Similar improvements for Trump among younger voters were cited in CNN’s 2024 exit polling of more than 22,000 voters. In the last election, Biden beat Trump in this demographic by 23 points. This year, Harris’ lead over Trump among those aged 18 to 29 was 13 points, a 10-point dip in the key demographic.
Everything has to be a meme. Lower taxes, healthcare, or racism isn’t exciting. Couches, weird, eating pets and out of context outbursts get way more engagement. Mostly, because people have given up.
I don’t think they’ve given up because the issues the care about matter to them but it has to be communicated in the form of inside joke meme-speak. Republicans seem to have cracked this nearly a decade ago. That’s how long a head start they’ve got on Democrats. By now they’ve thoroughly indoctrinated a generation with their own baseline.
I think what’s breaking older peoples minds is how far fetched all of this is. Not only do the kids speak in coded language. They cannot be reached by speaking normally to them. You have to use the codes.
Keep in mind that part of the reason I think they’ve given up is because there’s no reason to believe the promises made will ever be delivered. They may care about taxes, but you’d probably get more engagement by making an AI generated tiktok video of a dinner table splayed with food in the image of rich oligarchs. There just isn’t much left but the jokes, it’s not code - it’s that if everything is going to be bullshit, it might as well be entertaining.