Economic concerns and growing disenchantment with both parties is draining support for Trump among Gen Z young men, a key bloc of support during the 2024 election
Male Gen Z voters are breaking with Donald Trump and the Republican party at large, recent polls show, less than a year after this same cohort defied convention and made a surprise shift right, helping Trump win the 2024 election.
Taken with wider polling suggesting Democrats will lead in the midterms, the findings on young men spell serious trouble for the Republican Party in 2026.
Younger Gen Z men, those born between 2002 and 2007, may be even more anti-Trump, according to October research from YouGov and the Young Men’s Research Project, a potential sign that their time living through the social upheavals of the Covid pandemic and not being political aware during the first Trump administration may be shaping their experience.
It’s not that weird if only two parties stand a chance. Pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction. Your comment is a long-winded way of saying that the two-party system should be abolished.
The two party system should be abolished.
Not sure why democrats are so afraid of a one party government. Just run in republican primaries and push the party in your favored direction!
No, I am saying that “pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction” makes zero sense. It is like voting for the Racism Party™ and expecting them to run anti-racism candidates, or that you will “push” the Racism Party™ to be anti-racist. That isn’t gong to happen. The Racism Party™ would exist to push racism, it would exist to convince you to support its platform and vote for it.
The internet exists these days. We can all pull up videos going back decades to back when they were black-and-white of people talking about the needs of “pushing Democrats to the left” and yet generations later they are still a right-wing jingoist genocidal party. There is an old saying, “the definition of insanity is dong the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” The same strategy is used for decades with everyone insisting that it’s the only strategy that can ever work yet it never works.
How much longer do we have to wait before this strategy works? Will Democrats become a left-wing party election, the election after, the one after that? I guarantee you that everyone will listen to you as they do every election cycle and your strategy will continue to be the one used again, again, and again. So I am just curious in how long you think it will take for your strategy to bear fruits.
I’m not arguing in any particular way about it, I’m not American, and I don’t believe in electoralism, I believe no true change will ever come from voting or political parties.
I’m just explaining, if you live in a country with a two party system, if you want to end a genocide that both parties support, your only option electorally is to try and dissuade one of the two parties from it’s pro-genocidal position.
There are other solutions, of course, but those other solutions cannot be voted for.
I agree, I just think that part of that dissuasion can be voting against them. If there are two pro-genocide parties and one loses because the vote was split with an anti-genocide party, sure that may cause a slightly worse pro-genocide party to come to power, but it may lead to the pro-genocide party that lost because of the split vote dropping the pro-genocide from their platform realizing it is a losing issue next election cycle.
I do not believe we will ever get radical change from electoralism but I do think you can get minor changes. The people I mostly have a problem with are those who say you should pledge your loyalty to the “lesser evil” party every election cycle because that just guarantees we will get the pro-genocide party every election cycle. To actually break free of that and have some electoral change you have to be willing to lose a few elections or else the cycle will last forever.
It’s not like backing the pro-genocide candidate even helps you win all the elections, either. The “vote who no matter who” crowd still constantly lose elections and if you look at the numbers, the election losses are almost never because someone split the vote. They insist on backing such bad candidates they lose anyways and then don’t even have leverage over them to push them to the left because they all voted for that candidate.
Again, I don’t believe we will have some sort of radical fundamental change from electoralism, but you can get minor improvements. We see in western European countries that you can indeed achieve better social services and such through electoralism. But you have to be willing to vote for that, and even the American “progressives” don’t want to ever vote for that.
I get what you mean, but frankly, it’s hard for a european to understand just how fundamentally broken the electoral system in the US is. The two-party system is rigidly enforced through a number of institutions and mechanisms - the electoral college, the judiciary, the tricameral system, etc. and it would need an extremely organized radical campaign to change that system, and while that system is in place, no party will ever give a shit about third parties, because they are completely irrelevant. Even if through some miracle a third party won the presidency, they would be completely incapable of enacting basically any changes.
Neither party is too concerned about losing votes to a third party, because both parties are fundamentally the same where it matters to them, so even if they lose, they know that the winner will keep things more or less on the straight and narrow until they get another shot.
If you are able to build an organized movement to change the two party system, you’d be better off just doing a revolution anyways.