The Contrarian: “The most comprehensive post-mortem on the 2024 presidential elections—by Blue Rose Research, a leading Democratic polling firm that collected 26 million responses from voters of all ages, demographics and party affiliation in 2024—has been making the rounds of podcasts, newsletters and political media recently. Donald Trump won among young white men, and also narrowly won support from 18-year-old non-white men. AP’s vote cast analysis showed that Trump won 47% of the 18–29-year-old vote—an 11-point jump from 2020. There was also an unprecedented 23-point gender gap among voters under 30, with young men in this group significantly more likely to support Trump than young women. David Shor, a founder of Blue Rose, said this dramatic conservative shift among Gen Z voters was what shocked him most from the data. This last point is especially important. Unfortunately for Democrats, there are more under-educated voters than college-educated voters in America. Voters without a bachelor’s degree outnumber those with one in the electorate by 57% to 43%. Which helps explain why Trump is trying to abolish the Department of Education and has set out to destroy elite colleges by eviscerating federal research that supports hundreds of institutions of higher education. But what is most shocking (and hiding in plain sight in the Blue Rose research findings) is this simple, awful, incomprehensible fact: Republican voters who sent Donald Trump back to power might be the most hoodwinked, gaslit, deceived and lied to group of voters in U.S. history. Many of the biggest issues that voters say are critically important to them—and where they also trust Trump’s GOP more than the Democrats—are, in fact, the very types of issues that the Democratic Party fights to protect and expand. On the issues that are most important to them, GOP voters are quite simply living in an alternate reality with little or no basis in fact..

The reason is that these voters simply are not seeing this happen in real time. They only believe what they hear on Fox News and in their immediate media ecosystem. And, in that media ecosystem, Trump loves Social Security while his Musk-DOGE team dismantles it. And the GOP voters then say they trust the GOP more than Democrats to protect Social Security. Then there’s Medicaid and core anti-poverty programs such as SNAP, EITC, TANF, SSI, Head Start and child care support that Democrats have consistently fought to protect and expand while the GOP attacks these big, core anti-poverty programs at every turn…”