Conservatives love to joke that the Democrats should keep supporting outrageous Democrats that will hurt their image, from Jasmine Crockett to David Hogg to Tim Walz. What they fear is Democrats figuring out why they lost and fixing it.
On Ezra Klein's podcast for The New York Times, they turned to Democrat consultant David Shor, who analyzed the 2024 results in a way that's discouraging to the leftist press. "I think that superpolitically engaged people are overrepresented at every single step of the political process," Shor announced. "I really think the only point, other than Election Day, when regular people get a say, is in polls."
The biggest Democrat assumption that Shor set out to crumble was that fuller turnout always translates to a bigger Democrat win. Shor argued with his data that if only people who had voted in 2022 had voted, Kamala Harris would have won the popular vote and the Electoral College fairly easily. But if everyone had voted, Donald Trump would have won the popular vote by nearly 5 points!
This underlined Shor's media-confounding finding: "The story of this election is that people who follow the news closely, get their information from traditional media and see politics as an important part of their identity became more Democratic in absolute terms. Meanwhile, those who don't follow politics closely became much more Republican."
In other words, "The lower your political engagement, education level or socioeconomic status, the more Trumpy you are." This is a new development.
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Klein reacted by stating how journalists see the problem: They've failed to be anti-Trump enough to force a Democrat win. "Obviously, I get a lot of incoming from people who want The New York Times to cover Donald Trump differently." Klein raised the obvious follow-up: "How do you change the views of voters you don't really have a good way to reach?"
Journalists don't just want to inform voters. They want to manipulate voters into selecting "the right side of history." What if the voters refuse to be manipulated?
Elitist liberal journalists tend to see Trump-leaning voters with a lower education level as voters who believe anything their crazy uncle posts on Facebook. More of their "fact-based" information should translate to more Democrats. Voting Republican and being less educated makes perfect sense to their cocksure sensibilities.
What doesn't compute as easily is all their pompous lecturing -- that inflation isn't so bad, that you can't define what is a woman, and Joe Biden is at his best mental state ever -- can damage public trust and turn voters away.
Shor had more frustrating results to share: He estimated immigrants went from being a Biden plus-27 group in 2020 to a group that Trump narrowly won in 2024. This group of naturalized citizens makes up roughly 10% of the electorate.
Worse yet, the youngest voters have the largest gender gap. Eighteen-year-old men were 23 percentage points more likely to support Trump than 18-year-old women, which Shor proclaimed was the "scariest" chart. Shor and Klein guessed this had something to do with COVID and made generalizations about how young men and women have very different and gendered social-media experiences.
Democrats are demoralized right now, and polls show they're at their lowest popularity in decades. Flooding the media system with anti-Trump messaging (and legal actions designed as messaging applications) didn't work in the last election. But they'll keep hoping it will make a difference in the next one.
If conservatives are lucky, they may invest their hopes in the energetic performances of Crockett, Hogg and Walz.
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