates the issue you dislike is shortsighted.
I agree with "seen as" vibes think of the children era being foolish but its what liberal parents are talking about. Mega followers never accepted trans in sport or life so this doesn't change viewpoints.
It's such a small fraction though and it completely ignores the needs of trans and non-binary athletes. They're not all going to be able to compete on the men's side.
It pushes the world closer to removing the gender barrier in sport. Women and men playing separately is an outdated concept and these frontline warriors are breaking glass.
If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections.
I don't disagree, fundamentally, but the voters are prioritizing minor issues that affect one in a million people over major issues that affect everyone. That's not good judgement, it's stupidity. It's why wedge issues work so well.
It's Republicans who are dying on the hill of unpopular policies. Nobody cares about men in womens sports to the point of dying from diarrhea or closing shop.
I'm not sure how old you are, but shortly after Obama took office in 2009 there was quite a bit of reporting claiming that the Bush administration had been so disastrous and young people had been so thoroughly poisoned by Republican policies, that it would likely be a generation before the Republicans had the chance to win the presidency again. Remember, Bush left office in the depths of the Great Recession. Instead, it took less than 8 years for us to get MAGA.
In 2024 Trump got some of the youth vote, still not a majority. Trump never won Gen X (or at least Millennial) and below.
So the prediction sounds right? The Republicans have burnt the youth vote pretty badly and have never really recovered.
In the 2024 election, Trump's strongest margins appear to have been with Gen X, where he was roughly +10% over Harris, even stronger than his results among the Baby Boomers.
(See, e.g. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/06/26/voting-patte... and https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-elections/exit-polls. Annoyingly, the polls don't cleanly break down into generations; Gen X would be the ~44-60 crowd for that election.)
They didn't in the last couple. Those elections went 49% vs 51%. I don't hold out a lot of hope for the next couple. They feign surprise, but it isn't like it was a mystery as to what he was going to do. He campaigned on everything he is doing.
The last few elections have been the most active in history, especially in 2020 essentially everyone voted.
Which should inform the credibility of anyone declaring one issue or another would definitely motivate voters to come out and vote for whatever policy they want to say is a winner: the last two elections, despite enormous new voter activation, the split in preference followed polling trends anyway.
The great fiction of American politics at this point seems to be the belief that the non-voting population are definitely an election margin who'll definitely come and vote for you provided you support <commentators preferred policy here>.
The vast majority of voters don’t ever understand why they’re being screwed by economic policies, they just know when they are.
It’s much worse than that. People just feel like they’re getting screwed whether they are or not.
And they’re too dumb to remember who caused the problems and just blame the other team no matter what.
This is difficult even for experts paying attention because economics is cyclical and policies can take time to show their effects
That's a part of the whole issue, isn't it? People have been trained to disregard (and disrespect) nuanced factual information un favor of political platitudes.
And blame the other side lol
They don't even know that, come on.
They won't. I have industrial clients who are financially eating shit from all this and they have posters of Trump hanging on their office wall while extolling his antics. The workers think the same way. We're boned unless these morons wake up (they won't.)
What is the hook for them?
It's all cultural. It's pretty bonkers that you can tell who someone voted for in 2024 with a high degree of accuracy just by the shape of their sunglasses lenses.
The voters watch Fox. They will not see this.
They won't. Hope to be wrong though
Here's the problem: as bad as republicans are, democrat governments have the tendency to let most everything they did in place, and even add more as a way of playing a "bipartisan" game. The result is that democrat governments don't change the economy in any substantive way that can give a reason for people to support them.
Voters don’t go and actually look at the data themselves. They rely on pundits and the news to tell them the salient points.
The problem is that the media has essentially lost most of its usefulness as a bulwark against the most egregious excesses of crony capitalism and cozied up to it instead. It feels like the Gilded Age again, but the people are somehow more insufferable. Cramming the “light of human consciousness into the stars” apparently requires we create CSAM generating machines powered by nitrogen oxide belching gas turbines. Even the folks at non-profit news outlets like Pro Publica have leadership that refuses to understand that it is difficult to prevent AI errors at scale. Nobody reviews drafts with such detail, we make a lot of assumptions, we trust that the person/machine is not feeding us trash.
This is, of course, doesn’t even bring up the fact that a lot of people in the US now get their news—similar to folks in India via WhatsApp (that became such a problem that Meta was forced to curtail the number of forwards you could do in the app)—by passing trash, hate fueling articles around on social media.
In essence we took the grand market place of ideas, and then let it get completely owned by a few firms.
The media, where it isn’t outright compromised, is dying to survive on any revenue stream. local news outlets which are the backbone of solving actual Issues for citizen are not profitable and dying.
We have platforms, which instead incentivize for the largest viewer count, so local content is sacrificed at the altar of the zeitgeist.
I don't think it's helpful to suggest that "both sides" are equal in American politics, but I do think you have to be a least a little understanding that the democrats aren't an attractive alternative to most Americans. I'm afraid a pretty large minority of Americans have landed in the lose-lose position of "if i can't make it better, i might as well make it worse faster".
My Bangladeshi immigrant mom and her sister are complaining on Facebook that they were "good Democrats" until "Obama, AOC, and Bernie" brought their "radicalism." Democrats wave away this stuff as "performative," but people feel it viscerally and it subdivides and splits the coalition.
Most people don't vote based on policies and data. They are naturally skeptical about whether your five-point plans are actually going to have the intended effect. Instead, they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.
Anyone who says Obama, of all people, was radical clearly listens to too much Fox News and conservative talk radio (which is an entirely different problem).
The only way Obama was objectively radical as a politician and president was the color of his skin.
My mom watches CNN and liked Obama as President. But my parsing of her comment—I haven’t talked to her about it, just saw it pop up when my aunt responded “me too, sister”—is that she views Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging.
This is maybe an odd view for an American but it makes sense within a Bangladeshi social context. And democrats are the ones who chose to cultivate an electoral map based on immigrants like my mom in states like Virginia and Michigan.
> Obama as the patriarch so the buck stops with him to police the party messaging.
Sanders is not a member of the party. AOC didn't run for office until Obama had been retired a few years.
I get that you are trying to state facts but to the average person they are all Democrats so it don't matter.
Educate her.
> they vote based on their assessment of your judgment and whether you broadly share their ideas about what "good" and "bad" are.
You can't really simplify it to such a degree. I believe humans are creatures of action. We like it when things happen. Sometimes, not all the time but sometimes, our morals are downstream of that desire to "be effective". We will align ourselves, no matter the violence we have to do to our own senses, with what is useful.
Specifically, their willingness to skeptically engage with your five-point plan demands that you're actually able to execute it. If you categorically can't make anything happen, then people will cling to an explanation and a morality that can. American democracy has been at a standstill for upwards of 30 years, If the American people have to believe that all their politicians are pedophiles to get some sort of movement again. Then that's what they are going to believe.
According to polls democrats are the worse side, they are the most unpopular party maybe in history and are at an extreme low in terms of their approval rating. Trump is almost 20% more popular than the Democratic Party and they are polling below AI and ICE, they are right around the same approval rating with the American people as Iran.
And still they refuse to back down on a number of policies that have been proven to be extremely unpopular.
Part of that is because progressives also hate the Democrats for being hypocritical and/or ineffective. Doesn't mean they're going to vote for an R, though.
Not based on the special election results the past year, and primary turnout along with gains in polling numbers of Democrats compared to their Republican counterparts. Just look at Texas, Maine, Ohio, North Carolina, Alaska, Iowa, even Kansas. Bunch of red seats in play.
Your comment is spot on. Don't know why you're being junked.
-Independent..
"But...but...but what about gender equity in high-school sports?" - Voters
Social issues are just as important to voters as the economy and attacking them for caring about this issue, one that very clearly the people have asserted their opinion on, is dumb. If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections.
Anyone voting on the basis of the issue is the dumb one, sorry.
It’s a manufactured controversy with only a handful of trans athletes (usually at high school level) in the entire country. It does not make the slightest difference to the lives of the vast, vast majority of voters. If you let it outweigh factors that actually affect your life then you’re a dumb voter.
It affects woman and parents of girls. It's seen as men taking things women had to struggle to get and safety issues. I can see how it would affects women in general but I agree has little affect on those men who do not watch sports and are not pro women.
“It’s seen as”
Is the crucial statement there. Not “it is”.
> It affects women and parents of girls
No it doesn’t. It’s a new boogeyman to demonize that isn’t actually a factor in almost anyone’s lives. Not to mention that the people pushing this issue are proposing things like genital inspections to ensure the boogeyman never arrives:
https://www.newsweek.com/kansas-republicans-pass-bill-genita...
As the parent of a girl I’m a hell of a lot more concerned about that than I am of a trans kid wanting to play sports.
The genitals inspections are a result of trans issue. Not concerning yourself with one issue that creates the issue you dislike is shortsighted.
I agree with "seen as" vibes think of the children era being foolish but its what liberal parents are talking about. Mega followers never accepted trans in sport or life so this doesn't change viewpoints.
It's such a small fraction though and it completely ignores the needs of trans and non-binary athletes. They're not all going to be able to compete on the men's side.
It pushes the world closer to removing the gender barrier in sport. Women and men playing separately is an outdated concept and these frontline warriors are breaking glass.
If dems would stop dying in the hill of unpopular social policies they’d be winning more elections.
I don't disagree, fundamentally, but the voters are prioritizing minor issues that affect one in a million people over major issues that affect everyone. That's not good judgement, it's stupidity. It's why wedge issues work so well.
It's Republicans who are dying on the hill of unpopular policies. Nobody cares about men in womens sports to the point of dying from diarrhea or closing shop.
You're funny