Probably. My take is that the young people coming into the electorate in areas like this are overwhelmingly MAGA. They'd be less likely to participate in an election for the state supreme court, meaning their legacy Democrat grandparents have more leverage to help keep the county blue in lower-turnout cycles.
Probably. My take is that the young people coming into the electorate in areas like this are overwhelmingly MAGA. They'd be less likely to participate in an election for the state supreme court, meaning their legacy Democrat grandparents have more leverage to help keep the county blue in lower-turnout cycles.
It's par for the course though for young people to be the least likely to vote and for their politics to be shaped by the administration which they came of age into. A major reason why much of Gen X leans right is because many of them came of age when Carter and Reagan were in the White House. They associate the Democratic Party with Jimmy Carter and the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan. Reagan actually openly lamented poor youth turnout during the 1982 and 1986 midterms.
Right, but as you point out, my generation tends to be anti-Democratic because Carter was seen as a failure. It wouldn't have been a foregone conclusion that a president who was such a disaster and was then convicted would be seen so positively by young people.
I would agree with that if it weren't for the fact that one of the reasons that man is back in the White House is because the majority of Americans decided to pretend that COVID never happened. We Democrats are going to have to address men's issues because we are seen as "anti men" with Gen Alpha.
I'd say a start would be aiming moderating influence instead of immediately being on the opposing side simply because it's politicially expedient.
One of the contributing problems is the rhetoric shared by certain people who have feminist points of view, namely women (not all women, especially those who are feminists, are like this), who are attacking men for their views when they may not be really toxic in the first place.
It's one thing for men to show they have toxic views about women. It's another to flat out shut down the discussion amongst men when they are simply trying to show they care, want to learn more and evolve. If this happens for men often when they are much younger, then they are going to have a harder time approaching women and more likely to be brainwashed by the likes of Andrew Tate.
FYI, I argue I have feminist views but would never argue I know more about feminism than women, especially since such movements like the Hull House in the early 1900's and suffrage movement were started by women. However, when the argument is not about making progress but about making men in general look inferior, then that's where the rhetoric outweighs the real agenda that should be discussed.
This sounds like something for ordinary people to do. Are you envisioning some kind of Sister Souljah moment for a Democratic presidential candidate, if you know what I'm referring to, and can you imagine one getting away with that kind of politically motivated bashing of an anti-right wing non-politician now?
And also Reagan was seen as a success because he was having seen as restored strong economic growth without much inflation, leaving aside the question of how much credit he really deserved for that, and making for an easy contrast to Carter that Republicans pounded on for nearly a decade (until the economy slumped under Bush 41.)
If Trump's policies end up producing higher prices and stagnant at best growth, as many predict, then Biden won't look so bad in retrospect to young voters (or anyone else). Not to mention the fact that Trump is far less well regarded personally than Reagan was.
I think, fairly or not, it's more a case of them seeing Biden poorly than Trump positively.
Biden oversaw the majority of the difficult Covid years, inflation (which was global), Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and some inflaming of a forbidden topic.
Now, I think he did an exemplary job on the policy side of handling things. Of course I have room to critique but he did well. Voters don't care about that though. They care that the world seemingly went to shit under him and that he was constantly being attacked for his age (by republicans, independents, and democrats). Plus, with Harris not being elected to succeed him most of his big policy wins are going to be either undone completely or brazenly have the credit stolen.
I think there's strong-ish parallels to Carter here for Biden's historical legacy. We just have to hope that Trump doesn't end up with a Reagan-esque legacy. Fortunately I think that one is off the table with how the country is reacting to events so far.
Agree! Can't help but feel '16 and '24 were votes against the Dem Potus candidate as much as or more than a vote for the repub candidate. Not coincidental that both Dem candidates were women: this country has a long ways to go!!
It also doesnтАЩt help that so many of BidenтАЩs policies never really were implemented because of how long it took for infrastructure projects to be authorized and built and because of the Supreme Court stopping things like student loan forgiveness, so a lot of people didnтАЩt feel the benefits of them.
True although I think with the next Democratic POTUS, there is an opportunity to be bolder than what Biden did with student loan forgiveness. There are universities like Harvard and MIT that are experimenting with free tuition for families with annual income at or less than $100,000.
The problem with public universities charging tuition has been an issue ever since Ronald Reagan was Governor of California. Public universities should ideally be low in cost or free all together to attend vs. private universities, which as far as I'm concerned can do what they want with tuition.
Plus, ROI for centennials who are finishing college is important. It's a considerably more competitive market and everyone wants a reasonable shot at succeeding. I don't think Obama and Biden ever really addressed this in their presidencies although in all fairness to Obama, he had a much tougher hill to climb than Biden because of the Great Recession.
Yes, almost every shitty thing in the economy, including the cost of education, can be traced back to Reagan. Not to mention the right-wing media echo chamber which is the direct result of the repeal of the fairness doctrine.
To your point, we are in a much different circumstance than back in 1982 when Reagan managed as POTUS heading towards the deep recession then. Even while there can be comparisons, the economy today is just in much better shape even while inflation and costs in general are being liabilities for everyone spending and saving as they see fit.
Also, Trump now has to deal with the liability facing Biden and is going to be under increased pressure to get the prices down. The longer he doesn't do this, the harder it's going to be on the GOP heading to the 2026 midterms.
Of course although Biden as POTUS was under increased pressure to deal with inflation, even while there's not a ton he could do about it.
Trump will be dealing with the same dynamic as long as inflation continues with this volatile path. It's gone down a bit but then goes back up at some point. It's a complicated thing to manage.
The sad truth is that voters have different expectations of the parties. Republicans are expected to break stuff, fling poo, and throw hissy fits, while Democrats are expected to be "the adults in the room" and get stuff done, even when their actual power is quite limited.
When it became clear that Biden would not be able to restore 2019 world conditions, that was the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, few people seriously expect Trump to fix anythingтАФnot even the people who voted for him!
Reagan had a much better team, even though it included people like Watt, and he wasn't constantly firing people or insisting on empty sycophancy. His foreign policy team in particular was highly competent, even if there were sometimes questions about Caspar Weinberger's temperament and judgment, and of course there was the Iran-Contra scandal, but that seems to have come from the top. Reagan also had a very different style and delivery, and that made a huge and somewhat unjustified difference to his image and reputation.
Yes, I will give Reagan credit for that. He maintained civility and was liked by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. No one in either party argued that working for the Reagan Administration was dealing with low morale or toxic work environment.
Reagan also had the benefit that the US was geopolitically and globally economically ascendant during his presidency. The USSR was in serious decline while the US was not, and no US rival was growing quickly enough to compensate. There were worries of Japanese growth, but they were and remain a US ally. The US was dominating the global stage for reasons outside of Reagan's power, but that our country was doing so overly well would cause people to look fondly on those years.
Today is a very different thing. China is growing rapidly and even if we manage to avoid being displaced by them as the preeminent global economy, they will still remain close enough to end our unipolar status on the world stage.
Presidents today cannot rely on geopolitical inertia to carry them through. The US' global position is not what it once was.
And the current admin is doing every damn thing they can to make that problem worse. Making it even less likely to end up with a Reagan-esque legacy.
No exit polls broke it down that closely specific to these rural jurisdictions, but I've found a useful tea leaf is the student voting done at high schools. The results often come with district-by-district maps, and I've found that a lot of these school districts in Obama-Trump jurisdictions typically go 2-1 for Trump int he student vote. This strikes me as pretty useful data points to telegraph how the young adult vote is trending.
If these regions are anything like the Rust Belt areas with which I'm familiar (western PA and northeast OH), many young people leave (e.g., to pursue higher education) and never come back, and the ones who remain tend to be quite different demographically.
A place like Youngstown, OHтАФwhich has a low cost of living and nice suburban areas outside the cityтАФcan't even attract a professional class anymore. Doctors/lawyers/university professors etc. choose to commute from Cleveland, Akron, or Pittsburgh instead.
Better government and economic development strategies? Akron does have a good-sized university and sizable professional sectors like health care, education, and science/research, plus a service economy that's helped it to diversify its economy from manufacturing (mainly rubber in Akron's case) better than Youngstown.. Being relatively close to Cleveland doesn't hurt either.
^Yep, all this. Akron and Cleveland have pretty much fused into one big metro at this point (many of Akron's moneyed "suburbs" like Stow, Cuyahoga Falls, and Hudson are more accurately Cleveland exurbs).
I thought Youngstown was in the Cleveland area, too, but looking at a map, I see that it's a significantly farther than Akron, 1 1/4 hours by car and a 1 3/4-hour Greyhound trip from Cleveland. Akron is about 45 minutes from Cleveland by either method, per Google.
Probably. My take is that the young people coming into the electorate in areas like this are overwhelmingly MAGA. They'd be less likely to participate in an election for the state supreme court, meaning their legacy Democrat grandparents have more leverage to help keep the county blue in lower-turnout cycles.
That's really sad about young people. Is that based on exit polling from the general election?
It's par for the course though for young people to be the least likely to vote and for their politics to be shaped by the administration which they came of age into. A major reason why much of Gen X leans right is because many of them came of age when Carter and Reagan were in the White House. They associate the Democratic Party with Jimmy Carter and the Republican Party with Ronald Reagan. Reagan actually openly lamented poor youth turnout during the 1982 and 1986 midterms.
Right, but as you point out, my generation tends to be anti-Democratic because Carter was seen as a failure. It wouldn't have been a foregone conclusion that a president who was such a disaster and was then convicted would be seen so positively by young people.
I would agree with that if it weren't for the fact that one of the reasons that man is back in the White House is because the majority of Americans decided to pretend that COVID never happened. We Democrats are going to have to address men's issues because we are seen as "anti men" with Gen Alpha.
Address how?
I'd say a start would be aiming moderating influence instead of immediately being on the opposing side simply because it's politicially expedient.
One of the contributing problems is the rhetoric shared by certain people who have feminist points of view, namely women (not all women, especially those who are feminists, are like this), who are attacking men for their views when they may not be really toxic in the first place.
It's one thing for men to show they have toxic views about women. It's another to flat out shut down the discussion amongst men when they are simply trying to show they care, want to learn more and evolve. If this happens for men often when they are much younger, then they are going to have a harder time approaching women and more likely to be brainwashed by the likes of Andrew Tate.
FYI, I argue I have feminist views but would never argue I know more about feminism than women, especially since such movements like the Hull House in the early 1900's and suffrage movement were started by women. However, when the argument is not about making progress but about making men in general look inferior, then that's where the rhetoric outweighs the real agenda that should be discussed.
This sounds like something for ordinary people to do. Are you envisioning some kind of Sister Souljah moment for a Democratic presidential candidate, if you know what I'm referring to, and can you imagine one getting away with that kind of politically motivated bashing of an anti-right wing non-politician now?
And also Reagan was seen as a success because he was having seen as restored strong economic growth without much inflation, leaving aside the question of how much credit he really deserved for that, and making for an easy contrast to Carter that Republicans pounded on for nearly a decade (until the economy slumped under Bush 41.)
If Trump's policies end up producing higher prices and stagnant at best growth, as many predict, then Biden won't look so bad in retrospect to young voters (or anyone else). Not to mention the fact that Trump is far less well regarded personally than Reagan was.
I think, fairly or not, it's more a case of them seeing Biden poorly than Trump positively.
Biden oversaw the majority of the difficult Covid years, inflation (which was global), Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and some inflaming of a forbidden topic.
Now, I think he did an exemplary job on the policy side of handling things. Of course I have room to critique but he did well. Voters don't care about that though. They care that the world seemingly went to shit under him and that he was constantly being attacked for his age (by republicans, independents, and democrats). Plus, with Harris not being elected to succeed him most of his big policy wins are going to be either undone completely or brazenly have the credit stolen.
I think there's strong-ish parallels to Carter here for Biden's historical legacy. We just have to hope that Trump doesn't end up with a Reagan-esque legacy. Fortunately I think that one is off the table with how the country is reacting to events so far.
Agree! Can't help but feel '16 and '24 were votes against the Dem Potus candidate as much as or more than a vote for the repub candidate. Not coincidental that both Dem candidates were women: this country has a long ways to go!!
It also doesnтАЩt help that so many of BidenтАЩs policies never really were implemented because of how long it took for infrastructure projects to be authorized and built and because of the Supreme Court stopping things like student loan forgiveness, so a lot of people didnтАЩt feel the benefits of them.
True although I think with the next Democratic POTUS, there is an opportunity to be bolder than what Biden did with student loan forgiveness. There are universities like Harvard and MIT that are experimenting with free tuition for families with annual income at or less than $100,000.
The problem with public universities charging tuition has been an issue ever since Ronald Reagan was Governor of California. Public universities should ideally be low in cost or free all together to attend vs. private universities, which as far as I'm concerned can do what they want with tuition.
Plus, ROI for centennials who are finishing college is important. It's a considerably more competitive market and everyone wants a reasonable shot at succeeding. I don't think Obama and Biden ever really addressed this in their presidencies although in all fairness to Obama, he had a much tougher hill to climb than Biden because of the Great Recession.
https://www.dukechronicle.com/article/2025/03/harvard-mit-tuition-free-duke
We'll have to see whether there's money to do much after Trump destroys everything.
Yes, almost every shitty thing in the economy, including the cost of education, can be traced back to Reagan. Not to mention the right-wing media echo chamber which is the direct result of the repeal of the fairness doctrine.
Some shitty things can be traced back further. Nixon is to blame for HMOs.
To your point, we are in a much different circumstance than back in 1982 when Reagan managed as POTUS heading towards the deep recession then. Even while there can be comparisons, the economy today is just in much better shape even while inflation and costs in general are being liabilities for everyone spending and saving as they see fit.
Also, Trump now has to deal with the liability facing Biden and is going to be under increased pressure to get the prices down. The longer he doesn't do this, the harder it's going to be on the GOP heading to the 2026 midterms.
This is the residual effect of the Biden economy. The chaos Trump is bringing to it has already damaged it, and it will get worse.
prices are not coming down!
Of course although Biden as POTUS was under increased pressure to deal with inflation, even while there's not a ton he could do about it.
Trump will be dealing with the same dynamic as long as inflation continues with this volatile path. It's gone down a bit but then goes back up at some point. It's a complicated thing to manage.
The sad truth is that voters have different expectations of the parties. Republicans are expected to break stuff, fling poo, and throw hissy fits, while Democrats are expected to be "the adults in the room" and get stuff done, even when their actual power is quite limited.
When it became clear that Biden would not be able to restore 2019 world conditions, that was the beginning of the end. Meanwhile, few people seriously expect Trump to fix anythingтАФnot even the people who voted for him!
No, they're going up because of tariffs and chaos.
Reagan had a much better team, even though it included people like Watt, and he wasn't constantly firing people or insisting on empty sycophancy. His foreign policy team in particular was highly competent, even if there were sometimes questions about Caspar Weinberger's temperament and judgment, and of course there was the Iran-Contra scandal, but that seems to have come from the top. Reagan also had a very different style and delivery, and that made a huge and somewhat unjustified difference to his image and reputation.
Yes, I will give Reagan credit for that. He maintained civility and was liked by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. No one in either party argued that working for the Reagan Administration was dealing with low morale or toxic work environment.
Reagan also had the benefit that the US was geopolitically and globally economically ascendant during his presidency. The USSR was in serious decline while the US was not, and no US rival was growing quickly enough to compensate. There were worries of Japanese growth, but they were and remain a US ally. The US was dominating the global stage for reasons outside of Reagan's power, but that our country was doing so overly well would cause people to look fondly on those years.
Today is a very different thing. China is growing rapidly and even if we manage to avoid being displaced by them as the preeminent global economy, they will still remain close enough to end our unipolar status on the world stage.
Presidents today cannot rely on geopolitical inertia to carry them through. The US' global position is not what it once was.
And the current admin is doing every damn thing they can to make that problem worse. Making it even less likely to end up with a Reagan-esque legacy.
No exit polls broke it down that closely specific to these rural jurisdictions, but I've found a useful tea leaf is the student voting done at high schools. The results often come with district-by-district maps, and I've found that a lot of these school districts in Obama-Trump jurisdictions typically go 2-1 for Trump int he student vote. This strikes me as pretty useful data points to telegraph how the young adult vote is trending.
Yeah, that's interesting.
If these regions are anything like the Rust Belt areas with which I'm familiar (western PA and northeast OH), many young people leave (e.g., to pursue higher education) and never come back, and the ones who remain tend to be quite different demographically.
A place like Youngstown, OHтАФwhich has a low cost of living and nice suburban areas outside the cityтАФcan't even attract a professional class anymore. Doctors/lawyers/university professors etc. choose to commute from Cleveland, Akron, or Pittsburgh instead.
What is Akron's advantage over Youngstown that's made its present different?
Better government and economic development strategies? Akron does have a good-sized university and sizable professional sectors like health care, education, and science/research, plus a service economy that's helped it to diversify its economy from manufacturing (mainly rubber in Akron's case) better than Youngstown.. Being relatively close to Cleveland doesn't hurt either.
^Yep, all this. Akron and Cleveland have pretty much fused into one big metro at this point (many of Akron's moneyed "suburbs" like Stow, Cuyahoga Falls, and Hudson are more accurately Cleveland exurbs).
I thought Youngstown was in the Cleveland area, too, but looking at a map, I see that it's a significantly farther than Akron, 1 1/4 hours by car and a 1 3/4-hour Greyhound trip from Cleveland. Akron is about 45 minutes from Cleveland by either method, per Google.