Donald Trump winning a presidential election is, obviously, nothing new. It literally happened in 2016. What I think is new, eight years later, is the “vibe shift” first named by Tyler Cowen in July of 2024 and confirmed by Trump’s victory.
I liked Ezra Klein’s exploration of this theme on January 19, which he glossed with the observation that Trump’s narrow popular vote win (smaller than Biden’s in 2020 or either of Obama’s or even Hillary’s in 2016) feels like a kind of psychic landslide. And Klein rightly notes that the vibes, in this sense, are badly misaligned with the actual vote count in Congress. I find Trump to be a hard figure to predict. But looking up the size of his House majority is easy, and it would be deeply strange for a majority this thin to generate a large quantity of highly partisan policy change. And yet, the vibes! It feels like American culture is primed to turn decisively to the right.
And what I want to ask about this — and it really is in the spirit of a question rather than a secret theory — is what does this rightward turn amount to?
What, in other words, is the propositional content of the new right-wing vibe?
Because one thing that happens as you enter your mid-forties is that you remember how things were back in the day. Not just how things were before the shift in vibes, but how things were before that, when George W. Bush was a popular and successful president. Are we shifting back to the more conservative America of 2005? Or forward to some new thing? I genuinely don’t know. But I want to put the question on the table because part of the essence of being young is that you don’t know that much about how things used to be. My suspicion is that people who were born in the 21st century don’t just have different views on some issues, but a whole different sense of what the important political disputes are. But what they come to think about the issues they’re not currently thinking about is going to define how far the Trumpian backlash can go.
The kids are on the right
There’s been so much attention paid to the apparent realignment of a handful of Silicon Valley billionaires that I don’t have much to add to this.
What I actually think is more important with regard to “vibes” is the strong realignment of the youngest cohort of voters toward Trump. Trump did strikingly better with voters under 30 than he had in his prior two races, winning young men by a large margin.
Back in June, I wrote that the age polarization seen in the Obama- and Trump-era elections was newer and more unusual than people realized. Back in 2000, there was no age gradient in voting behavior. But an age gap opened up in 2004 and grew in 2008, 2012, and 2016. The idea of young people being more progressive is something that we took for granted, and that had a big influence on vibes. Senior citizens matter a lot more than young people in electoral terms. But young people are a lot cooler than senior citizens. Even when Bush beat Kerry in 2004 or when Obama got spanked in the 2010 midterms, it was still the case that progressive politics was cooler than conservative politics.
When it comes to brand advertising, or desired audiences for movies and television shows, or corporate recruiting efforts, the logic of politics is reversed. Much of corporate America cares more what twenty-somethings and even teenagers think than what seniors think. Nobody’s worried about recruiting the most talented septuagenarians to work at their company. Harris in 2024 fared a lot worse in the popular vote than Biden did in 2020, but her coalition was much more efficient in terms of the electoral college. This means that even though the map is full of red-shifting counties, the actual loss was extremely narrow. A uniform swing of about one percentage point would have been the end of Trump’s political career.
But I think that to an important extent, it would not have halted the vibe shift.
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