Ryan Girdusky in The Spectator:
Data scientist David Shor has a message for Democrats: “Your problem with young men is worse than you think.” Shor is a respected and highly reputable Democratic data guru. He has released his autopsy on the 2024 election and why Kamala Harris lost. Unlike previous analysis, which primarily used exit polling, Shor’s company Blue Rose Research looked at polls, precinct-level returns and voter-file data to figure out who turned on the Democrats – and why.
Democrats comforted themselves in the wake of their election loss by insisting that if more people had voted, Harris would have been sworn in as the 47th president. For decades it’s been true that Democrats win high-turnout elections while Republicans win votes with a smaller turnout.
But now that’s false, according to Shor’s analysis. Had every American voted, Trump would not only have won the Electoral College, he would have won the popular vote by nearly five points, instead of by 1.4 percent. Trump would probably have flipped Maine, Virginia, New Jersey, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Nevada.
That’s not the only Democratic-narrative violation Shor commits in his research. A lot of ink was spilled during the past year over the “manosphere,” the college-age white bros who listen to Joe Rogan, Legion of Skanks, Theo Von and Tim Dillon – and love Trump. Democrats believed they were losing these voters, but never considered by how much. According to Shor, “the actual numbers are a lot worse than people think.”
According to his data, only about 25 percent of white men under the age of 20 voted for Harris, worse than any other demographic by age and race. White men over the age of 70 were more likely to vote for Harris than those who can’t legally buy beer. White men under 20, the ones who missed important life events because of Covid lockdowns, are the most Republican generation since our great-grandparents, who fought in World War Two.
Harris also lost white women and non-white men under 20. The only voters willing to buy into her promises were non-white women, the type the Democratic party speaks to almost exclusively. When you look at how Trump did in all three of the elections he fought, he benefited enormously from anti-Hillary voters who chose to stay at home or vote for Gary Johnson in 2016. These mostly white moderates were also the group most likely to flip to Joe Biden in 2020 and back to Trump in 2024. They make up almost all the movement among white voters during the last decade.
A larger share of the vote from white Americans accounts for half of Trump’s increase in the popular vote from 2020 to 2024, when his numbers increased from 46.8 to 49.8 percent. Trump could not have won last year without increasing his share among white moderates – but the other half of the equation was his support from non-white voters. If there’s any story over the past decade that will send ripples into the future of US politics, it’s that a large share of minorities have stopped voting with their race and started voting with their ideology.
Harris lost a huge chunk of the Clinton coalition: nearly one in four moderate Hispanics, one in seven moderate Asians and one in two conservative Hispanics who supported the Democratic party’s nominee less than a decade ago. These minorities provided Trump with the extra 1.5 percent share he needed to win the popular vote and flip every swing state in the country.
Trump’s support came from people who don’t make politics the center of their lives and get their news from social media – especially TikTok. Social media, free of the gatekeeping of traditional media, helped open the floodgates not only to Trump but to a generalized distrust of Democrats.
The only important issue the Democrats are trusted on more than Republicans now is healthcare. On nearly every other vital issue, Republicans win.
More poll data from Ryan in today’s feature, linked below.
Trump’s War On The Ivy League
ABC News: Harvard Rejects Trump’s Demands, Risks Billions
After Harvard University said it is refusing to comply with a series of demands from President Donald Trump's administration, the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism announced a multi-billion-dollar freeze on funding to the university.
The administration's task force said on Monday evening it would withhold $2.2 billion in multi-year grants and $60 million in multi-year contract value to the institution.
"The harassment of Jewish students is intolerable. It is time for elite universities to take the problem seriously and commit to meaningful change if they wish to continue receiving taxpayer support," the task force said in a statement.
The decision comes after Harvard University President Alan Garber said in a letter on Monday, the school "will not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights" by agreeing to a series of terms proposed by the Trump administration.
The Trump administration had demanded that Harvard end its diversity, equity and inclusion programs; adopt merit-based admissions; and cooperate with immigration authorities -- or risk losing $9 billion in federal funding. Garber at the time said the loss of funding would "halt life-saving research."
The Wall Street Journal on the Anti-Semitism Task Force:
Columbia University’s president had already been hounded out of office, but her ordeal wasn’t over.
Four days after she stepped down under government pressure during fraught federal funding negotiations, Katrina Armstrong spent three hours being deposed by a government attorney in Washington, D.C. The lawyer grilled Armstrong over whether she had done enough to protect Jewish students against antisemitism.
As she dodged specifics under questioning, the lawyer said her answer “makes absolutely no sense” and that he was “baffled” by her leadership style.
“I’m just trying to understand how you have such a terrible memory of specific incidents of antisemitism when you’re clearly an intelligent doctor,” he said.
The attorney in the room during the April 1 deposition, a senior Health and Human Services official named Sean Keveney, is part of a little-known government task force that has shaken elite American universities to their core in recent weeks. It has targeted billions of dollars in federal funding at premiere institutions such as Columbia and Harvard, with cascading effects on campuses nationwide. Now it is pressing to put Columbia under a form of federal oversight known as a consent decree.
Called the Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, the group’s stated goal is to “root out antisemitic harassment in schools and on college campuses,” a mission that emerged from pro-Palestinian protests that disrupted campuses last year. But along the way, the task force is taking on university culture more broadly in ways that echo the MAGA dreams for remaking higher education—including ending racial preferences in admissions and hiring.
The task-force leaders have unprecedented leverage, thanks to a financial assault on higher education by the Trump administration that has no equal since the federal government began pumping money into research at universities during World War II. The Trump administration has pulled or frozen more than $11 billion in funding from at least seven universities. The tactics and agencies have varied but the top-line intent, Trump said on the campaign trail, is to wrest control of universities from the far left.
“We are going to choke off the money to schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on Western civilization itself,” Trump said at a 2023 event. “The days of subsidizing communist indoctrination in our colleges will soon be over.”
The handful of government officials driving the group aren’t household names. Aside from Keveney, the acting general counsel at HHS, they include a former Fox News commentator; a onetime leader of the Justice Department civil-rights division; and a government procurement official who spent much of his career in finance.
More from Chris Rufo in City Journal.
Pity The Taxman
The New Yorker with the smallest violin.
Aweek before Tax Day, Mike woke up at 4:30 A.M. and caught the train to Philadelphia just before six. The weather was brisk and sunny; from the window, the freeway traffic didn’t look bad yet. He wore his usual outfit: a Henley shirt, a light jacket, and slacks. He had two sandwiches for lunch. He carried his pocket radio, which was tuned to NPR’s “Morning Edition” on WHYY. “I’m definitely a creature of habit,” he said. Mike—whose real name has been withheld for privacy—has worked at the Internal Revenue Service for twenty years, currently as a customer-service representative. He is in his seventies and does not intend to retire.
The I.R.S. office in Philadelphia is situated in a grand, Art Deco-style federal building across from Thirtieth Street Station, along the Schuylkill River. Before President Donald Trump started his second term, the office employed around five thousand workers. Mike swiped through security, bought a coffee at the snack shop, and took the elevator up to his floor of padded cubicles. At his desk, he logged into his computer and put on a telephone headset, preparing for another day of what he called “the repetition—the same speech at the end of every call, the same speech during every call.” The I.R.S., which was created during Abraham Lincoln’s Presidency and sits in the Treasury Department, collected $5.1 trillion in the 2024 fiscal year—“nearly all the revenue that supports the federal government’s operations,” the agency wrote in its latest annual report. It runs a hotline, in English and in Spanish, with interpretation services available in more than three hundred and fifty additional languages.
It was peak tax season, which meant that Mike and other C.S.R.s in the building were on the phones more than usual. Thousands of representatives across the country handled tens of millions of calls, with an average wait time of just three minutes. “What’s your Social Security number? . . . Thank you. Hang on, please,” Mike began. “You got a letter from us. That letter is going to have a long number with some dashes or breaks. Can you give me that number, please?” In the cubicles all around him, his co-workers were taking similar calls, their voices forming a choir: “What’s your Social Security number?” “Address?” “Date of birth?” “Where were you born?” “Are you expecting a refund?”
If a taxpayer moves, sees a dramatic change in income, or is the victim of a scam, they might receive a letter asking them to contact the agency before their taxes are processed. Mike takes calls from taxpayers living abroad, taxpayers who have received notice of possible identity theft (the Taxpayer Protection Program), and taxpayers with random questions about their returns. Taxpayer-protection calls can last as long as half an hour, and Mike has verified the identities of people all over the world, from Texas to Egypt. One impatient caller went through the verification process, then asked why his account at irs.gov still reflected a protective hold. It takes time, Mike explained, for the data to go from “green characters on a black screen,” as it appeared on his computer, to an update online.
Lately, since Trump’s reëlection, Mike had been thinking a lot about racism and history. Where he lives, in the suburbs, most people are white (like him) and Republican (not like him). But the office, and Philadelphia in general, is largely Black. His dad, who was Jewish, had fought in the Second World War and faced discrimination in his own platoon. Mike came of age during the civil-rights movement. It was telling, he said, that Trump’s first campaign had “cast Barack Obama as an enemy” through the lie of birtherism. “That comes around to what we have today,” he added, “where half the country is just plain wrong and racist.” He believes that this prejudice is driving much of the Administration’s agenda, including its offensive against the I.R.S. and other government agencies. In 2024, nearly a fifth of federal workers were Black. “They’re perfectly happy to throw Black people out of work,” he said.
Four hundred employees in the Philadelphia office had been fired in February, a week after the “elation” of the Eagles winning the Super Bowl, Mike recalled. The several thousand workers who remained were being pushed to resign or retire, despite the crush of tax season. Flexible schedules were cancelled. Remote work would no longer be permitted. Trump did away with the civil-rights office, the union contract, and collective-bargaining rights. “There was anger, consternation on the floor,” Mike said. “Rage against the machine.”
A terse e-mail had arrived on April 4th, warning of a reduction in force “that will result in staffing cuts across multiple offices and job categories.” Nationally, the I.R.S.’s workforce of ninety thousand was expected to be halved. Employees were told to “upload a current resume to HRConnect”—their credentials would be scrutinized. C.S.R.s with even more seniority than Mike were having to market themselves like new college graduates. He helped a colleague dig up the résumé that she had used to apply to the I.R.S. It was another humiliation, not unlike the “five things you did last week” e-mail that Elon Musk and Russell Vought were requiring all federal employees to submit every Monday, or else.
Mike took that assignment literally, listing general tasks for each day of the week: “Taxpayer Protection Program line,” “international line,” “work and close cases.” “Our dear pal Elon Musk seems to push this idea that public-sector workers are lazy,” he said. “But we’re evaluated constantly. My calls are recorded. The adjustments I make are reviewed.” Systems analysts monitor what every C.S.R. is doing: the length of time they’ve been on a call, the length of time they’ve been between calls, the length of time they’ve been on break. “If you go over your fifteen-minute break, the managers start sending you e-mails,” Mike said. “There’s a lot of accountability. That’s O.K., because we’re getting paid to do a job. They have every right to know when we’re working.”
Feature
Items of Interest
Foreign
MSN: China Slams U.S. ‘Peasants’ in Tariff Fight
The Wall Street Journal: WRM: Trump Throws Another Hail Mary
Politico: Trump, Bukele Sidestep Court Orders
Politico Europe: JD Vance: Europe Can’t Be U.S. Security Vassal
Politico Europe: Russian Billionaire Usmanov Faces Sanctions, Fencing Drama
Politico Europe: France’s Marine Le Pen Down, Not Out in Election
The Spectator: Europe’s annual migrant crisis is just getting started
National Interest: How to Fix America’s Ship Problem
Domestic
The Spectator: Kimball: Chaos, or winning?
The Wall Street Journal: Consumers Resilient In Trade War
Semafor: Fed’s Powell: No Rush on Bank Capital Rule Changes
The Wall Street Journal: Trump Tariffs Could Dent Bank Revenue
The Wall Street Journal: Dow Holds Steady, Global Markets Gain
Mediaite: Maryland Senator Headed to El Salvador for Wrongly Deported Man
Washington Examiner: Bondi on El Salvador: Democrats’ “Detached from Reality”
MSN: DOGE Collects Data to Remove Immigrants from Housing, Jobs
NBC News: Man Arrested for Threatening Tulsi Gabbard
MSN: Fire at Pennsylvania Governor’s Home Sparks Violence Concerns
The Hill: Sen. Hawley Pushes Payroll Tax Relief Proposal
The Wall Street Journal: Kristi Noem’s Made For TV DHS
ABC News: Judge Allows Illegal Voter Registration Rule to Proceed
The Telegraph: Small Boats Crisis Plagues California
Politico: Poll: Voters Back Kamala Harris for Governor Run
Politico: Senate Democrats Eye Generational Shift
Washington Examiner: Biden Reemerges with Social Security Speech
Daily Mail: Steve Bannon Sparks MAGA ‘Civil War’ Talk
2028
The Spectator: Kamala Harris is turning into Meghan Markle
The Hill: Ocasio-Cortez, Sanders Hit Campaign Trail
Mediaite: No, Stephen A. Smith Isn’t Running for President
Media
The Telegraph: Trump and Cabinet Slam CNN Reporter in Oval Office
Axios: White House Faces Court Order on AP Rules
The Spectator: Mahmoud Khalil is no victim, despite media claims
Ephemera
The Spectator: Blue Origin and lady spaceflight: desperate, sad, tasteless
The Spectator: Rory McIlroy has banished his Masters demons
The Hollywood Reporter: Netflix Is the Safe Hollywood Stock Now
The Hollywood Reporter: Reacher Tops Streaming Charts for March 2025
The Spectator: Black Mirror season seven: a welcome return to form
The Hollywood Reporter: Black Mirror’s USS Callister Sequel with Cristin Milioti
Daily Mail: Melinda Gates Talks Ex-Husband Bill on Stephen Colbert
The Spectator: Lionel Shriver: Stick up for marriage, women!
Quote
“Now that he was navigating, his celestial mood was shattered. Wild, animal thirst for life, mixed with homesick longing for the free airs and the sights and smells of earth—for grass and meat and beer and tea and the human voice—awoke in him.”
— C.S. Lewis