Latest / INSIGHT TODAY / The War They Didn't Vote For: How the Conflict with Iran Alienated Gen Z Men

Transcript

The War They Didn't Vote For: How the Conflict with Iran Alienated Gen Z Men · INSIGHT TODAY

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: David Challen, let's check in with you.
• 0:01
  Speaker 2: What numbers are you looking at just in terms of
• 0:03
  Speaker 2: shifts among Republican voters?
• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm looking at the fraying of the Trump 2024 coalition, Anderson.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: You remember there was a lot of talk about Trump
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: making up ground with young men in the 24 election.
• 0:16
  Speaker 3: Look here.
• 0:17
  Speaker 1: In this midterm election, men ages 18 to 29, they
• 0:21
  Speaker 1: are 10% of the overall electorate. Democrats won them 66%
• 0:26
  Speaker 1: to 31%. That's a 35-point advantage.
• 0:28
  Speaker 3: This is a.
• 0:29
  Speaker 1: Group Donald Trump actually won by one point two years ago.
• 0:33
  Speaker 1: That's a 36-point swing away from the Republicans. The Latino vote,
• 0:37
  Speaker 1: also 10% of the overall electorate.
• 0:40
  Speaker 3: Democrats.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: got 64% of them. That is 30 percentage points ahead
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: among Latinos of what Republicans got, 34%. Just two years ago,
• 0:49
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump lost the Latino vote by five points to
• 0:52
  Speaker 1: Kamala Harris. So this is a 25-point swing among Latinos
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: away from Republicans. And independents are a similar story, except
• 1:00
  Speaker 1: they're a bigger share of the electorate. They make up
• 1:03
  Speaker 1: a third of the electorate, independents do. Democrats won them
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: by 20 points, 58% to 38%. This is a group
• 1:10
  Speaker 1: Donald Trump, just two years ago, Anderson, lost to Kamala
• 1:13
  Speaker 1: Harris by three points. And now Republicans are losing independents
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: by 20. Wow, fascinating.
• 1:18
  Speaker 3: Dave Jelen, we'll come back to you.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: Let's go to our panel.
• 1:21
  Speaker 3: Van Jones, what do you think is.
• 1:23
  Speaker 4: What happens? Particularly, what about young men?
• 1:26
  Speaker 2: Well, I mean, I think young men are, you know,
• 1:29
  Speaker 2: they move toward Trump. And why? Because the economic circumstance
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: for young men is terrible. And they were, look, they're
• 1:37
  Speaker 2: going for crypto scams. They're going for betting apps.
• 1:41
  Speaker 3: Something.
• 1:42
  Speaker 2: They're doing multiple gig economy jobs. They're door dashing. And
• 1:46
  Speaker 2: they just can't get ahead. And they signed Donald Trump somebody.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: who was kind of a tough bro who understood them.
• 1:51
  Speaker 2: He was on their platforms. They moved toward him. Nothing changed.
• 1:56
  Speaker 2: In fact, everything got worse. Their opportunities got worse. The
• 2:00
  Speaker 2: gas prices went up. If you're a door dasher, this
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: is not good for you. And so you see young
• 2:05
  Speaker 2: men saying this was garbage and they're moving away. The
• 2:09
  Speaker 2: Epstein stuff did not help at all because there was
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: this whole thing around these Democrats are perverts, but now
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: Trump is not cooperating. So I've seen young men sour.
• 2:19
  Speaker 2: What I was happy to see was some of those
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: young men, rather than just dropping out, decided to do
• 2:23
  Speaker 2: something else, move a different direction.
• 2:25
  Speaker 4: Did you anticipate these shifts, Scott, at all? Well, I
• 2:28
  Speaker 4: think the economic conditions for a lot of groups, not
• 2:31
  Speaker 4: just young men, explain most of what happened. I also
• 2:34
  Speaker 4: think that we may have mistaken cultural access for political loyalty.
• 2:41
  Speaker 4: I with a lot of young men in 2024 through
• 2:46
  Speaker 4: podcasts and other venues, people that maybe we didn't think
• 2:50
  Speaker 4: of previously as Republicans. And so they came to Trump.
• 2:53
  Speaker 4: And then it's easy to say, well, they're with us now.
• 2:55
  Speaker 4: They'll be with us all the time. You can't confuse
• 2:58
  Speaker 4: those things. They may not be strong partisans. They may
• 3:01
  Speaker 4: just think, well, this seems like the best option at
• 3:03
  Speaker 4: the time. Then you throw two years of it doesn't
• 3:06
  Speaker 4: feel like things are getting better. And they're not loyal anymore.
• 3:09
  Speaker 4: And I think you just can never mistake access to
• 3:13
  Speaker 4: a voter pool in one election for permanence.
• 3:15
  Speaker 3: And that's obviously what happened.
• 3:17
  Speaker 5: I think that there's another issue with Southern black voters specifically,
• 3:24
  Speaker 5: and that is there's been kind of an assault on
• 3:27
  Speaker 5: them through the dissolution of the Voting Rights Act, redistricting
• 3:34
  Speaker 5: in the South, not necessarily Mississippi, but in the South.
• 3:38
  Speaker 5: And I think this has really raised the ire of voters,
• 3:43
  Speaker 5: including young men. So you add the economic piece to
• 3:47
  Speaker 5: those provocations. And, you know, I sat down with Scott
• 3:50
  Speaker 5: Collum in Chicago a few weeks ago, and he talked
• 3:53
  Speaker 5: about the mobilization that he felt among black voters, including
• 3:57
  Speaker 5: young black voters. And I think we saw it play
• 3:59
  Speaker 5: out yesterday.
• 4:00
  Speaker 6: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look at also where Joe Rogan
• 4:03
  Speaker 6: has gone in the last two years. I mean, if
• 4:04
  Speaker 6: you focus in on that as a place where we
• 4:06
  Speaker 6: really saw this phenomenon play out with young men, he's
• 4:09
  Speaker 6: been talking about the war with Iran and how that
• 4:11
  Speaker 6: has essentially left a lot of these voters that listen
• 4:13
  Speaker 6: to his podcast behind. And I mean, to your point, David,
• 4:16
  Speaker 6: about Mississippi, I mean, Scott Colombe and there are other
• 4:19
  Speaker 6: Democrats across the map. Often they are male candidates, working
• 4:23
  Speaker 6: class candidates. Sam Forsag in Montana, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan.
• 4:27
  Speaker 6: They have embraced masculinity in a way that we hadn't
• 4:30
  Speaker 6: necessarily seen the Democratic Party do in other ways. And
• 4:34
  Speaker 6: Scott Colom is very appealing, straightforward, again, avoided some of
• 4:37
  Speaker 6: these culture war issues that have alienated young men and
• 4:40
  Speaker 6: instead ran on traditional economic issues.
• 4:43
  Speaker 7: The American people did last night and we'll see what
• 4:44
  Speaker 7: happens in Alaska. We'll get that final number in Mississippi.
• 4:47
  Speaker 7: We're talking about a Mississippi Senate race. Potential Democratic win
• 4:51
  Speaker 7: the morning after a midterm election. Mississippi, North Carolina, Ohio, Iowa, Kansas.
• 4:58
  Speaker 7: What the American voter did last night was to revolt
• 5:01
  Speaker 7: and to repudiate the president. And in the process, Dana,
• 5:04
  Speaker 7: they just crushed and crumbled the mega coalition. Pick a place.
• 5:08
  Speaker 7: Let's go to Iowa. President Trump won it three times.
• 5:11
  Speaker 7: See these three House districts? Three Democrats flipping Republican seats
• 5:15
  Speaker 7: in the state of Iowa. That's a state the president
• 5:17
  Speaker 7: carried easily. Iowa also elected a Democratic senator and it
• 5:21
  Speaker 7: elected a Democratic governor. The mega coalition out in Iowa,
• 5:24
  Speaker 7: mostly white working class people, farmers, small cities, crushed. Move
• 5:30
  Speaker 7: over to another place. You can go to North Carolina.
• 5:32
  Speaker 7: Look at house races here. Again, another state. The president won.
• 5:35
  Speaker 7: three times. Out in Western North Carolina, Democrats have not
• 5:39
  Speaker 7: been able to win in rural white working class America
• 5:42
  Speaker 7: in forever. This seat, not in more than a dozen years,
• 5:45
  Speaker 7: not only did the Democrat win, look at that margin,
• 5:47
  Speaker 7: 57 to 41 in white working class America. The mega
• 5:50
  Speaker 7: coalition in Western North Carolina crumbled. Let's pick another place. Well,
• 5:54
  Speaker 7: how did the president get reelected in 2024? Well, he
• 5:57
  Speaker 7: had a giant surge in Latino votes across the country,
• 6:00
  Speaker 7: including in Texas. What did Texas do? Look down here.
• 6:04
  Speaker 7: in the Rio Grande Valley. Remember the Republican redistricting plan?
• 6:07
  Speaker 7: Let's just bring this up for you here. Remember, Republicans redistricted.
• 6:11
  Speaker 7: They said they were going to pick up five seats
• 6:12
  Speaker 7: in Texas alone. They did that at the president's demand,
• 6:15
  Speaker 7: not request, demand. Well, what happened with that? Four of
• 6:18
  Speaker 7: the five went to Democrats. Democrats winning by bigger margins
• 6:22
  Speaker 7: than they did two years ago in districts the Republicans
• 6:24
  Speaker 7: redrew to make them more difficult, largely on the power
• 6:28
  Speaker 7: of Latino voters. That's not all Texas did. Texas, as
• 6:31
  Speaker 7: you know, elected a Democratic senator for the first time
• 6:34
  Speaker 7: in 38 years and a Democratic governor, a Latina, for
• 6:37
  Speaker 7: the first time in 36 years. I could go on
• 6:40
  Speaker 7: and on and on, but let me end with the
• 6:41
  Speaker 7: crumbling of the mega coalition in the home state of
• 6:44
  Speaker 7: the vice president, J.D.
• 6:45
  Speaker 2: Vance.
• 6:46
  Speaker 7: Vivek Ramaswamy, MAGA himself, crushed, crushed in the governor's race
• 6:52
  Speaker 7: in a state where they haven't elected a governor in
• 6:53
  Speaker 7: 20 years, in a state President Trump carried easily three times.
• 6:56
  Speaker 7: Sherrod Brown, back to the Senate in J.D. Vance's old
• 7:01
  Speaker 7: seat in Ohio. So MAGA was on the ballot big
• 7:04
  Speaker 7: time here, Dana, and MAGA here and just about everywhere
• 7:07
  Speaker 7: got crushed. A lot for the Republicans to think about.
• 7:10
  Speaker 7: They followed Trump, and last night they followed him off
• 7:13
  Speaker 7: a cliff.
• 7:14
  Speaker 8: Is the MAGA era, is the Trump era coming to
• 7:17
  Speaker 8: an end? That's what a lot of conservatives are asking
• 7:20
  Speaker 8: today as the Republican Party's catastrophic losses in the midterms
• 7:24
  Speaker 8: become clearer. And frankly, even before the dust had cleared,
• 7:28
  Speaker 8: the day before the election, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whose
• 7:31
  Speaker 8: state largely managed to hold off much of the blue wave,
• 7:35
  Speaker 8: DeSantis started drawing distinctions between his views and the Trump administration's,
• 7:40
  Speaker 8: specifically on the Iran war. He called it a big
• 7:42
  Speaker 8: drag on Republicans and accused the administration of gaslighting Americans
• 7:47
  Speaker 8: when it came to the high price of gas and
• 7:49
  Speaker 8: how it hurt regular working people. And even more stunningly, Today,
• 7:54
  Speaker 8: the sitting vice president, J.D. Vance, took to Twitter or
• 7:57
  Speaker 8: X to give the reasons why he thought the elections
• 8:01
  Speaker 8: had been such a disaster for the Trump administration and
• 8:03
  Speaker 8: for Republicans. And he blamed the U.S. war with Iran.
• 8:07
  Speaker 8: And he suggested the U.S. has too close a relationship
• 8:10
  Speaker 8: with Israel.
• 8:11
  Speaker 4: And on the.
• 8:11
  Speaker 8: Subject of immigration enforcement, the vice president said, quote, I'm
• 8:15
  Speaker 8: open to the idea that we should change enforcement by
• 8:17
  Speaker 8: focusing more on businesses that hire illegal labor, for instance, unquote.
• 8:22
  Speaker 8: That doesn't exactly sound like the language of a sitting
• 8:24
  Speaker 8: vice president. It sounds a lot more like someone outside
• 8:28
  Speaker 8: the White House contemplating formulating his own platform, perhaps contemplating
• 8:33
  Speaker 8: a presidential run. Now, the other question about whether we've
• 8:36
  Speaker 8: hit the end of the road of Trump Avenue is tone.
• 8:41
  Speaker 8: Voters overwhelmingly yesterday rejected politicians offering nasty attacks. And in fact,
• 8:49
  Speaker 8: they voted for the people on the other end of
• 8:52
  Speaker 8: those attacks. In Ohio, Republican Governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy lost
• 8:58
  Speaker 8: decisively to Democrat Amy Acton, whose childhood rape he had
• 9:05
  Speaker 8: exploited in what has been derided as perhaps the worst
• 9:08
  Speaker 8: political TV ad ever made. Vice President Vance made nasty,
• 9:13
  Speaker 8: weird insinuations about James Tallarico, the Democrat who won a
• 9:18
  Speaker 8: Senate seat in, of all places, formerly Ruby Red, Texas,
• 9:23
  Speaker 8: and Senator Roger Marshall, who desperately was suggesting in the
• 9:27
  Speaker 8: closing hours of his campaign that Democratic pastor, now Senator-elect
• 9:32
  Speaker 8: Adam Hamilton, was guilty of grooming.
• 9:37
  Speaker 6: Dr.
• 9:37
  Speaker 8: Marshall is also heading home.
• 9:40
  Speaker 9: And not to the Senate.
• 9:42
  Speaker 8: Hamilton and Tallarico in particular have made decency and kindness
• 9:47
  Speaker 8: hallmarks of their campaigns. Now, to be clear, Trump is
• 9:51
  Speaker 8: still president, still powerful, still loud and proud. But there
• 9:56
  Speaker 8: are real signs that the Trump era is coming to
• 10:00
  Speaker 8: a close. Now, I'm here now with Dana Bash and
• 10:03
  Speaker 8: Caitlin Collins and John King. What do you think, Dana?
• 10:09
  Speaker 3: I think that.
• 10:09
  Speaker 8: You can disagree.
• 10:10
  Speaker 3: No, well, no, far be it for me to disagree. No,
• 10:14
  Speaker 3: I think what you laid out is spot on. And
• 10:17
  Speaker 3: we don't know.
• 10:20
  Speaker 3: The Trump era is absolutely coming to an end. It's
• 10:23
  Speaker 3: just the way it is. And the beginning, we said
• 10:25
  Speaker 3: last night, his lame duck era started the minute that
• 10:29
  Speaker 3: the Democrats took the House. The question is, what's it
• 10:32
  Speaker 3: going to look like? And more importantly, going forward, is
• 10:36
  Speaker 3: MAGA going to be picked up by anybody? I think
• 10:40
  Speaker 3: that the short answer is no. And you just laid
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: that out. But what I'm hearing from Republicans today, and
• 10:46
  Speaker 3: I'm guessing you all are the same, is between Ron DeSantis,
• 10:51
  Speaker 3: the governor of Florida, coming out very forcefully saying that Republicans,
• 10:57
  Speaker 3: if not for Florida, would have been at an extinction-level event.
• 11:02
  Speaker 3: Then J.D. Vance coming out and saying, whoa, whoa, whoa,
• 11:05
  Speaker 3: it's the war, and trying to sort of make excuses.
• 11:09
  Speaker 3: And then I'm told behind the scenes people are saying, okay,
• 11:12
  Speaker 3: Marco Rubio, maybe it's time for you to get up.
• 11:14
  Speaker 3: The jockeying for 2028 has already begun. And I didn't
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: even mention Ted Cruz and others who are out there.
• 11:22
  Speaker 9: I mean, the Trump administration is lost right now. They're
• 11:25
  Speaker 9: not really sure how to navigate this going forward. And
• 11:28
  Speaker 9: I think the statement from the vice president today, which
• 11:30
  Speaker 9: was extremely long, really encapsulated that, where he was breaking
• 11:34
  Speaker 9: with the president on the Iran war, saying, well, the
• 11:37
  Speaker 9: president said last night that's why Republicans lost. That's not
• 11:40
  Speaker 9: what the president said last night. And, yes, today he
• 11:42
  Speaker 9: said he agreed with him, but he tried to blame
• 11:45
  Speaker 9: gas prices without tying them to the war, even though
• 11:47
  Speaker 9: we all know they are directly tied, because if you
• 11:49
  Speaker 9: look at a chart, they skyrocketed in February when he
• 11:52
  Speaker 9: started launching bombs in Iran. And so, I mean, if
• 11:56
  Speaker 9: you look at the president, though, who is known for
• 11:58
  Speaker 9: his political savvy, the party follows him. They do what
• 12:01
  Speaker 9: he says, essentially. Today, he appeared at the White House
• 12:04
  Speaker 9: ballroom construction site, signed a steel beam, and right now
• 12:08
  Speaker 9: is complaining that the Senate didn't make daylight savings permanent.
• 12:12
  Speaker 9: And so he's not really giving them any guidance on
• 12:15
  Speaker 9: how they should handle the massive losses that they suffer.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: He kind of is. He's kind of saying, I don't care.
• 12:20
  Speaker 3: I mean, without saying it.
• 12:21
  Speaker 7: Don't you think?
• 12:21
  Speaker 9: But he definitely cares.