“A Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study showed that Gen Z teens are twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents in comparison to millennials and their parents 20 years before. This was especially true for male Republican teenagers. Younger people are also more skeptical of major American institutions, including political parties, the government, and the media.
Trump’s campaign directly spoke to this demographic: He echoed that same mistrust in institutions, and did so while stopping at seemingly every podcast, Twitch stream, YouTube channel, and TikTok page whose viewership is dominated by Gen Z men and boys. He joined Adin Ross, a now 24-year-old streamer who once famously looked up and struggled to read the definition of “fascism” on camera, for an interview during which Ross presented Trump with a Rolex and a Cybertruck.
He went on the mulleted comedian Theo Von’s podcast, where they discussed cocaine, golf, and UFC.
He palled around with YouTube millionaires like the Paul brothers and the Nelk Boys, known for their distasteful pranks and crypto scams.
And, of course, he talked to Joe Rogan, the most famous podcaster in the world; the two rambled to each other for three hours. For this, he received Rogan’s much-coveted endorsement.”
…
“Nearly half of men between 18 and 29 say there is “some or a lot” of discrimination against men in America, up from a third in 2019, according to the Survey Center on American Life, which is affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank. They believe the Me Too movement was an overreach and that many women are simply lying about being abused.
It’s not exactly surprising they’re drawn to media that speaks to these grievances — and more often than not, that media comes in the form of individual influencers who are unaffiliated with existing media institutions.”
…
“men are even lonelier, more likely to be single, more skeptical, and more afraid than ever. They find solace and community online, in places that older folks still don’t understand, where they see idealized versions of masculinity winning. They cheer on UFC fights and boxing matches, use “edgy” slurs, trade in risky crypto investments, bootlick Silicon Valley billionaires, listen to toxic dating advice, and denigrate women.
They vote for a man who has done everything you’re not supposed to do — steal, lie, rape, idolize Hitler — because his election fulfills their fantasy that men really can get away with whatever they want.”
“I think you actually see this in the bit of daylight that emerged between her and the White House early in Biden’s term. I warned in March 2021 that Biden wasn’t thinking clearly about the asylum situation. His administration didn’t want a ton of asylum-seekers to show up at the border, but was also unwilling to actually say that or align their policies clearly with the goal of preventing it. The person who was willing to say it was Kamala Harris, who got saddled with the quasi-impossible task of ending the root causes of migration via diplomatic engagement with Central America, but who managed to fly to Guatemala and actually say the thing — “do not come” — that should have been the administration’s top to bottom message.
The Groups and media leftists yelled at her, the Biden administration didn’t back her up, and now, three years later, her biggest political vulnerability is still her association with Biden’s efforts to appease the Groups. The good news on the substance of immigration policy is that Biden eventually changed course, and now crossings are lower than they were at the end of Trump’s term.
Harris has also clearly said that she wants to sign the border security bill that Trump quashed for his own personal political game. Immigration groups originally revolted, not so much at the substance of the bill (which is good!) but at the idea of doing anything on border security detached from a path to citizenship for the long-resident undocumented. Biden belatedly shifted Democrats off this bit of Groups-think by linking the border security measures to aid for Ukraine. But Harris is now advocating for border security in a freestanding way.
I personally would love to see comprehensive immigration reform, but it’s clear that the construct ran aground some time ago. And Harris has been steering, from the get-go, toward a more sensible approach that involves considering individual immigration policy changes on the merits. Back in 2019, she co-sponsored a skilled migration bill with Mike Lee at a time when the idea of doing this detached from comprehensive reform was anathema to The Groups.”
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“I sincerely understand why people with very right-wing policy views might decide they want to overlook Trump’s well-known flaws and roll the dice on the possibility that he does something catastrophic. But if you’re a normal person with some mixed feelings about the parties, I think you will be dramatically happier with the results that come from President Harris negotiating with congressional Republicans over exactly which tax breaks should be extended rather than a re-empowered Trump backed by a 6-3 Supreme Court and supportive majorities in Congress.”
“The “extra votes for parents” proposal came in a 2021 speech sponsored by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute, a conservative organization that encourages college students to engage with right-wing ideas. About halfway through the speech, Vance says that he wants to “take aim at the left, specifically the childless left.”
He knows these comments will be controversial: He says “I’m going to get in trouble for this,” and then asks the hosts if he’s being recorded. But he continues on by listing off leading Democratic politicians who didn’t have children at the time — Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, Sen. Cory Booker, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — and then asks, “Why have we let the Democrat Party become controlled by people who don’t have children?”
Of course, this is misleading: Harris is a stepmother and Buttigieg has become a father since Vance’s remarks. But the specific examples are less important than Vance’s general point, which is a moral one.
In his view, being a parent is the primary source of happiness and meaning in a person’s life, and people who don’t have kids can’t be trusted to make decisions in the interest of society writ large. Societies are good, per Vance, when they have babies; if they don’t have enough, they rot.
So what to do about it? Vance suggests borrowing ideas from Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister who has made increasing Hungary’s birthrate a centerpiece of his policy agenda. But Vance also worries that a Hungarian model might not be possible because families suffer from a “structural democratic disadvantage”: children can’t vote. Hence, he concludes, we should let parents cast votes on their behalf.
“Let’s give votes to all the children in this country and let’s give control over votes to the parents in this country,” he says.
It’s an old idea called “Demeny voting,” named after 20th-century Hungarian demographer Paul Demeny (a vocal champion of the idea). Typically, the argument for Demeny voting is rooted in fairness. Children are people who, like anyone else, deserve political representation. Since they lack the maturity to make informed choices about their interests, parents should vote on their behalf — much in the same way they make decisions about children’s medical care or education. To get a sense of how this argument works, I’d recommend a recent paper by two law professors at Harvard and Northwestern making the case at length.
But for Vance, the policy isn’t just about ensuring fairness for families: it’s about punishing childless adults. Vance sees Demeny voting as a tool for creating two-tiered citizenship, one where parents have more and better political representation than other adults.
“When you go to the polls in this country, you should have more power — more of an ability to speak your voice in our democratic republic — than people who don’t have kids,” he says. “If you don’t have much of an investment in the future of this country, then maybe you shouldn’t get nearly the same voice.”
This is not the language of a liberal looking to expand the sphere of people whose interests are represented in the system to children. Vance’s defense of Demeny voting reveals a belief that people who aren’t like him, who don’t share his values about childrearing, are social unequals: non-participants in the political project of ensuring America survives across generations, and hence deserved targets of political discrimination.
In short, Vance wants to turn the law into a vehicle for legislating hard-right morality.”
“It’s that time again. The last act of Congress funding the federal government expires on September 30. So, unless Congress passes new funding legislation by then, much of the government will shut down.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), egged on by the House Freedom Caucus and by former President Donald Trump, reportedly wants to use this deadline to force through legislation that would make it harder to register to vote in all 50 states.
Johnson plans to pair a bill funding the government for six months with a Republican bill called the “Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act” or “SAVE Act,” that would require new voters to submit “documentary proof of United States citizenship,” such as a passport or a birth certificate, in order to register to vote.
As recently as Monday night, Johnson’s plan to tie government funding to passage of the SAVE Act seemed dead. At least five House Republicans oppose the spending bill, enough that Johnson would need to secure Democratic votes in order to pass it. But Trump, the GOP’s presidential nominee, demanded on Tuesday that congressional Republicans “SHOULD, IN NO WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM, GO FORWARD” with legislation funding the government unless it also includes something like the SAVE Act.
There is no evidence that noncitizens vote in US federal elections in any meaningful numbers, and states typically have safeguards in place to prevent them from doing so. Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, a Republican, for example, claims to have identified 1,634 “potential noncitizens” who attempted to register during a 15-year period. But these possible noncitizens were caught by election officials and were never registered. In 2020, nearly 5 million Georgians voted in the presidential election.
More broadly, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, “illegal registration and voting attempts by noncitizens are routinely investigated and prosecuted by the appropriate state authorities, and there is no evidence that attempts at voting by noncitizens have been significant enough to impact any election’s outcome.”
While noncitizen voting — which is, of course, illegal — has never been proven to have affected an election, there is evidence that the SAVE Act could have an impact on elections. That much is clear from Arizona, which already has a SAVE Act-like regime. Data from Arizona suggests the state’s law has made it slightly harder for people of color, a group that skews Democratic, to vote. And at least one analysis of Arizona voter data suggests that the SAVE Act could suppress voter registration among another group that tends to vote for Democrats: college students. So the bill could make it slightly more difficult for Democrats to win elections.
That said, the SAVE Act law does have a vague provision allowing voters who “cannot provide” the required documentation to submit other evidence that they are a citizen, and it provides that state or local officials “shall make a determination as to whether the applicant has sufficiently established United States citizenship.”
It’s unclear what, exactly, that means.
Notably, the SAVE Act would take effect immediately if enacted by Congress, and it imposes significant new administrative burdens on state and local election offices. So, if the law did take effect in the two months before a presidential election, it could potentially throw that election into chaos.”
“A new voting method, AADV (Approve/Approve/Disapprove Voting), was proposed in 2020. Each voter has the option to approve of either one or two of the candidates, and also has the option to disapprove of one candidate. Each candidate’s approvals and disapprovals are separately summed. Disapprovals are then subtracted from approvals to obtain the net approvals for each candidate. The candidate with the most (positive) net approvals is declared the winner. If no candidate achieves positive net approvals, NOTA (None Of The Above) has won. If NOTA should win, all candidates are disqualified and a new election must be held with new candidates.”
“If the basic test of whether a country remains a democracy is that the party in power can still suffer a setback at the ballot box, India passed”
…
“Results from the nation’s parliamentary elections — the largest in the world — indicate a shocking electoral setback for Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
“Setback,” to be clear, is a relative term here. At the end of the staggered six-week election, Modi will become only the second Indian prime minister to win a third consecutive term. As of this writing, the BJP-led National Democracy Alliance (NDA) has won 289 seats in the 543-seat parliament and is leading in one more. A majority requires 272 seats.
The BJP itself has won 240 seats. That’s more than any Indian party won between 1984 and 2009, when Modi first came to power, and in most elections, it would have been an amazing result. But the expectations game is real, and Modi and his party lost it.
During the campaign, the NDA had a stated goal of winning 400 seats: a supermajority that would have allowed them to push through major legislative and constitutional changes. They didn’t come close. And after winning an absolute majority on its own in the last election, the BJP will likely now have to rely on its smaller coalition partners in the NDA to form a government.
Exit polls over the weekend were also wildly wrong, with most incorrectly projecting around a 350-seat victory for Modi. (One of the more bizarre media moments on Tuesday was a prominent pollster breaking down in tears on Indian TV over his erroneous forecast and being comforted by his fellow panelists on camera. Not something you’re likely to see from Frank Luntz.)
The opposition Congress Party, which very recently looked headed for political oblivion under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, the much-mocked fourth-generation scion of India’s most prominent political dynasty, appears likely to double its tally from the last election.”
“the BJP held just 240 seats. They not only underperformed expectations, they actually lost their parliamentary majority. While Modi will remain prime minister, he will do so at the helm of a coalition government — meaning that he will depend on other parties to stay in office, making it harder to continue his ongoing assault on Indian democracy.”
…
“after looking at the information that is available and speaking with several leading experts on Indian politics, there are at least three conclusions that I’m comfortable drawing.
First, voters punished Modi for putting his Hindu nationalist agenda ahead of fixing India’s unequal economy. Second, Indian voters had some real concerns about the decline of liberal democracy under BJP rule. Third, the opposition parties waged a smart campaign that took advantage of Modi’s vulnerabilities on the economy and democracy.”