Kamala Harris underperformed President Joe Biden's 2020 numbers among young and first time voters in the 2024 election.
Similar improvements for Trump among younger voters were cited in CNN's 2024 exit polling of more than 22,000 voters. In the last election, Biden beat Trump in this demographic by 23 points. This year, Harris' lead over Trump among those aged 18 to 29 was 13 points, a 10-point dip in the key demographic.
Anyone who hasn't read Kill all Normies by Angela Nagle, buy a copy (and ignore the name, it's anti-Trump). It's written about the first Trump election but seems more relevant now than in 2017.
The Right was able to weaponize online spaces far better than the Left, against all conventional wisdom that the Dems were the party of the young people and the Repubs for the older ones.
Great, now I'm at the point of the post election grief cycle where I'm getting a bunch of books to try to figure out what happened. I remember this phase from 2016. Thanks for the recommendation for my list!
It's really short, I read the entire thing last night, but it probes into the right-wing online space deeper than any other scholarly resource I've read.
Also note that a lot of leftist YouTubers have either retired or moved to Nebula, a platform where their videos are harder to reach. Guess who didn't paywalled their videos! Your crappy gaming streamers creating reaction videos to crappy right-wing grifters whining about "masculinity in gaming" and how some video game women aren't fuckable enough for them.
I agree, but it doesn't help that YouTube rewards low effort daily posts and if someone spends a week making a video as opposed to quick 10 minute rants about "the woke in gaming", they won't get as much attention by the things YouTube put in place.
There are leftist content creators that make things that put some Ken Burns documentaries to shame. Engaging, well edited, comedic, time spent crafting the points that educate and joke. Sometimes they get focused in attention, often times they don't.
Meanwhile TrumpFan1488 can make more "The DEI in this game will make it go broke! Women ruined Star Wars!" posts every day, and YouTube pays them more and more for constant engagement with the site. YouTube doesn't care if its costs IQ points to host, they need that ad money!
Nebula at least pays people who put out quality content. I am curious how many people stopped watching when Nebula was a thing for some content creators. I'm a broke bitch, so streaming service didn't exactly engage me. I did however still watch when those exclusives when to YouTube.
Even then, it was better than nothing. "Theory" is very dry, and is menacing to those who have been taught by the current school systems, as they're being taught that socialism is an "extreme" ideology, and is "probably worse" than nazism, because it killed more people on paper. Also you can just make lower effort videos without the fanfare of Philosophy Tube, or the multi-month research HBomberguy or Shaun does.
Most Nebula creators that I'm familiar with still also upload to YouTube. They just post to Nebula first, like a timed exclusive. The truly Nebula exclusive stuff is almost universally stuff that wouldn't work on YouTube anyway.
I hear Hamas is modeling their insurgency after the vietnamese, so I'm reading Kill Anything That Moves about how the US prosecuted counter insurgency operation in vietnam, and why and how they won.
We should probably all start reading and prepping about how to keep safe under unsafe regimes.