Plain English with Derek Thompson - How Joe Biden Lost Millennials

Episode Date: April 19, 2022

The White House has a big youth problem. Since the day of his inauguration, Joe Biden’s approval has declined by about 7 points among Americans over 50—and by an astonishing 19 points among Americans under 35. The pollster and politics writer Kristen Soltis Anderson joins the show to talk about Biden's eroding approval among young people and what it means for November. Then she and Derek talk about what liberals don't get about conservatives, why Democrats overrate the political power of Donald Trump, and whether masculinity could benefit from a liberal rebrand. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: Kristen Soltis Anderson Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This is Dave Chang and Chris Ying. We are the hosts of Recipe Club. You may have listened to it before, but we are now back on the air, new and improved, with the same host that lose every week. I still don't know what the rules are because they've changed as well. Chris, can you give a quick rundown? Every week, we debate the best way to cook the things you want to eat. We take a user, listener submitted recipe, and we all cook it with our friends,

Priya Krishna, Rachel Kong, Brian Ford, and John DeBerry. and then we talk about what went right and what went wrong. No, I actually really don't want to do this podcast. And they are hardly our friends. They are enemies. They are enemies. It's Dave's civil disobedience. If you want to see Dave Chang in an act of civil disobedience,

tune in to Recipe Club where he will not follow the recipe. I'm contractually obligated to make this podcast. But I'm here to have a good time. So listen to Recipe Club every week on the Ringer Podcast Network. So I've been thinking recently, I should try harder to understand how Republicans and conservatives see the world. And there are two reasons

why I've been thinking this recently. The first reason is power. Democrats are headed for a brutal wipeout in November. They are projected to lose the House. They are projected to lose the Senate. They are projected to lose both quite badly. It is very likely that in six months, Republicans will hold the House

and the Senate, in addition to having a historic majority in the Supreme Court, in addition to maybe being slight favorites in 2024 against an unpopular Joe Biden or whoever runs in his place. And if you are interested in the near future of American political power, I think you have to be interested in what Republicans want and how they think. Second, I don't think I understand what Republicans want or how they think. I'm not particularly embarrassed about this either. I live in Washington, D.C., which is a pretty liberal city. I work at Atlantic, which is a heterodox, but basically left-of-center magazine. My friends are mostly urban college grad in your 30s, a demographic that overall leans to the left. And you can be angry

at me if you want for being a journalist whose social circle isn't like a perfect representation of the census. But in today's age of partisan sorting, most of us live in bubbles that are unrepresentative of this big, messy country. So I wanted to level up on this topic. And I reached out to Kristen Soltes-Sanderson. Kristen is a Republican. Holster, so she has the big picture on how conservatives and liberals think about the world. She also runs focus groups that can give us very personal details about how individual Republicans and Democrats think about their lives. She is also a millennial. And so on the way to unpacking what Democrats don't understand about Republicans, we also talk about a phenomenon that is

fascinated me that I think is really important, which is the absolute implosion of Joe Biden's approval among young people. So get this. Since the day of his inauguration, Biden's approval has declined by six points among seniors, by eight points among young boomers, 50 to 64, by 14 points among Gen X,

and by 19 points among voters 35 and younger. So among millennials and older Gen Z voters, Biden's approval has dropped almost 20, points in less than 20 months. So today's big picture theme, I suppose, is political misunderstandings. What Biden doesn't get about my generation and what liberals like me don't get about conservatives. I'm Derek Thompson.

This is plain English. Kristen, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. Kristen, you wear so many hats. So first, to give listeners a sense of your bonafi, Can you give us like 30 seconds on all of your professional hats? Yes. My main job is as a public opinion researcher.

I am a pollster, founder of a firm called Eschelon Insights. And then from time to time, I take those insights on television. I'm a CNN contributor, as well as I write a newsletter called Codebook. You can find codebook. com. You are also the author of the selfie vote, where millennials are leading America. And I have all these questions to ask you about how Republicans think and how the conservative outlook has changed in the last decade. But I actually want to start with young people.

Something very interesting and troubling, if you're a Democrat, is happening with Biden's approval among young people right now. It has collapsed not just dramatically, but more than any other age group. Lots of different polls show this, but the following numbers come from civics and online pollster. among all 18 to 34-year-olds, Biden's approval is down 19 points since January 2021. Within that age group, approval for among young people without a college degree is down 20 points. For Hispanic young people, down 26 points.

For black young people, down 30 points. Like, Joe Biden has, in the last 15 months, basically lost the millennial generation. Why do you think this has happened? In one sense, Joe Biden never really had the millennial generation or Generation Z coming behind them. While these two generations are not identical and we can argue about where the dividing line is, they're politically relatively similar these days.

And arguably Biden has never been strong with young voters. He has just benefited by running against Donald Trump for president. So if you looked back at all of the data coming out of the Democratic primary in, you know, late 2019, early 2020. He was getting demolished among young voters within the Democratic Party by folks like Bernie Sanders. Now, it didn't wind up mattering. He was able to run up the numbers so dramatically with, you know, Democrats over the age of 50 that he was able to ultimately secure the nomination. But young voters have never, you know, outside of, you know, oh, Uncle Joe making his cameo on Parks and Recreation.

and he's this guy who's vaguely memeable with his aviator sunglasses. He's never, at least in any data I've seen, been someone who's really captured the heart of young voters. I do think that his campaign did reasonably well with them, in part because Donald Trump was just so off the table as an option for many. And I also think a lot of young voters, they're still just learning about politics. They're not deeply ideological. they just kind of hoped, okay, maybe we'll get a normal president in and things will start to feel a little better. And when your gas is $4 a gallon, we can argue over whose fault that is, but you're just, that's the kind of situation where you're going, I don't know that things feel a lot better right now. And so when I look at Joe Biden's job approval, the approval numbers among young voters are really low.

But there's also a really high level of don't know, refused. And even among those who are giving an opinion, they tend to be in that, you know, we ask as a pollster, do you have strongly approve or somewhat approve? There's a lot of somewhat going on here. The views on him just aren't very strong. So it's not as though young voters really dislike him. They just feel extremely meh about him. And that's a big problem for Democrats because meh does not lead you to show up to the polls in a midterm. And this is a demographic that in the last few cycles has turned out,

very strongly for Democrats, at least in terms of the margin. They haven't necessarily turned out strongly compared to seniors in terms of actual turnout numbers. What's really interesting to me is that I totally buy your meh argument, that there has just sort of been a consistent uniform meth that millennials and older Gen Z voters have felt about Joe Biden since January, February, 2021, and that mech is just now being more visible, more visibly expressed in the polls. At the same time, I think it's also the case that there's a lot of disappointment. You know, a lot of progressives and even maybe just moderate young people that thought that there was going to be some kind of action on student debt, maybe that he would cancel student debt, that maybe there

would be some clearer action on solving the affordability crisis. Well, quite the opposite. Inflation now is 8%, not 2%, as it was, toward the middle and end of Donald Trump's administration. His domestic agenda, I feel like, has just a lot of vibes emanating, bad vibes emanating from it in the last 12 months. He hasn't really done a whole lot. And then, And finally, I think that there's this sense that everything surrounding Joe Biden seems to be sort of curdled with badness, right? It's Delta. And then after Delta, it's Amacron. And then after Amacron, it's a war in Ukraine that messes up the supply chains even more.

So how much do you think this is also a function of sort of the broader global forces that have pulled down Joe Biden's approval rating in the last 12 to 15 months? And that's just also being reflected in the fact that millennials are pulling their avowed support. porch for the White House? Sure. I think that's a part of it. And I think, remember, for an older voter, you typically are talking about someone who has voted in elections for a decade or two or more. They've got pretty ingrained partisanship. And so things like the polarization we see, where you've got Republicans who there's nothing Joe Biden could ever do that would make them like him or there are older Democrats where there's nothing Biden could do to make them dislike him. That's a little more baked in for older voters. But younger voters don't have as much of a track record of having,

you know, brand loyalty to a particular party. And so as a result, when things get go, when things are going rough, you don't necessarily have that reservoir of goodwill and, hey, trust me, it's not my fault. Stick with my team. Younger voters just won't have as much of that as older voters. Now, the good news for Democrats is that young voters are not becoming conservatives. I am not like the other question that pollsters like to ask is, you know, if the election were held today, for whom would you vote for Congress, a Republican or Democrat? And in many of the exact same polls that are showing Joe Biden with terrible job approval numbers among young voters, those are still the generational groups that are breaking the most for Democrats. So they've not become Republicans. They're just checking out entirely.

I'm really curious about the intersection of this generation of young people that is in Fitzton starts becoming more political. You are seeing more things like Occupy, more things like the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 and also 2020, these murmurations of political energy among young people, juxtaposed with the fact that American politics overall is arguably as, old or gerontocratic as it's ever been. I mean, Joe Biden is the oldest president in American history. If Joe Biden had lost, Donald Trump would have been the oldest president in American history. If you look at the Senate, if you look at Congress, the average age of both of those

bodies is near an all-time high. The party leaders are basically all, I believe, over 73. to what extent do you think that the sheer oldness of Washington, of national politics right now, is a driving factor in the way that young people think about the frustrations of government and their disinclination, as you put it, to affiliate strongly with Democrats or Republicans and thinking, well, it's just one group of old people versus a more liberal group of old people and neither of them are speaking directly to me. Is that a factor here as well? There are two questions that I think are pretty illuminating on this. One is you ask people, do you think the next generation will be better off, worse off, or about the same as your generation?

And it's actually older voters that are more likely to think the next generation is in trouble. But that's not to say that young people don't think that things are bad. They think everything is great and everything's fine. I mean, there's tons of data about how young people are stressed out about the extremely high cost of housing, for instance, the rising cost of things like a college education. But at the same time, I find a lot of young people will say, I think we're going to be able to make things better when we're finally in charge. That for an older generation, they just think things are structurally broken and the kids these days are going to be worse off for any number of reasons. Where for many young people,

they're just sort of thinking there are a lot of systems that seem pretty broken and the older people who are in charge of them don't seem to be doing a very good job. The good news is I think once my generation is in charge, we'll be able to make it better. And in the meantime, there are other things I can do outside of sort of traditional politics and running for office to bring about change. Now, some of this means having your politics invade or pervade other parts of your life, where for an older American, you might have this really clear dividing line between, okay, I watch the news and I go vote, and then other things in my life, like my work and what I buy at the grocery store, that is all separate from my politics.

For many young people, that line is much more blurred that by the choices they make in the grocery aisle or the things that they demand of their bosses within their companies, that's another way for them to make change. And it's a lever that I think older Americans don't think of in quite the same way. I'd love you to expand on this because it's one of the most fascinating political phenomena among young people, I think. This discrepancy between millennials being less likely to vote than older generations, but also exerting more political power at their own institutions. You have this idea that college campuses

have become more political, more inclined to ban speakers who aren't politically aligned with students. You see this at companies. Millennials are broadly seen as more political, more insistent that companies follow their politics. We just saw this with Disney, where employees insisted that Disney CEO Bob Chepec speak out against Florida's parental rights law, aka don't say gay. I'm sure class and education play a role in the answer here. But it is interesting, right, that you have this generation that is less likely to vote in elections, but more likely than previous generations to express their political views at work. I think some of this is that for younger Americans, we have kind of grown up with more ways to speak our minds.

for better or worse, we have come of age in the era of social media. And so if you are someone who is 24, 25 years old, you have ways to grab a microphone and make a political statement that were not available to someone who was 25 years old in 1972. And so that piece of the landscape, I think, has changed. And especially for Generation Z, part of that belief that, hey, my generation is going to make things better is linked to we are good at grad. the microphone in a way that terrifies older generations, and there's power in that. I also think that the pace of change has really accelerated, looking over a long enough time horizon. And so where decades ago, the boss may have been able to sort of look at the younger workers

and say, like, no, no, I know what's best. We're going to keep doing things the way we've been doing for so long. I find that many older Americans I talk to about these sort of generational clashes just feel very confused and honestly a little scared of the younger employees because they recognize my younger employees and staff or my students. They have tools available to them that I don't fully understand that seem to use and to wield a lot of power these days. And since I don't fully understand it, maybe I need to just listen to them a little bit more because, I'm afraid of what will happen if I don't. That some of this, I think, is an older generation, just not understanding fully how a younger generation works and operates and thinks, and that lack of understanding leading them to be

fearful and in some cases, therefore, very deferential. Now, I think it's important to clarify, and you sort of had this caveat, too, is that to what extent is this like college educated? I think it's not necessarily just about education, but it is a small slice of the millennial and Gen Zee workforce. The vast majority are not going to their CEO demanding, you know, change on the basis of politics. But that small slice is able to be very vocal, is able to leverage the tools that they have at their disposal to make a lot of noise. And for a consumer-facing company, for instance, you may just sort of recognize that Republicans are not going to stop buying

your widgets because you put out a... nice statement about LGBT issues or race. But if you don't say the right things on LGBT issues or race, younger consumers will stop buying your widgets and will punish you. And so that is also part of where some of these CEOs are trying to, how they're trying to navigate this. I think it's just so interesting. You know, I thought that young people being a quite liberal generation would over time color the entire electorate blue as they grew up, as they entered age brackets, they were more likely to vote. So you could just see this sort of millennial wave coming into the electorate. And this was the sort of demographics, this destiny argument that said

that we were going to be electing, you know, Democratic presidents until the end of time. And to a certain extent, an aspect of that is happening in that people under 35 reliably lean Democratic as a block. But something else has happened. And this is where I want to take the second chapter of our conversation here. Something else has happened that I didn't quite anticipate. And that is that the perceived liberalization of America, which is related to, but not exclusively because of young people, has really energized the culture wars in a way that I think at the ballot box has helped Republicans. I don't want to be misunderstood here.

I'm not saying anything as critical as like young people being pro-LGB are responsible for Trump or anything like that. I'm just saying there is this fascinating mutual antipathy, this, this, this, this this sort of wacky, toxic symbiosis between this emerging cultural liberalism on the one hand and this emerging new conservative mindset, on the other hand. And I really want to spend a little bit of time talking to you about that, the sort of emerging conservative mindset. So speaking to a liberal millennial, as you are here, I am a liberal urban millennial, I wanted you to just explain to me what it is that people like me misunderstand about the country we live in by

misunderstanding the conservative mindset. So let me ask the question in a very broad way, and then maybe we can pick it apart for the rest of the show. What is it that Democrats like me don't understand about Republicans? I think the two things that many people don't understand about the conservative mindset is one, they overestimate how much real estate Donald Trump takes up in the mind of the median Republican or conservative voter. And second, I think they underestimate the extent to which your median conservative or Republican voter feels pretty powerless in the face of very rapid change that they think is powered by very powerful institutions that do not care about them anymore. I find both of these things very interesting because I agree that they're both

misunderstandings. I think A, that Democrats would be surprised to hear a Republican pollster say that Trump looms too large in our imagination. And B, would be surprised to hear that the overwhelming feeling among conservatives is one of powerlessness, because I think that Democrats feel the same kind of powerlessness on their end, too. So let's take these one by one. First, Donald Trump, let me push back, as the liberal in this conversation, against your characterization that Trump is too much of a boogeyman, or at least seems too much of a boogeyman on the left. Isn't this guy still incredibly powerful? Isn't he still arguably the most most powerful Republican, a Republican that people in Ohio and Georgia running for office,

for Senate, for governor, are desperate for his endorsement. So persuade me, please, that Donald Trump is overrated in terms of his power over the Republican electorate. Elected Republicans definitely do not want to create headaches for themselves by crossing Donald Trump. And because so many elected officials, Republican and Democratic, are mostly held accountable by their primary electorates and are not in a swing district. That's just the reality of the world we're living in. But I think for the median Republican voter, not your loud activist, not your cable news host, but for just your average person who every two to four years goes and pulls the lever for Republicans,

they like Donald Trump fine. If he runs in 2024, they might vote for him again. They'd sure rather have him in office than the current president. But he is not someone who is. driving their every view on every issue. At my firm, we did an experiment where we, it's called a conjoint analysis. They use this in market research all the time to figure out, would people rather have more cup holders or USB ports in a car or something like that? You're testing out different features. So we did this with hypothetical candidates, where we would present people in a survey with two hypothetical

candidates that would have a bunch of different attributes. And then you at the end can see, like which feature is associated with the candidates who tended to win more. And we found that Donald Trump's endorsement alone was only worth like three points in a primary. But if it was paired with the endorsement of other local Republican officials, that suddenly goes up to like 20 points. And it was the strongest feature that we tested. At the same time, if he specifically does not endorse you, that does create a negative effect. And so I think Brian Kemp in Georgia is going to be an interesting example of this is someone

who continues to be ahead in the polls, you know, not by just a little bit, against his primary rival in David Perdue, despite Donald Trump focusing the death star on him directly. And just to catch people up, right. Kemp is the incumbent who was the governor of Georgia when Trump lost the election. Trump basically wanted Kemp and his consigliaries to hand him the state of Georgia through whatever nefarious means he conjured up. Now Kemp is running for re-election, and there is a Trump-like candidate in the race. That is Purdue.

Trump has endorsed Purdue. But Kemp, the non-Donald Trump-endorced candidate, retains a moderate lead in that race, which goes exactly to your point. The Democrats mildly overrate the value of a Trump endorsement, and by extension, might mildly overrate Trump's sort of Sengali-like power on the party.

A couple other things that I think are really interesting in terms of Trump's overrated Svengali-like power on the party, You talked about his pro-vaccine stance. Trump is not that subtly pro-vaccine. He has been kind of outspoken about getting boosted and being proud of Operation Warp Speed, which was the government program he initiated that helped us get the MRNA vaccines. I've seen him booed at conferences for saying that he's pro-vaccine. His support of the vaccine has clearly done very, very little for Republican uptake of the vaccine. That seems like another interesting piece of evidence that he's not exactly a strong cult leader. Another one, truth social. He launched that social media app or

whatever it was, replacement Twitter. And it's done quite terribly as far as I understand it. So you would think, again, if Trump were a real cult leader, he could launch a product and the MLM underlings would make it a hit. Well, truth social is not exactly a hit. And then finally, Trump has been, continues to be more pro-Putin than the median Republican seems to me to be pro-putin. It seems to me that antipathy toward Russia, despite what Tucker Carlson says every night on Fox

News, is relatively bipartisan. The vast majority of Americans left of center, right-of-center, are not pro-Puttin at all. So I'm very interested to hear you say that. I didn't expect you to say it, but when you add it all up, it does seem to me like Trump might be slightly overrated

as a bogeyman on the right. My necessary follow-up to you. And this is probably the question that's burning in a lot of listeners' heads, is, okay, does that mean that he's not the favorite in 2024? Does that mean that the field is the favorite? Or that even more specifically, a Ron DeSantis governor of Florida is stronger than he might seem to those on the MSNBC left who hold up Trump as the all-powerful? Donald Trump certainly is in poll position at the moment, but some of that is for lack of really well-known alternatives who have introduced themselves to Republican voters as someone interested in running for president very clearly, because so many of them

are still dancing around this question of, well, if Donald Trump runs, then I probably won't anyways. So it's a little bit opaque. Something that I point to is I did a focus group for the New York Times back in January of Republican voters and their views on January 6th. This was the first in a series of focus groups that I've done for the New York Times looking at different slices of the electorate. And in this focus group, you had a lot of voters who had no interest in anyone who had criticized Donald Trump after January 6th. Even those who said they were horrified by what they had seen on TV, they felt like, you know, the texts that got released between, you know, folks like Laura Ingram, et cetera, saying, you know, tell them to call it off, you know,

this is bad. They just thought, I can't believe all these people criticize Donald Trump. So they have lots of affection for him. But when we got to the question of 2024, they were a little more ambivalent. They were, you know, he's fine. I wish he was president now. But if someone else comes along, I think as long as they are putting America first or, you know, whatever those policies look like, I'd be open to it. So that to me was the first time that I had heard. Again, these are not never Trumpers. These are not folks that are watching MSNBC. These are, you know, pretty mainline Republican voters, they like Donald Trump fine, but they could go for someone else if someone else emerged. And that's the big question. You mentioned the second answer to the question,

what is it that liberal urban millennials like me don't understand about the conservative mindset was the perceived powerlessness that conservatives feel when they look at the cultural landscape or maybe even the corporate landscape, when they look at companies like Apple or Google or Disney that represent themselves through various ways as being progressive and some might even, although I would never say this sincerely, woke, right? What I find so interesting about that answer, and I'd love you to help me unpack this, is that, as you will know, liberals feel the exact same way. Liberals feel that they are powerless, that they want certain laws surrounding abortion

or education to be the law of the land or to be the law of their home state and feel like they are losing in the courts and they are losing at the local politics angle, that Texas laws against abortion and Florida right, Florida laws about parental control of education make liberal priorities endangered in America. They look at Washington where I think it is totally fair to say. The Republicans are very likely to win both the House and the Senate in the midterms. They already control the Supreme Court, which has much more power in the U.S. to overturn laws than it has in other countries, which means that a conservative body has powers to overturn liberal laws in the United States that it doesn't necessarily have in other countries,

which is a long-witted way of saying that liberals are terrified as hell and therefore fighting against perceived Republican power in politics. And Republicans are sort of closing their grips around their control of politics because they're terrified as hell of liberal power in culture and the media. Like, is this in your mind a kind of spin-stimbing? cycle of powerlessness, that both sides are retreating to their far polls because they think that their power in America, whether it's political or cultural, is being endangered. 100%. And it frankly leads voters to be more tolerant of things they might not have been tolerant of otherwise because when you feel under siege, you are more willing to accept behavior that

is outside the norm if you feel like, well, you don't want to. want your side to be the one to disarm in the arms race. And so it allows the, it allows our polarization to get much worse. An analogy I use is in political science, there's something we call thermostatic public opinion, which is usually used to describe the way people feel about pretty, you know, benign policy stuff, that if you have a president who wants to spend a lot of money, then suddenly the public becomes really interested in, well, government spending is a problem, and we need to stop, and then they vote people that are fiscally conservative. And then you put someone in office who at least claims to be fiscally conservative,

and suddenly nobody cares about that anymore. And they say, no, no, no, we would like the government to spend more money and back and forth. I think the problem is that the thermostat in our politics is a little bit broken these days, in that the news that people consume often tells them your side is losing and you are under siege. And so much like a thermostat that is broken, suddenly if, your thermostat is constantly reading that the window is open and you have to just crank the heat because cold air is coming in, you're just going to crank that heat hotter and hotter and hotter fighting against a force that may or may not exist, but the thermostat sure thinks it does.

And that's what's causing our politics to really overheat. I'm very interested in the thermostatic theory of public opinion, which you very capably just described. But I wonder if something beyond that is happening. Like, I think Americans are losing their minds a little bit. And I think the media has something to do with it. Like the way I see it, there are some Democrats, there are a lot of Democrats who think Republicans are trying to ban abortions with one hand and break the infrastructure of democracy with the other. And in your model, many Republicans feel justified in pursuing, I think, fairly extreme policies, in part because of a fear of powerlessness, of fear that liberal culture wants to cancel them into oblivion. I mean, like, if this is

thermostatic. It's like, it's like setting the thermostat to 120 because you think your roommate or partner is going to open the window during a blizzard or something. Like, this is extreme thermostatic behavior. So sticking with Republicans here, do you think their fear is something to do with where they get their news? Like how much of this is about the stories conservatives tell themselves on social media and Fox News? I don't think you can just point to say cable news on this front. And I say this is someone who has been a contributor at different news networks. I've been a contributor at ABC. I've been a contributor at Fox, and I'm now a contributor at CNN. So I've seen a lot of different things. I mean, on a good night, Tucker Carlson gets 3 million people to watch his show. That is a teeny,

tiny, infinitesimally small slice of the American population, even if we're just looking at the American electorate. Bigger than this podcast, smaller than the American electorate. Yeah, I wouldn't say no to an audience of 3 million. And I want to be clear. But I think there's this notion, you know, to your question about, well, what do progressives get wrong about conservatives? Most conservatives are not watching Tucker Carlson and Hannity every night. But with that said, there is an ecosystem of the stuff that bubbles its way to you through social media that means you don't have to have watched it last night live when it was on for the ideas that are talked about or the examples that are raised to kind of make their way to you. And same thing with a progressive. who's maybe not watching Rachel Maddo every night,

but the things that are brought up suddenly become, you know, viral 90-second. You wouldn't believe the thing that happened in this congressional hearing today, montages that then make their way to you on social media. And this goes to the problem of incentives, where the incentive of is not to create content online that makes people think, it's to make people feel. Because feeling is what is going to make you share it. It's what's going to hold it.

your eyeballs longer. And so content that makes us feel rather than think is the stuff that gets turned up and shared the most. And something that says, hey, the world's not actually so bad, is not as likely to inspire an emotional response as, oh, my goodness, can you believe this horrible thing? Can you believe this book that this school board somewhere banned? Or how you believe this? Negative emotions are the ones that go aerodynamic on social media for sure. I think you're right. I think that media has something to do with it. I think social media has something to do with it.

I also think that there's underlying realities that show that polarization is just getting worse. You know, it is the case that agree or disagree with most of their policies, and I agree with most of their policies. The LGBTQ movement is to the left of where it was 10, 15, 20 years ago. And Republicans are correct. in noting that liberals are more liberal than they were just a decade ago. At the same time, I think that liberals are correct to point out that something like the Texas abortion law

is more severe than the sort of laws that conservatives are trying to pass 10 to 15, 20 years ago. So it goes to your original thesis. This is still sort of thermostatic powerlessness war, right? That's still what it is, is both sides being, feeling powerless and therefore retrenching even further to decide in response. But it's not just the media representation. I think there's also underlying realities of deepening polarization. Wasn't to overrule what you said. I just want to make sure that I had that on the record.

The very last thing I want to talk to you about, which is actually one of the original reasons where I wanted to have you on the show, was that you held a focus group of conservative men that was written about and published in the New York Times that I thought was utterly fascinating. I thought the response to it, the online reaction to this article,

was completely fascinating. So let's talk about both, the substance and the reaction. You hold this focus group with conservative men, eight conservative men. What did they say that was most interesting to you? I feel like for these men, what was most interesting to me was that their sense of not fitting into modern culture was very real. And it wasn't just theoretical. It wasn't just, I feel like I don't fit in because.

someone on TV or something I saw in social media told me I didn't. It was that these men had examples of, you know, being ostracized within their church communities for having noted that they were conservative. You had one participant. This was one moment that went particularly viral from the focus group where he talked about being a realtor and getting negative Yelp reviews from someone with whom he had had a conflict on an HOA board and feeling like his – that the world became. becoming more progressive was having real consequences for them personally, not just theoretical,

but something that was affecting their lives. And that's why, even though they know throughout the focus group, they were very clear that they know their views on things were unpopular. They nevertheless think that they're right and were unwilling to back down from their views on things like gender roles, etc. Even in the face of me as a young female moderator telling me to my face, well, you know, there's a reason why women call the weaker sex. I thought, okay, well, tell me more about that, sir. You know, I think in these focus groups, these guys know that they are out of step with today's culture. They know that they are out of step with where culture is headed.

and they know that it can have consequences for their lives, their careers. And so they try to just figure out how do I, you know, many of them said things like, I haven't made a new friend in many years. And there's plenty of data outside of this focus group that backs that up that men in particular these days just have fewer and fewer close friends, that a lot of them are just sort of retreating from a lot of spaces that they may have previously engaged with because they just sort of get that they are not where society is headed and don't know how to make sense of that. It's funny. I've long thought that there were surprising similarities between left-wing millennials

and working-class Republicans. They're both turning away from religion. Church attendance among white men without a college degree is declining just about as fast as it is among young college grads. Both are deeply skeptical of elites. And both are lonely. Like what you're describing is a culture of loneliness. And loneliness isn't often considered a political phenomenon, but maybe it should be. Maybe we need some anti-lonelly politician to raise the political salience of loneliness. And I want to connect that to your article in The New York Times. I read it.

I disagreed with about half of what these conservative men said. And I thought the subtext of their message was, I'm done with the left because I think liberal America basically wants me to go fuck myself. And then I go on Twitter, and guess what a lot of my leftist center friends told these guys to do? In not so many words, basically, go fuck yourself. So, Kristen, from a coldly political standpoint, are my friends right? Is it just not worth it for Democrats to pursue this group? Or do you think Democrats are making a huge error in assuming that working class dudes are

hereby rendered eternal property of the Republican Party. From a pure political strategy perspective, any time you are trying to, anytime you have decided that you are okay losing a group of voters, you have to have someone else that you are adding to take their place. And I think in this focus group, there are some of those men, of those eight men who they were probably, they've probably never voted for a Democrat,

they probably never would vote for a Democrat, writing them off is not costing Democrats any votes. But there were a couple who I think that if you had approached them with a message that said, hey, don't you think it's terrible that the middle class has been hollowed out over the last, you know, a couple of decades in American society? And if your message to them was focused on that and also didn't say, by the way, I find you repellent, they could potentially vote for Democratic candidates. I think in particular, the most interesting voices in the group, you know, you had two African-American men who talked about how, you know, they, that was one of the examples of a man who said, you know, people at my church

won't even talk to me anymore because of the views that I've expressed on some of these things, that there are a lot of men who are, you know, whether it's a diverse coalition of kind of working class guys or what have you, that used to be very available to Democrats through a kind of an economic message, but who now, it's just hard to imagine. them voting for a Democratic candidate because why would you vote for someone who says, I think you are a bad person? Now, the flip side of that is that for Democrat, you know, this is a war amongst Democratic strategists that I just watch unfold on Twitter, but the counter argument is we should call their views for what they are. And we should acknowledge that if we are trying to

pander to them and tell them that they're welcome in our coalition, you are depressing the base of our party and they will not turn out. Republicans had this same thing go down 10 years ago. When Mitt Romney lost in 2012, that was the fight was, should Republicans try to moderate, be more accommodating to socially progressive voters, bring them in, say nice things about immigration reform, et cetera, or should they double down on a really strongly conservative message and win back those disaffected evangelicals? So this is a tale as old as time in politics, but I do think that some of those men in that focus group would be available to Democrats on a purely economic message if they were not also simultaneously hearing, we don't want you at every turn.

This leads me to my last question for you, which is about masculinity. In your focus group, the men were exquisitely sensitive to questions about masculinity in American culture. They were very aware of the way that young men were cross-dressing and they didn't like that. They felt very threatened by the perceived attack on all men online. And this fits into a little bit of electoral history. Men have pulled away from the Democratic Party. In almost every election since 1980, women have voted for Democrats.

And in I think every election except for one since 1980, men have voted for Republicans. And it's funny because as I was reading these men saying something like, quote, I don't know what masculinity even means anymore. I was thinking to myself, I don't think that much about masculinity, to be honest, but as a matter of definitions, I am very aware of what constitutes toxic masculinity, but I am not entirely clear on what constitutes

anti-toxic masculinity. The positive definition of masculinity is not, I think, a very popular project on the left. So, Christian, what do you think are the prospects for a more positive vision of liberal masculinity? This, I think, goes back to our earlier discussion about the pace of change. And for some of these men, look, the idea that there are going to be people who say, I don't understand the way the kids these days dress, and I feel like that is a sign of broader societal decay, is extremely not new.

Right. And it also wasn't unanimous in the group. Hundreds of years old. And there was even a moment where one of the men in the group who was a little more aggressively vocal about his. views, you know, he was trying to bring other participants along with him on some of this. And one said, I can't come with you, man. You're too macho. Like, I'm not in on this. But, you know, it's interesting. You've got this, you know, sort of arch conservative view online that I think you've got this new documentary that Tucker Carlson is putting out with a trailer that has gone viral because it's It's called the end of men.

And it's like a lot of shirtless guys all like weightlifting. It's like the top gun volleyball scene in terms of its homo eroticism. But it's also an explicitly pro-masculine Republican ad. It's a really fascinating piece of visual culture for sure. We could unpack that for hours. That's another episode. That's another episode. But I will say this anxiety on the right that men are viewed as the bad guys.

very broadly, you know, that has fed into this idea of, well, one side says you're not a good person, just by virtue of who you are, not based on your actions, just because of your identity. You are inherently, probably somewhat a bad person. That, I do think, is a problem. Because, again, a lot of these guys in that focus group, some of them had views that you could very rightly say, they're out of step and they're out of step for a reason. But there were others who said, you know, for me, and I would encourage people, you know, there's an abridged transcript on the website at the New York Times, but there's a full 80 minutes of audio. You may not want to listen to all 80 minutes, but, you know, where some of them say, look, a lot of the things that I would say,

you know, are the things that make a man are not so different from the things that I would say make a woman. Like, that was actually one of the comments that one of the people said, you know, I don't know that it's so different necessarily. But that things like, that some of the positive characteristics they associated with masculinity, they just felt like weren't valued in society anymore. And they just wanted to know that things that they associated with themselves, hard work, et cetera, again, these are not things that women don't do. And some of them even acknowledge that, but just that their view of masculinity and their own identity, they didn't think that it was necessarily a bad thing to hold some of the values that they held. but they don't feel like society values them anymore. And that makes them very anxious.

And I think they are open to a political figure that tells them that they do think that some of those values really matter. I think it's very well said. It's one of the issues that fascinates me most. And I honestly haven't written that much about it. But I think the gender divide in politics right now is fascinating.

I think it's disturbing. I don't, I think it's bizarre to have one party that is women plus 20 and another party that is men plus 20. Like, I think that's just a strange cultural phenomenon to have emerging into one's future. And I'm completely fascinated by the degree to which it would be helpful for the Democratic Party to cobble together a positive vision of masculinity that could appeal to the middle and center-right. This has been incredibly informative for me.

Kristen, I really, really appreciate your time. And we're going to have you back on the show very soon to help me unpack so my other theories about politics. But I appreciate this time. And thanks very much. so much, Derek. I'm a huge ringer fan, so this has been an unbelievable honor. Great. Planning this with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. Thank you so much for listening to this show. If you like us, follow us on Spotify, rate and review on Apple Podcasts. We will be back with our second episode this week on Friday. We will see you then.