- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- news@lemmy.world
Summary
Donald Trump’s popularity among Generation Z voters has sharply declined since the 2024 election, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll.
His net favorability among 18-29-year-olds has dropped from +19 in November to -18, raising concerns for Republicans about sustaining youth support.
While Trump gained ground with young voters in 2024, recent policies—such as his mass deportation plan and targeting of DEI initiatives—may have contributed to this decline.
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I get that these kids were brainwashed a little but what bothers me is that it was never any secret what was happening to women’s rights and LGBTQ+ rights but they went for it anyway. It wasn’t some secret plot or trick, these people told us all exactly what they’re about.
Even if they don’t care about queer people, they happily sold out the rights of their own mothers because the word of some ex reality TV star meat head was more important to them. I feel like even if I was that age being bombarded by propaganda, I would’ve woken the fuck up the moment they started going after my mother and my sisters.
I actually saw a story on Reddit shortly after the election, that’s a double whammy in this regard. It was a divorced woman who is currently in a relationship with another woman, telling the story of how her own son visited her and fessed up to voting for Trump and happily said out loud “I don’t agree with gay people.” Based on the reactions she described afterwards, this dumb piece of shit kid only realised that the people he was hating included his own mother, after it was already too late.
It’s all fucked. I forgive these kids to an extent but I know that when I was that age, I did in fact have a sense of morality and could in fact use my own brains to figure things out for myself.
They voted for the memes, and are now in the process of realizing real life is not a meme
Yes but meme man named the department DOGE (/s)
How was he popular in the first place
Gen Z desperately wants change, any change and Dems were against change.
That’s my take at least.
There’s also a lot of incel Zoomers. I think that’s where the bulk or his youth support came from.
It’s more that Gen Z wants change without putting in effort. They (and millennials too) aren’t voting in primaries at all let alone showing up in non Presidental elections so all parties are putting money and effort into candidates that appeal to older, more conservative voters that actual show up.
The younger people I work with and interact with on a regular basis that admit they voted for Trump say they didn’t do it because he appealed to them but because they had some protest against Harris or Biden. Dems dropped the ball entirely this election but the majority of voters fail to turn out and prove their desire for change and progressive candidates is anything but talk.
There wasn’t a primary to vote against Harris in though. I’m not bashing you, it’s just that was a mistake IMO.
There was primary for congressional seats where the actual change Gen Z keeps saying they want will have to come from. And there was basically no participation there nationwide for their generation.
Either all of the polling sites are lying or that impotent clown still has a 47% approval rating. Why? I have no idea.
Be aware: Newsweek put out a string of content before the election, making it clear that Harris was winning and that Democrats were in the clear when few other news outlets were being that optimistic. Recently, they’ve been putting out a lot of articles talking about how the Orange One is losing popularity. While I hope that’s true, they definitely have a weird angle. Take their content with a big grain of salt.
Where can I buy large grained salt?
You can put a bunch of it in the microwave with a bowl of water to make a humid environment that might help it to form into a huge chunk. Then you can put it in a sock to persuade your local billionaire to stop fucking up society and the planet. I may have left out a few steps, what were we talking about again?
Little too late for that…
been kind of sad for me, the process of realizing these kids were fucking stupid.
i had really high hopes for some reason.
Growing up with social media.
I genuinely think the type of social media you use in your youth has a very strong influence on the type of person you become:
Instagram/Snapchat: Average, slightly sociable
Reddit/Tumblr: Insightful, knowledgeable about niche topics/social issues (respectively), better at writing, worse at socializing
Twitter: Argumentative, not really capable of cohesive long-form thought, great at one liners though
TikTok: Mindless beasts conditioned through a variable-ratio positive reinforcement algorithm to uncritically believe whatever thoughts China wants to insert in their brains: “The US is awful!!” Heck yeah! “Because of this, we’re going to not vote/vote for Trump!” Wait, what?
One would think watching Nazi salutes on inauguration day of a GOP president going blitzkrieg all around the world, would be enough to forget about them reaching the White House again… but, seriously, this is the USA.
You assume they read about history and know what Nazis were beyond tiktok memes.
Looks like they missed that year in school.
I mean who knew he would be against DEI and immigrants?
I think these polls are bullshit. The same gen Z kids who voted Trump after being brainwashed for years watching Rogan, Shapiro, etc rail on DEI, trans, ‘wokeism’ and ‘open borders’ haven’t suddenly changed their opinion once Trump’s started enacting policies that aim to enact those goals.
These kids just recognize how unpopular these actions are in the wider community and are lying to pollsters now. It’s virtue signalling. They’ll continue to vote right-wing imho
It could be as simple as losing access to grants, scholarships, and general funding. Add to that any of them hoping for a government job doing something they’re passionate about (wildlife/park/environmental sciences) only to have their future prospects crushed by an ignorant foreigner.
You might be right, but my question here is: Has it really had time to sink in yet? They got their student aid in January when Biden was still in office. Some of them may have lost jobs, but for the most part, there hasn’t been enough time yet for the leopards to come around for their faces. And Newsweek HAS posted overly optimistic articles saying the Dems have this in the bag. Granted, we won’t know the actual outcome until 2 years from now, but I am thinking the shitheads will just blame Dems, DEI, or whatever other BS to avoid realising that it’s their own leopard eating their face.
Could be.
You mean that?
Well these days I’m starting to think I have to put
/s
behind every statement since I’m hearing so many people say things so friggin bizarre I never suspected I would ever hear such a thing and expect they were actually serious.
Well if this election has taught us anything…
Good news, having such an eye-awakening experience at an impressionable age can drive people left-wing for their lifetime. Same has happened during Trump-1, Bush-2 and Bush-3, (now in Canadian politics) the Walkerton Crisis, the Mulroney days, and now hopefully with Doug Ford.
Bad news: They already got played, and they might get played again in 4 years with billions of big tech money intended to distract the masses.
We’re going to be damned lucky if we get the chance for people to be played again.
It will happen, might take a generation or three.
This is all so depressing… Its like there needs to be a massive war every so many years so people remember why it’s important to have a democracy and be kind to one another.
Question of when, not if. Fascism isn’t sustainable, it will fail eventually (but gods is depressing to think of it getting real bad)
There’s a famous quote about investing by Garry Shilling: “the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.” Sure, you can say “this is definitely a bubble” and “it will eventually revert to the mean,” but fat lot of good that does you if you’ve already been screwed by the time it happens.
Similarly, it’s easy to say that dictatorships are doomed to failure “eventually,” but that “eventually” can easily be beyond your lifetime. Just look at North Korea, for instance.
north korea isn’t doomed to failure by virtue of how incredible aggressively their abuse their citizenship.
By literally ANY metric of the definition of failure, except for “dissolution” north korea has utterly failed their citizens. They’ve only managed to keep control through force.
It won’t be luck that will save your democracy, it will be determination.
We’ll probably find out in 2 years when seats of Congress are up for election again.
Theres 3 seats up for special elections here soon because of appointments for the house I believe
You still think there are going to be free and open elections?
Yes, in blue states. State governments are responsible for elections, not Federal. I expect plenty of fraud and worse-than-usual voter suppression in Republican-governed states, though.
The Federal Election Commission has determined that your state had a fraudulent election. Please remain calm while our jackboots personally conduct a recount…
the concern here is that if the redwall we saw in the presidential election persists into the midterms, it may not matter what blue states vote, it’s entirely dependent on how well the general public views the current administration as doing, and if that’s “poorly” they’ll get fucked and we’ll swing blue, if not, nothing happens.
If enough of the population thinks they did a good job, for whatever reason, it may not be recoverable at all.
I’m assuming that there won’t be another Democrat in the White House in the foreseeable future due to corrupt red state governments. Elections will be good for for state things and that’s it.
I’ll echo the other reply - red states will not have them, blue and some purple states will. I suspect we will continue to have the facade of democracy for a while, and may see the Democrats take the House and maybe the Senate in 2026.
The real question is, if there are elections in 2028, and the Republicans lose, will there be a transfer of power? I don’t have a good feeling about the answer, but only time will tell. Four years is a long time for an obese old man with a very stressful job to live, and I don’t think there is anyone who can easily take over Trump’s cult of personality and take the reins of the fascist movement.
They’re completely ignoring congress right now and they control both chambers. You think they’re going to start listening if the democrats gain control?!
This will not be solved by an election. Germany couldn’t vote away Hitler. Russia can’t vote away Putin. And America can’t vote away
ElonTrump.Anyone who believes there is a peaceful way they can sit on their ass and hopefully maybe one day vote the problem away is in denial.
The real question is, if there are elections in 2028, and the Republicans lose, will there be a transfer of power?
i imagine there will have to be, otherwise there will literally be a civil war. Unless they rig voting somehow.
I hope so. Also, I feel like saying things like this only make more people fall into the defeatist attitude which tends lead to lower voter turn out. I get where you’re coming from, but we have to at least try.
If that were true, trump wouldn’t have won his first term or his second.
Republicans can rest easy, they will forget by 2028, 2030 at the latest.
Harper and Mike Harris for me.
There’s a Bush-3? In Canada? Sounds like the sequel to a really bad movie nobody liked and everyone is wondering why it even got made.
If we’re counting election cycles there were 4 bushes. none in canada afaik though
I count Bush-1 as 1989, Bush-2 as 2001 and Bush-3 as 2005.
Cannot wait for the types of gen z voters that voted for a dipshit like donvict to turn around and blame “boomers” for their issues.
They kinda already are. Though they seem to be blaming the Democrats for not doing enough to convince them to not be stupid.
Being raised by social media has caused some issues with them. They seem to value the ability to say whatever you need to say to get to the top of the algorithm and aren’t able to question the algorithm itself.
The zoomers are just like the boomers. They will blame anyone but themselves for their problems.
Millennials voted for trump and Republicans more than zoomers. There is plenty of blame to go around.
We are not talking about millennials in this thread. Just the zoomers.
Only us millennials are victims. /s
Everyone is a victim even the zoomers. Many just lack the critical thinking skills to realize it.
It’s okay they don’t bother coming out of their sofas to vote
What do these numbers mean? How is there negatives?
I would expect a scale from 0-100
Edit: its a scale from -100 to +100
Levels of dislike (-100 towards zero), levels of like (levels of like towards +100), would be my interpretation. It is an overly complex way of doing it though.
Well, that’s kinda dumb.
We thought GenZ was going to save us, but that was bullshit.
I work with a few in a DEEP BLUE state in a field in which the majority of my co-workers have been liberal and they’re Trumpers. Morons who grew up on social media and had their minds warped by it. Fell for the alpha male bullshit too.
They aren’t going to save us. They’re pretty dumb.
Surprise the iPad kid generation that were brought up on 4chsn derived troll culture are not bastions of virtue.
Like I have a zoomer nephew, and he’s genuinely a good kid at heart, and his mum raised him well, but he also showed me things like videos of people harassing kids in video games until they meltdown like it was the funniest shit in the world, and also thinks Trump is super funny.
Being a shitty person is just good “content”.
Seeing this with my own kids. We strictly manage their YouTube time, and that’s fucking hard because there’s million stupid ways to sneak on to YouTube. I wish there was a way to set them up with an allowlist feed instead of having to go and block every single bullshit video and channel, but then they couldn’t feed my kids to the algorithm to make it shit out money, I guess.
gen z is literally the wrong generation to use 4chan lmao
Yeah. I’ve got a high school teacher in my life, they told me recently that many of their Seniors can’t do what Freshmen could just ten years ago, and they have a shocking amount of Seniors who can’t even read at a second grade level (they teach general ed, not special ed). I mean, not five or twelve of them, but like 30 or 40 percent. They say the kids struggle super hard these days (again, relative to Freshmen a decade ago) to analyze text and form original thoughts, and it’s almost like they’ve all been trained to just be told what to think. In a way, I guess that’s true, thanks to the Algorithm. I think we’re seeing the fruit of that; the algorithm has told these boys what to think, and now they get to find out for themselves what the consequences of that is.
its not social media that causes this, it’s the political brainwashing and propaganda, idk why people are so blindly ignorant to this fact. Does social media propagate and disperse it? Yes, is it entirely the reason behind it? No.
Sitting around and waiting for someone else to save you is defeatist. There’s no magic fix to this. You have to get up and do it yourself.
I’ll do what I can but I can’t stop the zoomers from listening to Rogan any more than I could stop the boomers from listening to Limbaugh.
All we need is people to do their best.
I don’t trust polls anymore. Trump wasn’t supposed to win '16 and it wasn’t supposed to be a blowout '24 according to polls.
What sucks is he only won the popular vote by about 2 million votes. A lot of these states misrepresent their population with the electoral college and gerrymandering.
Gerrymandering would only change a state’s electoral college votes meaningfully in one or two states.
It’s more often an issue of:
- Citizen becomes voter via “motor-votor” registration.
- Later, state sends postcard asking to confirm voter’s address.
- Voter sees postcard, looks like junkmail or fraudulent mail, discards without response.
- State, not checking anything else, drops voter from roll.
Gerrymandering doesn’t affect statewide elections.
it’s almost entirely up to the fact that we use FPTP voting structures in the electoral college, not the electoral college itself.
granted getting rid of FPTP is going to be easier said than done, but it would definitely benefit us in the long run.
Hillary had an 80% chance of winning according to polls. That’s a lot, but Trump still had a 20% chance. That doesn’t really detract from the polls as much as from the reporting on said polls.
It’s almost like a ton of zoomers weren’t paying attention to what the fuck he was doing last time around.
If you think about it, a TON of zoomers were maybe 10 years old when he started his shit.
It’s literally all they have known for most of their formative years. I blame their parents more then them. They never talked to their kids about what he’s doing apparently.
I tell my two kids that what he is doing is evil, and anyone who follows him is broken in some form or another. I tell them ALL the stuff our country has done, good and bad, and to keep learning, keep questioning, and most of all: beware of people like him. They are world enders.
He’s the funny guy from all their memes. They love those memes!
formidable years
I think you meant “formative”.
Changed it, thanks. Stupid phone.
A lot of people were the same age when GWB was signing the Patriot Act and didn’t realize the consequences of his presidency until much later. Young people are impressionable but they do change.
Problem is there are too many old people misguiding young people, the capacity for change doesn’t matter if the same mistakes will be repeated by the next generation.
They were kids. Their parents blamed Biden for the lockdown. They hated the lockdown.
But, many people are easily swayed by emotions. That’s why that whole “genocide Joe” influence worked so well.
Very few people can see the forest through the trees.
It’s not just the zoomers
this is what i like the call “the stupidity of the crowd”
the unfortunate truth is that most zoomers got politically engaged during the biden admin, most zoomers were in elementary, maybe middle MAYBE highschool during the first trump term. This was most definitely an expected result to some degree.
best we can hope for is a significant demographic shift.
I was 16 at the start of the last time, so yeah quite a few of the middle and younger zoomers may legit not remember or were too young to understand.
In it for the jokes.
That’s odd because the only Gen z people who liked Trump were the paid Russian propogandists that were creating all the fake bullshit memes for him
I listened in on a conversation between two young male Kroger union members before the election (the store is unionized so maybe that was an assumption, it’s a right to work state…)
They both agreed they were voting for Trump. I can’t speak to their unspoken motivations but what I can tell you is they absolutely voted on vibes and didn’t have a goddamn clue what was coming for them.
I don’t know what brain rotted the Gen Z boys in a way that didn’t work on the Gen Z girls but I can tell you it wasn’t fake, those kids are not alright.
Maybe this will be Gen Z’s Afghanistan and Iraq, the events that push them left against Republican abuse, but I’m not sure they’ll have a chance when they’re getting a steady diet of algorithmic propaganda.
Hate to say this but there are a lot of young white men who feel unheard and unseen. Trump and the right wing podcasting network really resonates with them.
The reality is society is so much better now than it was in 1995 or 2005 but many young white men feel left out because the advantages they once held are disappearing.
It used to be a that the only right person for the job was a white man or another white man. They didn’t have to compete with other races or genders cuz the game was rigged to only take them seriously. Now, having to fairly compete against women and PoC, a lot of the less capable folk are tapping out and saying “no let’s go back to the old way” because they were more competitive back then.
Yeah and it can be really frustrating because some of their complaints are valid and reasonable, some are understandable but taken to bad places, and others are insane and/or evil. Like, yes there is a serious issue with loneliness and lack of community, but no it isn’t feminism or immigrants to blame, and for some of them it’s that they’re agonizingly unpleasant to be around and mentally unstable.
No one wants to sleep with them, so they want to take rights away from women. It’s pretty simple.
I don’t know what brain rotted the Gen Z boys in a way that didn’t work on the Gen Z girls but I can tell you it wasn’t fake, those kids are not alright.
A lot of it is all that “manosphere” grievance propaganda shit – reels them right in.
It’s been that way for a while, Gen Z boys aren’t the first to fall for it. 10 years ago it was gamergate, and before that there was talk radio like Rush Limbaugh rambling on about “feminazis.”
That’s been “conservatives” best recruitment tool for years. And it generally works up until the boys realize they’re serious about the “no masturbation” rule. Although by that point they’ve generally already got them hooked on other propaganda.
Yeah the left and the right both have a sexually conservative faction and in my experience pointing to the other’s has long been an effective tactic for recruiting young men.
I don’t know what brain rotted the Gen Z boys in a way that didn’t work on the Gen Z girls but I can tell you it wasn’t fake, those kids are not alright.
its nothing to do with brainrot, its the same shit that makes your dad the single dumbest person you’ve ever seen whenever he speaks on politics.
People have done things where they start with a clean VM and set up something like Youtube, watching the most innocuous of things. Doesn’t take too long before they start getting the red pill shit.
That doesn’t happen with broadcast media. You don’t start off watching, say, C-SPAN or PBS, and next thing you know you are getting shown Nazi propaganda.
you have to consciously consume it though, as a consumer of information and media, you hold a responsibility to ensure that what you’re consuming is both good, and factually accurate. If you aren’t doing that, that’s your fault.
People can argue all they want about content algorithms pushing this content, it’s because it’s good content, that’s why its fucking propaganda. It wouldn’t be if it didn’t.
You really don’t have to consciously consume it. You can literally leave auto-play on YouTube and it will steadily pull you down the rabbit hole. These people aren’t logging in to
nazi.comand ravenously looking for content (at least most aren’t).It’s served directly to them in mainstream platforms, prepared exactly how they like it. And they’re the first generation to be bombarded by this algorithmic targeting for their entire lives.
Should adults still be responsible for what they consume and analyzing it critically? Of course. But given we’re in unprecedented territory and this is (at most) their second time voting in a presidential cycle, I’ll give them a mulligan.
If it’s a human failing then no, it should be regulated against to prevent abuse.
People don’t want to hear the truth. Look at the sales on fiction vs. non-fiction.
That’s not a problem in most media because most of the time people are honest about what’s fiction and what’s non-fiction.
On social media, people have these para-social relationships with the people making the content that makes them want the content creators to be “authentic”. Problem is the algorithms don’t select for actual authenticity, because people prefer fiction over reality. So instead people making content need to appear to be authentic to get the para-social juice, but give people fiction because that’s what people really want.
Adults who remember the times before social media became dominant are better equipped to understand the distinction between the fiction social media presents us from reality. To those raised on this content, what’s on social media is reality.
Adults who remember the times before social media became dominant are better equipped to understand the distinction between the fiction social media presents us from reality.
I really do think (fear) that may be true, and that’s probably why I go on about teaching media literacy and critical thinking (most especially spotting logical fallacies) so much.
I already think many that were around before social media were ill-equipped as-is (as an example - how many people think “reality television” is not heavily edited and heavily scripted? That artifice came on the scene before social media did and many were and are duped by it); I worry even more about people raised on it, many of them foolishly thinking that knowing their way around apps and certain sites makes them more “media-savvy”, thinking that “my generation” just gets this like no other when it’s definitely a prior generation that has handed them these things.
This kind of thinking - that your generation is somehow uniquely equipped like no other prior human beings before - is complete delusion. It’s not like this conceit is confined to gen alpha or z or whatever, either - virtually every generation has their version of it.
Cold War brain rot?
political propaganda and uncritically consuming information will turn you into a sheep faster than dressing up as one.
I mean, that’s what I call brain rot, but fair enough. Most people use it to mean saying skibidi too much.
There was a pipeline of radicalization to the right that specifically targeted young men starting with young millennials. In my day it was gamergate, these days it’s tate
The people that constructed the hate radio machine that takes a daily dump in the skull of millions of magazombies would have loooooved to have something like The Algorithm at their disposal.
When you look at the damage they managed to do with decades of the Poutrage Industrial Complex they had with radio/cable, just imagine the shitshow they will manage with decades more of The Algorithm…
The people that constructed the hate radio machine that takes a daily dump in the skull of millions of magazombies would have loooooved to have something like The Algorithm at their disposal.
Uhhh… those people are the ones that control the algorithms now. Have you not been paying attention?
I didn’t say they were necessarily a different set of people. They are definitely the same types. I’m just saying the Roger Ailes would have loved to have the algorithm at their disposal at the time they built Faux. Same for the money behind radical right wing talk radio.
I guess now they captured much of cable, radio and local TV (when you add in Sinclair) - and they seemingly control much of the siren servers on the 'net now, too.
Don’t underestimate right wing populism
I hate articles like this. He won, he is in power. He will be in power for 4 years. His popularity doesn’t matter anymore.
Does if you want a revolution.
I envy the optimism.
The popularity of the President has a great effect on what happens in the midterm elections.
Ofc that’s dependant on us having a free and fair midterm election by then
He will be in power for 4 years
minimum
Not necessarily. His lifestyle is atrocious
But his medical care is the best in the country.
That can only do so much, though.
They made a hologram of Tupac, I’m sure they could figure something out
He’ll be in power for only the next 23 months if we can get a supermajority of sane, congresspeople with backbones elected in 2026. So yeah, he’ll be in power for 4+ years.
If he were a normal president who cared about Congress and the future of his party in fair and free elections this would matter a lot. Unfortunately he isn’t and his plan is to make certain there aren’t any free and fair elections, so we’ll see what happens.
Need to rejoin England, go back to a proper parliamentary system. Everybody who saw the American Constitutional, from it’s first publication, said "this will end up as a dictatorship, as the role of president has too much power’'. Finally that scenario has played out.
I mean fair enough but do you really want a GOP-controlled congress to have ultimate power?
It’s not great in the UK either mind, for fucks sake don’t copy us!
It doesn’t have to be great.
It just has to be better.
Democracy happens whether governments want it to or not.
Elections are just a form of democracy where all parties involved agree that its going to happen.
Either way, the will of the people will ultimately decide the direction of every nation, regardless of what kind of government they have.
