After Donald Trump narrowly defeated then-Vice President Kamala Harris in the United States' 2024 presidential election, Democratic strategists spent months conducting a political "autopsy." It was a close election — Trump won the national popular vote by roughly 1.5 percent — but his gains with Latinos, Generation Z, independents and moderates were a major source of frustration for Democrats, along with the fact that he flipped six swing states that Joe Biden won in 2000: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, Arizona and Georgia.
But in a conversation published in Q&A form in the New York Times' opinion section on January 15, two polling experts — Nate Silver and conservative Kristen Soltis Anderson — and the Times' John Guida examine some problems Republicans could be facing down the road.
Noting recent polling from Gallup, Anderson told Silver and Guida, "The pendulum swings. To me, the thing that stuck out the most was the very small percentage of young people who identify as Republicans. I've been writing about this for years. Republicans got a brief reprieve when Democrats ran a very, very old Joe Biden during a very, very tough economy for young people — and that, combined with some backlash to overzealous progressivism among Gen Z, got overstated into Republicans having won over a new generation. Behold how short-lived it was! Only 21 percent of Millennials and 17 percent of Gen Z identifying as Republicans is bad, bad news for the GOP over the long haul."
Guida interjected that "a year into Trump 2.0, it seems the dreams of a new GOP coalition — adding Latino and Black voters as well as young voters — seem diminished." And Silver pointed out that although "the Democratic brand is very unpopular" among younger voters who identify as "independents," some of them will say they "lean Democratic" if "a pollster pushes them to pick one of the two parties."
Silver told Anderson and Guida, "I still think Democrats probably focus too little on the economy and what everyone's now calling affordability. If you look at the big drop in Trump's approval ratings, there's one around Liberation Day when there's a bunch of tariff-related anxiety. Then there's another in the second half of the shutdown when the administration starts threatening food stamps — not early on in the shutdown where the stakes were more abstract."
Read the full conversation at this New York Times link (subscription required).
