An analyst says that a key constituency is "repelled by" President Donald Trump and MAGA, especially women under 30, who overwhelmingly backed Democrats in key races this month.
In a podcast interview with Sarah Longwell and The Atlantic's David Frum on The David Frum Show, Longwell describes how young women are repulsed by the Republican party and how three major elections — Zohran Mamdani's mayoral race in New York City, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey's governor race and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia's governor election — all highlighted this.
"So those three races taken together, you have women under 30 where 81, 82 percent of them are voting for the Democratic candidate. That is a massive margin and really different from the gender breakdown, the gender split, for their older cohorts," Longwell explains. "So among men and women who are 65-plus, the gender divide is almost nonexistent. But as you get younger, the gender divide opens up into a chasm, and I think Democrats are feeling pretty good about the fact that they still overperformed with men relative to how they did in 2024, but with women, it’s just not even close. It’s like a total ownership by the Democratic Party of this young cohort of women."
Plenty of factors play a role in this strong political response, including education and reproductive health, but the main one is how women see their relationship with men, she explains, and "...young women are just living in a different information environment than the men that they’re around."
Longwell explains how younger women are rejecting poor behavior, "locker room talk" from men, and saying "I don’t need to deal with this."
She argues that the pandemic has pushed young men and women further apart and fueled further isolation, living in "algorithmically different universes, and that is pushing them to both not really understand each other, not be able to talk to each other."
"And so you’ve got this sort of young-man culture that is both angry at elites, angry at woke culture, and also, in many ways, hostile to women," Longwell describes.
It signals more than just a problem for the GOP and men in general.
"And of course, them feeling like women don’t feel the same way or reject them then cause them to sort of turn inward and find community in these bro-y podcasting spaces, gaming spaces, many places that actually could be either actively hostile to women or where just sort of a rejection of women to create that camaraderie becomes [prevalent]. And so they’re getting actively pulled apart in this way that doesn’t just have political consequences, but I feel like it’s gonna have lasting cultural consequences if we kind of don’t figure out what’s happening with the kids," she adds.
