Liberal New York Magazine columnist Jonathan Chait feared younger minority voters are rejecting the Democratic Party after decades of the party rallying for their vote.
In his column, “Are Young People Actually Progressive?” Chait warned, “The mistaken assumptions of Democrats have put the party in peril.”
He cited recent polls showing former President Trump dominating over President Biden among younger voters, which flies in the face of widely held beliefs that these voters have “ironclad loyalty” to the Democratic Party.
A Fox News poll from December found Trump had a 13-point lead over Biden among voters under 30. Polls from the New York Times, USA Today and others also show Biden bleeding support from Black, Hispanic and young voters who voted for him in 2020.
Chait argued that these results show Democrats have made a strategic mistake in focusing on turning out young minority voters.
“The unthinkable has become, at least for the time being, undeniable,” he wrote. “The progressive movement made a giant bet on mobilizing young voters. That strategy, invested with buoyant hopes and vast sums of money, is now in ruins.”
Democrats mistakenly believed that race would be the “determinative factor” in future election outcomes. However, Black Democrats and Hispanics actually hold more moderate views on immigration, the environment, crime and abortion, than White liberals do, Chait argued.
Progressive activists and the media have misunderstood this, he said.
“The danger is not that young voters, massively demoralized by Biden, will merely sit on their hands in 2024. It’s that they will actually vote for Republicans,” Chait said. That even includes progressive voters upset about Biden’s support for Israel who’ve threatened to vote for Trump, he feared.
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The columnist made the case that college education, not race, is actually the factor splitting the Democratic Party.
“Democrats have gained college-educated White voters and lost nonwhite voters who lack college degrees. This shift has flipped the traditional assumptions about voter turnout upside-down,” the columnist claimed.
Democrats win elections when the most “dedicated and organized citizens” show up to vote, he said, pointing to the 2022 midterm election victories.
“The new rule is that the fewer people who show up to vote, the better Democrats do. It would be a delicious irony if the GOP’s relentless enforcement of voter-suppression laws ultimately does Trump in. But hoping for low turnout is a thin reed on which to base the salvation of democracy,” Chait argued.
Democrats have proposed different theories on why minority voters are abandoning Biden in 2024. In November, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Texas sparked outrage when she suggested that Black voters disgruntled by Biden were blinded by their feelings about the economy and didn’t understand how civics works.
