GOP loses grip on key group ‘seduced by hucksters’: researcher

Republicans are losing their grip on young men, a key voting group "seduced by an ecosystem of hucksters," while Democrats make serious gains among the demographic, according to a PhD researcher at the University of Melbourne.

Cory Alpert, a former Biden-Harris administration strategist who studies how AI impacts democracy, wrote an opinion piece for The Guardian describing how Democrats' focus on affordability has pushed men left in the elections this month.

"Young men in the US face a political identity crisis," Alpert wrote. "It should not be controversial to say that the world that many were promised as children has not come to fruition. Two decades of war and a turbulent economy have combined with a massively changing workforce. Young men’s disaffection should come as no real surprise."

Elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York City have given Democrats a lesson on how to win young men back.

"Most young men, like most trans people and Black people and immigrants and everyone else, are dealing with housing that has skyrocketed in price, especially compared with our parents’ generations," he added. "Instead of having one career in our lifetimes, we now have to continually seek new jobs. Living independently as an adult is much more expensive and complicated now than it has been. These affordability campaigns gave young men something to do about those pressures rather than ceding that frustration to the most cynical actors."

Alpert called it a "political miracle" that the men who followed Trump just a year ago have now turned toward the left.

He described how Republicans were focusing on defending President Donald Trump and "tying Democrats to the culture war of the moment" while Democrats were focused on affordability and paying bills.

"Undoubtedly this conversation is easier to have when Donald Trump is taking three steps every day to dismantle the economy. There’s a real sense that the economy is getting worse," he explained. That it’s more difficult to pay bills and keep food on the table, especially when Republicans are, quite literally, ensuring that 42 million people cannot afford to keep food on their table by refusing to fund SNAP during their government shutdown."

"Young men, like everyone else, are looking for a politics that can make life a little better. Democrats are finally figuring out how to offer them that chance," Alpert wrote.