We can recognize that fact all we want, but it's not just a numbers game. It's also a cultural game. In our media-driven society, any successful candidate is going to need to be "cool," and that means they're going to need to excite young voters.
Replies
There are a lot of successful candidates who aren't cool.
aug 26, 2025, 11:12 pm • 1 0 • view
I'm talking about at the presidential level, where these cultural issues are often more important in creating overall vibes, especially with low-frequency voters.
aug 26, 2025, 11:16 pm • 0 0 • view
OK, but we gotta win in other places as well.
aug 26, 2025, 11:18 pm • 1 0 • view
Sure, but I think centrist candidates already exist at the congressional level. We're pretty good at that. (Better than Republicans, by the numbers. There are way more Democrats in Trump districts than Republicans in Harris districts.)
aug 26, 2025, 11:22 pm • 0 0 • view
The Senate should be in play but there are tons of states where we don't/can't even play.
aug 26, 2025, 11:26 pm • 0 0 • view
I don't think Trump or Bush or Biden were cool.
aug 26, 2025, 11:39 pm • 0 0 • view
Trump was definitely cool. I kind of knew Trump was going to win in October 2024 when I saw a young African-American man at the grocery store with a big screen T-shirt with an image of Trump decked out as a rapper.
aug 26, 2025, 11:48 pm • 0 0 • view
He was definitely popular among the manosphere types and among influencers like the Paul brothers.
aug 26, 2025, 11:48 pm • 0 0 • view
We have had two COOL presidents. Kennedy and Obama. They are unicorns.
aug 26, 2025, 11:44 pm • 3 0 • view
Clinton was pretty cool.
aug 26, 2025, 11:46 pm • 1 0 • view
Clinton was cool back in 1992. In NYC when we opened the campaign office in the fall the Dem party expected a few dozen to show up and there were a couple of thousand.
aug 26, 2025, 11:46 pm • 0 0 • view
You can't win if you don't have an army of influencers genuinely excited about you, sharing your platform, and making it socially desirable to vote for you. Alienating the left has drawbacks.
aug 26, 2025, 11:01 pm • 1 0 • view
The voters who historically don’t vote unless they are excited vs the reliable voters who vote even if its dull, who actually prefer dul.
aug 26, 2025, 11:31 pm • 2 0 • view
Exactly. And you really can't win with just the latter. Not at the presidential level. You need to excite the infrequent voters.
aug 26, 2025, 11:32 pm • 0 0 • view
Who does Trump win with? In the late 60s, the Dems threw over its historical working class base for the youth vote. A lot of them are Trumps current base. It’s not an either or. It’s just has to be a big tent.
aug 26, 2025, 11:40 pm • 1 0 • view
I think it was civil rights that lost the working class base.
aug 26, 2025, 11:43 pm • 1 0 • view
It was actually the “Cultural Revolution”. The Weathermen, The Yippies, blowing up buildings, people openly fucking in parks, and the children of working class parents running away to become drug addicts in San Francisco. Black folks had no part in any of that.
aug 26, 2025, 11:49 pm • 0 0 • view
Uh huh. Which explains why today’s working class base of the right is so hung up on all of the things you just mentioned and not race relations.
aug 26, 2025, 11:54 pm • 0 0 • view
Well, those things pretty much ended in 1970 when all those kids went and got jobs on Wall Street. Racists are a very reliable base for the American right, since slavery, and survive like the cockroaches they are.
aug 26, 2025, 11:57 pm • 0 0 • view
We were talking about the working class specifically
aug 27, 2025, 12:00 am • 0 0 • view
Yes. The working class, which was a lot of America. Centrist Dems and Republicans for the most part, with a slim percentage of fringe right wingers. But they were not embraced. Nixon held his arms open wide, followed by Ronnie Reagan to disenfranchised Dems.
aug 27, 2025, 12:05 am • 0 0 • view
Those Dems became Republicans and not being “political” people, they just kept going where their party took them over the decades, further and further to the right. Most people are sheep and are easy marks for propagandists.
aug 27, 2025, 12:08 am • 0 0 • view
He wins with a lot of infrequent, social-media addicted voters who don't really follow politics closely.
aug 26, 2025, 11:41 pm • 2 0 • view
this is why anyone who wants to talk about 'how to win Trump voters' can be ignored: the GOP base has shown they'll vote for Generalissimo Franco, they're unreachable & also 27% of votes the nonvoters who didn't get out for Harris + nonvoters who got up for Trump aren't going to repeat their errors
aug 26, 2025, 11:47 pm • 0 0 • view