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Yahoo
27-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
3 takeaways from the most authoritative autopsy of the 2024 election yet
It's been more than six months, but Democrats are still picking over the cold, dead body of the 2024 election. The latest autopsy comes courtesy of Catalist, a Democratic data firm with a widely coveted voter database. By now, you may feel that you know more about how Democrats lost last year than you ever wished to know. Which would be understandable. But Catalist's findings are especially authoritative, as the firm tracks the actual voting behavior of 256 million Americans across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In other words, they are not relying purely on surveys of how people said they would vote, but also hard data showing which party individual voters registered with, and which elections they did and did not show up for. Previously, David Shor of Blue Rose Research released a 2024 analysis that drew partly on similar data sources. But Catalist boasts the longest-running voter database of any institution besides the Democratic and Republican Parties, as it has tracked the electorate's behavior for over 15 years. Many, therefore, consider its characterizations of shifts in voting patterns to be uniquely trustworthy. Their entire report is worth reading. But I'd like to spotlight three takeaways that have especially significant implications for Democratic strategy going forward. (One note: When Catalist reports election results, it strips out all ballots cast for a third party. This is because the third-party share of the vote is highly noisy from one election cycle to another, shifting in response to semi-random factors, like whether a rich businessman decides to throw his hat in the ring. Thus, all the figures cited below represent the Democratic Party's share of all ballots cast for a major party presidential candidate in a given election year, not its share of all votes cast, although the two tend to be very similar.) Some analysts have attributed Harris's loss entirely to weak Democratic turnout. Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, argues that American voters didn't shift 'rightward' in 2024 so much as 'couchward.' In his telling, Trump didn't prevail because he won over a decisive share of swing voters, but because Democrats failed to mobilize America's anti-MAGA majority. And many on the left attribute that failure to Harris's centrism: Had she not taken her party's base 'for granted,' she could have ridden high Democratic turnout to victory. The evidence for this view has always been weak. But Catalist's data makes its falsity especially clear. Drawing on voter file data, the firm found that 126 million Americans cast a ballot in both the 2020 and 2024 elections, a group it dubs 'repeat voters.' And Catalist determined how these Americans voted in each election. This is the exact data necessary for resolving the debate over whether Trump won over swing voters. Looking at raw election results, it's hard to tell whether a decline in Democratic support was derived from the same voters switching sides or different people showing up at the ballot box. But here, Catalist provides us with a large, fixed voter pool. Any drop in Democratic vote-share among these 126 million individuals could only come from Biden 2020 voters flipping to Trump. And the data shows that Biden won 51.6 percent of repeat voters in 2020, while Harris won only 49.4 percent of them last year. Meanwhile, there were 26 million 'new voters' in 2024, which is to say, voters who hadn't cast a ballot in 2020. Democrats have historically won new voters by comfortable margins, largely because young Americans were overwhelmingly left-leaning in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. But last year, Trump won new voters by about 3 points. One could attribute this development to either turnout or persuasion. Some voters who didn't cast a ballot in 2020 — either because they were too young or too disengaged that year — strongly prefer one party over the other. So maybe Trump mobilized lots of previously inactive voters who always favored the Republican Party, while Harris failed to energize enough of those who always preferred the Democrats. On the other hand, it's possible that Republicans won over many young or disengaged voters who had previously lacked a strong partisan attachment or had favored the Democratic Party. In reality, both these factors were likely operative. Indeed, it is extremely improbable that Democrats' difficulties with new voters were entirely attributable to turnout. Some young and irregular voters just started tuning into politics and forming a partisan preference over the past four years. And survey data indicates that Republicans converted many such voters to their cause. All this said, Democrats surely saw weaker turnout than Republicans last year, and this was partly responsible for Harris's loss. According to Catalist, 30 million Americans voted in 2020 but not in 2024. And this group of 'dropoff' voters had supported Biden over Trump by a 55.7 to 44.3 percent margin four years ago. We can't safely assume that this bloc would have voted for Harris over Trump by similar margins. In fact, it is likely that this population became more sympathetic to Trump over the past four years. Unreliable voters tend to have weaker partisan identities, and the decision to sit out an election often reflects a voter's ambivalence about which candidate they prefer. Nevertheless, if every 2020 voter turned out last year, Harris would almost certainly have done better. Democrats do need to try to mobilize their coalition's most unreliable members. They just can't do so at the expense of winning over swing voters. Fortunately, there is not necessarily a stark tradeoff between these two tasks. Biden-supporting 'dropoff voters' were not typically hardline progressives outraged about Biden's complicity in Israeli war crimes or Harris's courting of NeverTrump conservatives. Rather, such unreliable Democratic leaners tend to be politically disengaged and ideologically heterodox, much like many swing voters. According to Catalist's modeling, the lower a Democratic-leaning voter's propensity to turnout for elections, the more likely they are to consider voting for a Republican. Like AP Votecast and Blue Rose Research, Catalist finds that younger voters were significantly more Republican in 2024 than they had been in 2020. While Biden won 61 percent of voters under 30 four years ago, Harris won only 55 percent of that demographic last year (notably, this is a smaller decline than Blue Rose Research registered). This decline was driven almost entirely by the rightward drift of young men. Harris won 63 percent of women under 30, just three points lower than Biden in 2020. But she won only 46 percent of men under 30, which was nine points worse than Biden's showing. Harris actually won the same share of the white vote that Barack Obama had in 2012. And her support among America's white majority was only 2 points lower than Biden's in 2020. But like previous 2024 autopsies, Catalist's report finds that Democrats suffered steeper losses with nonwhite voters, particularly those who were young, male, and/or politically disengaged. Harris won 85 percent of Black voters, down from Biden's 89 percent. That drop was entirely due to flagging support from Black men, as this chart shows: Democrats suffered especially large losses with young Black men, winning only 75 percent of their ballots in 2024, compared to 85 percent four years earlier. The trends among Latino voters were similar. Between 2020 and 2024, Latino support for the Democratic nominee dropped from 63 to 54 percent (as recently as 2016, Democrats had won 70 percent of the demographic). The decline among Latino men was particularly pronounced, as Trump won a 53-percent majority of that historically Democratic constituency: Democratic support among young Latino men fell off a cliff. And the party lost even more ground with Latino men under 30 who vote irregularly — which is to say, those who missed at least one of the last four general elections in which they were eligible to cast a ballot. Finally, Harris won only 61 percent of Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) voters. Back in 2012, this group had backed Obama over Romney by a 74 to 26 percent margin. As with other nonwhite voting blocs, AAPI men are leaving the Democratic coalition faster than their female counterparts. Taken together, all these figures paint a disconcerting picture for Democrats. The party has long wagered that time was on its side: Since America's rising generations were heavily left-leaning — and the country was becoming more diverse by the year — it would become gradually easier for Democrats to assemble national majorities, even as the party bled support among non-college-educated white voters. And it's true that Democrats still do better with young and nonwhite voters than with Americans as a whole. But the party's advantage with those constituencies has been narrowing rapidly. Last year's returns suggest that demographic churn isn't quite the boon that many Democrats had hoped, and can be easily outweighed by other factors. Meanwhile, as blue states bleed population to red ones, Democrats are poised to have a much harder time winning Electoral College majorities after the 2030 census. Given current trends, by 2032, a Democratic nominee who won every blue state — and added Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania — would still lose the White House. How Democrats can arrest the rightward drift of young and nonwhite Americans — while broadening their geographic base of support — is up for debate. But pretending that the swing electorate does not exist, or that unreliable Democratic voters are all doctrinaire progressives, probably won't help.
Yahoo
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The New Partisan Divide Is Old Gen Z vs. Young Gen Z
New data out of Yale's Youth Poll broke the internet last week when it revealed a partisan split within Gen Z. Given a generic Democrat vs. Republican ballot for 2026, respondents ages 18-21 supported Republicans by nearly 12 points, while those ages 22-29 backed Democrats by about 6 points. It was a stunning gap that undermined the longstanding notion of younger voters always trending more liberal. On the contrary, today's youngest eligible voters are more conservative than their older counterparts: According to the poll, they are less likely to support transgender athletes participating in sports, less likely to support sending aid to Ukraine and more likely to approve of President Donald Trump. Fifty-one percent of younger Gen Zers view him favorably, compared to 46 percent of older Gen Z. That split might seem surprising, but it's only the latest example of an emerging dynamic I've noticed developing over the last few years: It's increasingly clear that there are actually two different Gen Z's, each with a particular political worldview. Since just after the 2022 midterm elections, I've held listening sessions — open-forums for discussion — with teens and young adults across the country to find out how young people think and feel about politics. I've traveled to high school and college campuses, community centers and even homes. And as I've written before, these conversations with young people illuminated the distinctions between Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0. Gen Z 1.0, the older segment, graduated high school and tasted independence prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their coming of age coincided with Trump's first term in office and the rise of anti-Trump resistance movements for racial justice and gender equity. Social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat, with all their filters and made-for-social media aesthetics, were commonplace — but TikTok wasn't yet the massively popular platform it is today. Fast forward to 2020 through today, and those in Gen Z 2.0 came of age under different circumstances. They graduated high school during or after the start of the pandemic, which disrupted their K-12 experience. When many in this cohort began college, it was largely on Zoom, or in a campus environment that barely resembled pre-pandemic times. The political situation was also starkly different: With President Joe Biden in office, Trump and his MAGA movement felt like the counterculture — especially for young men, who swung hard to the right. Indeed, gender played a prominent role in shaping the youth vote in 2024. An analysis by Blue Rose Research found a 20-point gender gap in Democratic support between men and women ages 25 and younger — the largest such gender gap in any generation by far. 'It's normal to see women supporting Democratic candidates at like a five- to 10-point higher rate than men do,' said Ali Mortell, Blue Rose's research director. 'Among the youngest cohort of Gen Z, it's north of 20 points. So this is really jarring, and I think, caught the Democratic Party somewhat flat-footed.' That gender gap has attracted a lot of media attention, but the headlines gloss over some important nuances. While young men turbo-charged Trump's success in November, they're not the only Gen Zers shifting right. Despite the overall gender gap, the Yale poll found that, while women ages 22-29 have a net-negative favorability of Trump, those ages 18-21 are more supportive of him, roughly split between a favorable and unfavorable view of the president. Young white women in particular are trending more conservative. Data from Tufts University's Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) shows that, while women of color ages 18-29 overwhelmingly supported former Vice President Kamala Harris, young white women were split between Harris and Trump, 49 percent to 49 percent. That's a huge jump from 2020, when, according to CIRCLE's data, young white women voted for President Joe Biden over Trump by a 15-point margin. That could be in part because some of the most formative experiences separating Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0 cut across gender — the most obvious being the pandemic. 'We've definitely been cognizant that there feels like there's a change between the kids who got through high school before and after Covid,' said Jack Dozier, the 19-year-old deputy director of the Yale survey. 'There is a huge variation that came up between just the college-age young adults, and then the young adults who are over 22.' In my own research, I started to hear about Covid's impact in conversations with young Americans in 2022. Throughout history, young people haven't liked being told what to do, and for many younger Gen Zers, the pandemic restrictions chafed against their youthful discomfort with authority. At first, they expressed annoyance with what they saw as prolonged social distancing on campuses that impacted the student experience. As one 20-year-old told me in a listening session at the end of March: 'The adults don't have it all together, and they don't have my back.' When students finally went back to school, they complained about the policing of their behavior — not just regarding Covid protections like social distancing and masking, but also broader issues around language. Our national online discourse, these young people said, had adopted an overt political correctness and cancel culture – the tendency, particularly in online spaces, to denounce others for controversial statements or action. Many young people perceived this as promoted by Democrats — those in control, not just in D.C., but in pop-culture and on social media. As recently as late March, I checked in with a number of Gen Zers to see how they felt about cancel culture. Asked if it has been a net-positive or net-negative for American politics, young adults told me that, while there should be some social practice to hold people accountable for their words and actions, cancel culture limits freedom of speech and has the potential to radicalize those with already controversial opinions. Beyond the impact of the pandemic on these younger Gen Zers, Dozier said the schism within Gen Z might stem from how young those in Gen Z 2.0 were during Trump's first term in office. 'In Trump's first presidency, these 18-year-olds were only nine or 10 years old, at least when the campaign started,' he said. 'We found that there's a potential causality from the reasoning that these 18- to 21-year-olds just don't quite remember the impacts of the first Trump presidency, whether that be in global isolationism or in a change in American politics.' Put simply, older Gen Zers had a sense of what they were getting themselves into by voting for Trump; younger ones didn't. Meanwhile, news consumption has dramatically changed over the last few years. Dozier called the online landscape for Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0 'a whole different world of media.' Similarly, Ali Mortell, the director of research at the Democratic Blue Rose Research, credited Gen Z's rightward movement to a 'radical shift in the digital media environment,' adding that 'TikTok has exploded as a platform.' While TikTok was around during the 2020 election, it really gained in popularity over the past five years and has become a go-to source for news and politics for young voters especially. When I conduct listening sessions with members of Gen Z, I ask where they get their news. TikTok is always at the top of the list. And while its mysterious algorithm feeds users' varying content, on the whole, an internal review of the platform ahead of the 2024 election found twice as many posts in support of Trump as those in support of Biden, signaling a mood shift on the app frequented by young voters. 'Young people are not only consuming digital media content, non-traditional sources at much higher rates than older generations, but they're increasingly getting their news from non-political, non-traditional sources,' Mortell told me. But she took it one step farther: 'We are seeing this very clear relationship between defection away from the Democratic Party and TikTok consumption.' The rapid onset of TikTok encapsulates the head-spinning pace of change younger Gen Zers have experienced. There are cleavages within every generation, but perhaps none more so than Gen Z, which has grown up amid the fastest speed of technological and political change in recent memory. When it comes to their politics, time will tell if the rightward shift sticks. Until then, anyone trying to understand this generation's politics will need to figure out just which Gen Z they're asking about.
Politico
26-04-2025
- Politics
- Politico
The New Partisan Divide Is Old Gen Z vs. Young Gen Z
New data out of Yale's Youth Poll broke the internet last week when it revealed a partisan split within Gen Z. Given a generic Democrat vs. Republican ballot for 2026, respondents ages 18-21 supported Republicans by nearly 12 points, while those ages 22-29 backed Democrats by about 6 points. It was a stunning gap that undermined the longstanding notion of younger voters always trending more liberal. On the contrary, today's youngest eligible voters are more conservative than their older counterparts: According to the poll, they are less likely to support transgender athletes participating in sports, less likely to support sending aid to Ukraine and more likely to approve of President Donald Trump. Fifty-one percent of younger Gen Zers view him favorably, compared to 46 percent of older Gen Z. That split might seem surprising, but it's only the latest example of an emerging dynamic I've noticed developing over the last few years: It's increasingly clear that there are actually two different Gen Z's, each with a particular political worldview. Since just after the 2022 midterm elections, I've held listening sessions — open-forums for discussion — with teens and young adults across the country to find out how young people think and feel about politics. I've traveled to high school and college campuses, community centers and even homes. And as I've written before , these conversations with young people illuminated the distinctions between Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0. Gen Z 1.0, the older segment, graduated high school and tasted independence prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their coming of age coincided with Trump's first term in office and the rise of anti-Trump resistance movements for racial justice and gender equity. Social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat, with all their filters and made-for-social media aesthetics, were commonplace — but TikTok wasn't yet the massively popular platform it is today. Fast forward to 2020 through today, and those in Gen Z 2.0 came of age under different circumstances. They graduated high school during or after the start of the pandemic, which disrupted their K-12 experience. When many in this cohort began college, it was largely on Zoom, or in a campus environment that barely resembled pre-pandemic times. The political situation was also starkly different: With President Joe Biden in office, Trump and his MAGA movement felt like the counterculture — especially for young men, who swung hard to the right. Indeed, gender played a prominent role in shaping the youth vote in 2024. An analysis by Blue Rose Research found a 20-point gender gap in Democratic support between men and women ages 25 and younger — the largest such gender gap in any generation by far. 'It's normal to see women supporting Democratic candidates at like a five- to 10-point higher rate than men do,' said Ali Mortell, Blue Rose's research director. 'Among the youngest cohort of Gen Z, it's north of 20 points. So this is really jarring, and I think, caught the Democratic Party somewhat flat-footed.' That gender gap has attracted a lot of media attention, but the headlines gloss over some important nuances. While young men turbo-charged Trump's success in November, they're not the only Gen Zers shifting right. Despite the overall gender gap, the Yale poll found that, while women ages 22-29 have a net-negative favorability of Trump, those ages 18-21 are more supportive of him , roughly split between a favorable and unfavorable view of the president. Young white women in particular are trending more conservative. Data from Tufts University's Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) shows that, while women of color ages 18-29 overwhelmingly supported former Vice President Kamala Harris, young white women were split between Harris and Trump , 49 percent to 49 percent. That's a huge jump from 2020, when, according to CIRCLE's data, young white women voted for President Joe Biden over Trump by a 15-point margin. That could be in part because some of the most formative experiences separating Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0 cut across gender — the most obvious being the pandemic. 'We've definitely been cognizant that there feels like there's a change between the kids who got through high school before and after Covid,' said Jack Dozier, the 19-year-old deputy director of the Yale survey. 'There is a huge variation that came up between just the college-age young adults, and then the young adults who are over 22.' In my own research, I started to hear about Covid's impact in conversations with young Americans in 2022. Throughout history, young people haven't liked being told what to do, and for many younger Gen Zers, the pandemic restrictions chafed against their youthful discomfort with authority. At first, they expressed annoyance with what they saw as prolonged social distancing on campuses that impacted the student experience. As one 20-year-old told me in a listening session at the end of March: 'The adults don't have it all together, and they don't have my back.' When students finally went back to school, they complained about the policing of their behavior — not just regarding Covid protections like social distancing and masking, but also broader issues around language. Our national online discourse, these young people said, had adopted an overt political correctness and cancel culture – the tendency, particularly in online spaces, to denounce others for controversial statements or action. Many young people perceived this as promoted by Democrats — those in control, not just in D.C., but in pop-culture and on social media. As recently as late March, I checked in with a number of Gen Zers to see how they felt about cancel culture. Asked if it has been a net-positive or net-negative for American politics, young adults told me that, while there should be some social practice to hold people accountable for their words and actions, cancel culture limits freedom of speech and has the potential to radicalize those with already controversial opinions. Beyond the impact of the pandemic on these younger Gen Zers, Dozier said the schism within Gen Z might stem from how young those in Gen Z 2.0 were during Trump's first term in office. 'In Trump's first presidency, these 18-year-olds were only nine or 10 years old, at least when the campaign started,' he said. 'We found that there's a potential causality from the reasoning that these 18- to 21-year-olds just don't quite remember the impacts of the first Trump presidency, whether that be in global isolationism or in a change in American politics.' Put simply, older Gen Zers had a sense of what they were getting themselves into by voting for Trump; younger ones didn't. Meanwhile, news consumption has dramatically changed over the last few years. Dozier called the online landscape for Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0 'a whole different world of media.' Similarly, Ali Mortell, the director of research at the Democratic Blue Rose Research, credited Gen Z's rightward movement to a 'radical shift in the digital media environment,' adding that 'TikTok has exploded as a platform.' While TikTok was around during the 2020 election, it really gained in popularity over the past five years and has become a go-to source for news and politics for young voters especially. When I conduct listening sessions with members of Gen Z, I ask where they get their news. TikTok is always at the top of the list. And while its mysterious algorithm feeds users' varying content, on the whole, an internal review of the platform ahead of the 2024 election found twice as many posts in support of Trump as those in support of Biden, signaling a mood shift on the app frequented by young voters. 'Young people are not only consuming digital media content, non-traditional sources at much higher rates than older generations, but they're increasingly getting their news from non-political, non-traditional sources,' Mortell told me. But she took it one step farther: 'We are seeing this very clear relationship between defection away from the Democratic Party and TikTok consumption.' The rapid onset of TikTok encapsulates the head-spinning pace of change younger Gen Zers have experienced. There are cleavages within every generation, but perhaps none more so than Gen Z, which has grown up amid the fastest speed of technological and political change in recent memory. When it comes to their politics, time will tell if the rightward shift sticks. Until then, anyone trying to understand this generation's politics will need to figure out just which Gen Z they're asking about.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Less ‘West Wing,' More TikTok: How Democrats Are Losing the Messaging Wars
Democrats have engaged in near-continuous hand-wringing about their 2024 loss, debating how Republicans outmaneuvered them in the messaging/information wars. Yet the post-election autopsy, which has included pondering whether the left needs its own Joe Rogan, might mask a broader concern: Do Democrats see the world through a long-form lens, informed by movies like 'All the President's Men' and TV shows like 'The West Wing,' in what has increasingly become a TikTok world? Historically, Democrats have enjoyed a creative advantage in terms of access to top filmmaking talent, since the biggest names in Hollywood are far more likely to support them. In the past, that paid off with signature image-building exercises like 'The Man From Hope,' a stirring biographical portrait that helped introduce Bill Clinton produced by his Arkansas pal, 'Designing Women' producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason; and 'The Road We've Traveled,' a 17-minute video for Barack Obama's 2012 reelection campaign from 'An Inconvenient Truth' director Davis Guggenheim. As some experts and analysts have observed, though, the media world has changed, and the kind of gauzy ads and meticulously produced material that once ruled politics have lost ground to viral, bite-sized consumption. That's perhaps especially true among low-information, less-engaged and younger voters who are, arguably, the most difficult, yet also potentially most pivotal, for campaigns to reach. What seems clear is that Democrats' advantage in terms of pop culture luminaries and filmmaking heavyweights evaporates when the conversation shifts to influencers and media that's less focused on stirring cinema, à la 'Mr. Smith Goes to Washington,' and more akin to guerrilla warfare. In addition, politicians on the left appear to be floundering as they seek to tap into the world of podcasts and new media, which many see as responsible, at least in part, for the inroads the GOP made among younger constituencies upon which Democrats had traditionally relied. David Shor, the head of data science at the Democratic consulting firm Blue Rose Research, spelled this out in a podcast with the New York Times' Ezra Klein, noting that the share of voters getting their news from TikTok has 'more than quadrupled in the last four years,' representing 'the biggest and probably fastest shift in media consumption that has happened in my lifetime.' Shor cited a 'political divergence' between people who consume traditional news sources and those who don't. On a related front, the liberal media watchdog Media Matters recently broke down how voices on the right dominate the online media ecosystem, bleeding beyond politics into sports and other areas. Even ostensible media allies of the Democrats have found the party's collective response to that redefined playing field underwhelming. 'The Daily Show' host Jon Stewart, for example, derisively featured a 'choose your fighter' video of Democratic members of Congress seeking to playfully reenact the game Mortal Kombat, pointedly observing, 'Whatever this is is no match for the game Republicans are playing.' Whatever the game, the rules do appear to be changing. As for solutions, nothing is as simple as the left finding its version of right-leaning podcasters like Rogan, as some have suggested, when the split looks much more complex than that — a divide between those who sit through movies and those who operate in memes, between those who pine for Jed Bartlet's stirring 'West Wing' speeches and those who filter the political world through reality TV, and not incidentally, who cheer Donald Trump, a president who burnished his image by starring in a reality show and hobnobbing with wrestlers. Matthew Sheffield, a former Republican operative who has turned his attention to analyzing the asymmetrical nature of the information wars, sees merit in the long-form versus short-form analogy, as well as the gap between scripted and unscripted TV. Mostly, he argues that Democrats must recognize that politics and the messaging surrounding how campaigns are waged have evolved (or perhaps devolved) dramatically since Clinton was in the White House, citing the need for 'a market-oriented messaging system versus a top-down messaging system.' 'In the social media age there is no one message that will work anymore. You have to give people a thousand different messages, and let them choose what makes sense for them,' Sheffield told TheWrap, adding that Democrats have to 'meet people where they are, even if it's on 'Temptation Island.'' Rep. Eric Swalwell, a media-savvy California Democrat, seemed to echo that sentiment in a recent social media post, putting the emphasis on methods, not objectives, by saying, 'People keep asking me if Dems are divided between left and center of party. Nope. We are divided over old and new ways of fighting. That 20th century playbook ain't stopping a dictator.' As Sheffield has suggested, from a messaging standpoint, any new playbook requires a variety of approaches, adapting to a media landscape that, as any studio executive could attest, has a way of rapidly turning familiar expectations on their head. Simply put, consumption patterns have changed, from the size of the screens to the nature of the content itself. While movies and TV can still connect with audiences on an emotional level, political messaging operates in much more niche-oriented spaces today, certainly compared to the days when a Watergate drama could top the box office or series creator Aaron Sorkin's vision of a principled president and his staff qualified as a ratings hit. Sheffield noted that a recent trend toward self-consciously conservative movies tend to be pretty lousy, in part because they often focus more on venting grievances and pushing a message than telling a story. By contrast, the short-form material from that right often feels more authentic, raw and entertaining — setting aside whether it's factual or truth based — and that's increasingly where the political battle is being fought. 'People want something that is quick and not overproduced,' Sheffield political quotes have received more mileage through the years than one attributed to the late New York Gov. Mario Cuomo, who famously said, 'You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose.' Arguably, the messaging around Clinton and Obama's campaigns (and before them, Ronald Reagan) effectively trafficked in poetry, rooted in Old Hollywood imagery of actors like Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda fighting the good fight on behalf of American values. But that was then, and this is now — a time when campaigning often resembles a chaotic food fight, and governing is simply the spoils of war that's left to the victors. The post Less 'West Wing,' More TikTok: How Democrats Are Losing the Messaging Wars appeared first on TheWrap.
Forbes
25-03-2025
- Politics
- Forbes
Gen Z Could ‘Become One Of The Most Conservative Generations': Data Shows Why Democrats Lost In 2024
As a party, Democrats were forced to do some soul-searching after losing the White House, House and Senate in the 2024 election. Blue Rose Research conducted over 25 million interviews with voters throughout 2024, and have found data that paints the picture of why exactly Democrats lost — and what they can learn from the election. Ali Mortell, Director of Research at Blue Rose Research, joined Brittany Lewis on "Forbes Newsroom" to discuss. Watch the full interview above.
