The MeidasTouch Podcast - Democrat Rep. Jake Auchincloss on Reaching Young Male Voters in the Democratic Party

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

Congressman Jake Auchincloss (D-MA) explores strategies for engaging Gen Z men and rebuilding Democratic support amid economic and social challenges. Remember to subscribe to ALL the MeidasTouch Network Podcasts: MeidasTouch: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/meidastouch-podcast Legal AF: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/legal-af MissTrial: https://meidasnews.com/tag/miss-trial The PoliticsGirl Podcast: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-politicsgirl-podcast The Influence Continuum: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-influence-continuum-with-dr-steven-hassan Mea Culpa with Michael Cohen: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/mea-culpa-with-michael-cohen The Weekend Show: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/the-weekend-show Burn the Boats: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/burn-the-boats Majority 54: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/majority-54 Political Beatdown: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/political-beatdown Lights On with Jessica Denson: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/lights-on-with-jessica-denson On Democracy with FP Wellman: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/on-democracy-with-fpwellman Uncovered: https://www.meidastouch.com/tag/maga-uncovered Coalition of the Sane: https://meidasnews.com/tag/coalition-of-the-sane  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. I'm joined by Congress member Jake Alkencloss. When we had our last interview together a few weeks before the election, you and I were talking about Gen Z men, and we were raising the red flag that Gen Z men were not Democrats anymore. They're not, were not liberal. They were becoming Trump supporters, whether that's because of the podcast ecosystem that

exists, starting as kind of gamers and then bringing them all the way up to become kind of Trumpers. But we tried calling it out. That's one of my big reflections. The election, I think, demonstrated that. What are your thoughts about that? What do we do to bring back, you know, men into the Democratic Party while also still not sacrificing core

values of being a party that respects people's rights and equality? First, thanks for having me back on and for digging deeper into this topic. As you mentioned, you and I were discussing this a few weeks ago. The last poll I saw heading into the election had Democrats doing better with 85 year old men than with 18 year old men.

That is obviously not a future forward, future proofed strategy for building electoral power with half the electorate. So we need to introspect and we need to do better. I also wanna put in a caveat that there's a lot of micro narratives out there right now. And by micro narrative, I mean, looking at the data and then having the data paint a story

about which demographic, which geographic, which psychographic costs the election for Democrats. Was it that young men didn't vote for us? Was it Hispanic men? Was it non-college educated people? Was it that college educated women didn't vote enough? We've all seen this punditry.

And I do want to recognize that while all of these micro narratives can help inform our model of reality, we do have to zoom out and look at the macro narrative, which is that, you know, bluntly, we got dropped. We got dropped across the board in almost every place and in almost every cohort of voters. And indeed, it was not just limited to the United States. It was across the entire developed world. Every single party in governance post-COVID lost vote share for the first time since World War II. And the simple and I think stark reason is that voters were very frustrated with inflation. So while we are talking about young men and while that's an important issue we have to talk about electorally, I think we've got to keep our eye on the fact that cost of living is what deflated our vote share more than any other factor.

Agree, but look, I don't think it should have been a state secret that the origin of inflation begins with Donald Trump's catastrophic handling of COVID, supply chains being cut off because he didn't do an infrastructure or chips act, his lies about COVID, the fact that when the reins were handed to Biden, I remember that Time Magazine cover with the mess that he inherited, but there never seemed to be anything kind of communicated out there with any force about,

you know, whether it was fireside chats or whatever, like, here's where this is coming from. Here's what happened. I mean, do you agree with me? Should that have happened? I mean, and I'm not sure the utility of the postmortem per se, but that was frustrating to me because I think Biden and Democrats helped turn around a cataclysmic situation. Hey, I got reams of federal reserve data about real wages 2014 versus 2019 going up, about productivity growth in the last six quarters, about new business starts in the Biden administration, about record low unemployment, about record high job creation. The point of the matter is for two years, we saw near double digit inflation in rents, in utility bills, and in the price of groceries.

And it was demoralizing and deflating for average Americans. And I think what we have to do a better job of is not just explaining how it happened, you know, COVID disruptions and Russia's invasion of Ukraine causing spikes in food and fertilizer, but also going forward what we are doing about it. Here is how building 10 million units of housing is going to put downward pressure on housing prices and make it easier to buy a home as a millennial or Gen Zer. Here is how building a thousand nuclear power plants and bootstrapping a clean energy revolution is going to make your utility bills cheaper. Here's the plan. Voters think excuse me, politicians sometimes think that voters don't like talking

about policy. I soundly reject that idea. I think voters love talking about policy, but you have to have that conversation authentically in depth and with command of the details. And you got to do it in every single channel of this balkanized media landscape that we confront today. I mean, you've built this platform from the ground up and it's an amazing way to reach people. We gotta go podcast by podcast, YouTube channel by YouTube channel,

Twitch chat by Twitch chat to go out and talk to folks. And I think that is especially true of young men who are apolitical and who have really tuned out of traditional political media. You know, speaking about the young men topic again, I mean, one of the things that was frustrating me was that you had all these people on in the right wing masquerading as alpha and using the whole like alpha label, you know, on on the other and punching down at marginalized communities. You know, and I think that Democrats had just shied away or ignored that or thought that perhaps even framing things in that way could be offensive to other groups.

But I think that you don't have to kind of sacrifice one for the other if you're authentic about the message. And, you know, one of the thoughts that I had when you and I were having this conversation, I'm like, these people are talking about alpha. And meanwhile, you know, you had people like Colin Allred, you know, who was, you know, on the Tennessee Titans and a football player who had actually been in locker rooms who tells you locker room talk isn't sexually harassing women. You and I were talking, I let people know your background, being in the Marines,

being on combat patrols in Afghanistan, in areas contested by the Taliban, and then in Panama leading a reconnaissance team of Marines with Colombian special forces. And I just think that like, that needs to be highlighted think that needs to be highlighted more versus the, hey, we have to bully people or mock people. That's right. It's the Josh Hawley zero-sum approach. And putting up that video of Josh

Hawley scurrying out of the Capitol on January 6th, hiding behind actually real men, the Capitol Hill police officers, I think really deflates that self-important bubble that says to people, you're only going to be masculine if you tear down in particular women. And I find this personally just really distressing because I grew up and my mom was a rock star. She was a physician scientist. She did groundbreaking biomedical research. She became the president and CEO of a renowned cancer center, really just like an all-star.

And my dad and now my stepfather both are so incredibly proud of her. And they've got big careers themselves in their own ways, but they always, from the time i was little just like could not contain how much they were rooting for her and it was such a healthy example of what it means to be a husband and a father and a and a uh a supporter in in a marriage and we can talk about things that way you know and congressman look there are people who were trying to say, look, Ben, what if Trump's tone is going to change?

And what if they come here and there and all of a sudden, you know, he wants to build a legacy. And so, I mean, some people said that to me yesterday and I said, really? That's what you really, I go, you really think that? And just like to the point of this conversation, you know, I mean, look at the things that he's, him and like Don Jr. have been posting today. I mean, Don Jr. literally makes a post joking about domestic violence, saying Trump arrested for beating two women. And it's a photo of, you know, Senator Clinton

and Vice President Kamala Harris. You have Donald Trump doing his all caps post. These rumors and statements are false. I'm going to call upon authorities to go after people who are talking about my social media company or him making this post. Governor Gavin Newscum is trying to, you know, and to me, this is just some like, what just what is this? Like, it's just whiny stuff. It's it's petulant, pathetic behavior. And yet I think that if Democrats have learned anything over the last decade, it's that simply going out there and pointing at Donald Trump and saying this is a morally bankrupt human being is not sufficient to win elections. A lot of the people who voted for him on Tuesday know he's a morally bankrupt human being. And yet they chose him because they found his policies or his promises to be more compelling. And so we have to have our own positive differentiated agenda. And part of that does absolutely need to be specific to young men. And let's talk about

some particulars here. One is recognizing that the social media environment in which so many young men gain their news and their entertainment, more than half by some measures get the majority of their news entertainment from TikTok, is really a poisonous and toxic place. And I co-led the legislation to force TikTok to divest. And I've also introduced two different pieces of legislation, one that would raise the social media age limit to 16, and the other bipartisan would establish a duty of care for social media platforms to take down cyber harassment, toxicity, defamation, etc. All in keeping with the First Amendment.

Because we have to recognize, and Jonathan Haidt has written this book, Anxious Generation, he draws the empirical support quite clearly, that growing up digital first on these social media platforms, I think is causing young men to retreat into themselves to exhibit more antisocial behavior, to engage in activities online that are maybe being substitutes for healthy relationships, both romantic and friendship. And all of these things are really impairing their sense of self and society. And there is a role for government not to, you know, get rid of social media.

It's here to stay and we're gonna use it to make it, we gotta ensure that it is a pro-social and positive dimension of our media landscape and not something that's causing young men to go down incel rabbit holes. So if you can give me the Alken-Kloss agenda, assume that, you know, we're in the midterms or even we're four years out or forget that just even say we were to be able to rewind time and deliver a message to

the American people about the economy how would you message that whether it was a presidential campaign a midterm or just right now you you know, being in Congress and, you know, fighting in the position that you have? Absolutely. So even before we dig into the economy, to me, it starts with an even higher level problem, which is that to average Americans, they do not perceive the Democratic Party as working for them. They perceive the Democratic Party as working for a coalition of esoteric or elite interests that one by one we identify and cater to. And that is very uncompelling to the average person because they basically say Democrats are working for them, but not for me. Whereas with Donald Trump, he has clearly established an authentic connection

where despite his unbelievable depredations and the low sense of character that most voters have of him, they still think that he is in general fighting on their behalf, mostly because they see that people they don't respect seem to hate him so much. And so Democrats need to flip that script fundamentally.

If we go into 26 or 28 and voters still perceive that overall Democrats seem to be working for them but not for me, then there is not a single piece of policy that is going to actually overturn that narrative. We will structurally be at a deficit. The second thing we have to do is stop the condescending, patronizing tone that I think can alienate more apolitical people or people who disagree

with various elements of our agenda. Mike Pence was a conservative radio DJ before he was Vice President of the United States. He used to say, I'm a conservative, but I'm not angry about it. I think the symmetrical statement for the democratic party needs to be, I'm a liberal, but I'm not condescending about it.

I can believe these things, but I can also respect your viewpoints and come to our conversation from a position of curiosity. And I think that's partly how we build people's trust that we are working for them and not for some subset of others. On the economic front, we have got to talk about building things in this country. That is what the core hunger that I hear from every sector of our economy. People do not want

an economy of NIMBYs and middlemen. They want an economy of builders and doers. They want an economy that works like Legos, not monopoly. And I recently was in California. I visited a company called Hadrian. And Hadrian is automating elements of the defense and aerospace supply chain. They are building things. And they are building things in a way

that they are employing huge swaths of young men and young women who have high school degrees, associate degrees, and are doing well paid, productive, meaningful work and strengthening the United States economy. We need 100,000 more Hadrians. Build, build, build hard hats. I mean, get out there, make the connection, shake the hands, be inside the factories, and not just when there's an election. I mean, the one thing that Trump did was he was, I call it ABC, always be campaigning. And another way of just saying that though is right now, the midterm campaign's beginning. We almost have to look at it like we're in 2028 presidential election mode already, where people need to see these connections and not just three months out before an election. And I think that's one of the issues too. And by the way, one of the issues I see with some of the base Democratic supporters and

the donors and everybody is there's not this kind of generational view of it. I mean, Republicans have been working towards a lot of this stuff since the 70s with the courts, with the media, with all of these things. Democrats, boom, it's an election. Okay, we're chilling. We're hanging out. I'm not saying, you know the the donor class if you will and then all of a sudden an election happens it's like all right make one

appearance on a podcast do this put a little money into the campaign it's like you where were you for the last four years anyway that's my final thought what's your final thought congressman i it absolutely a long-term view and particularly a long-term view about this building things again approach because if we're talking about 10 million units of housing, 1,000 nuclear power plants, building more ships in the Chinese Navy, starting more new businesses in the rest of the world combined, the craftsmanship pride that so many young men are hungry for, with the strength and prosperity of their nation. And so we are able to tap into and intertwine both enterprise and patriotism in a way that can be compelling and a way that can give people a sense of broader purpose. It happens, though, in these kinds of communications

where we've got to be fearless and effective in going everywhere and shattering echo chambers to have conversations with young men where they are right now. Well Congressman, we're going to keep building our platform. We hope to keep having you on this show and let's just keep building. It's going to be brick by brick. There's a rebuilding process. We're grateful for the work that you're doing on the hill and keep us posted with all of your initiatives thanks for having me on all right everybody hit subscribe and let's get to four million subscribers thanks for watching real quick meta just changed their algorithm to suppress political content please follow our instagram at Midas Touch right now as we head towards 400,000 followers so you don't miss a beat.