In his Six-Chart Sunday newsletter, Washington strategist Bruce Mehlman spells out startling differences that have emerged between older and younger generations across a striking array of topics:
1. Values: Members of Gen Z are less than half as likely than Baby Boomers to say patriotism, belief in God or having children are "very important," according to a recent Public Opinion Strategies polling report, "Key Data by Generation."
Another Zoomer casualty: Believing America is the "best place to live."
When it comes to religion, millennials and Gen Zers are much more likely to consider themselves atheists, agnostic or "nothing in particular."
2. Economics: Americans 18-29 were more likely to say they have a positive impression of socialism (44% favorable) than capitalism (40%), a 2022 Pew poll found.
Just 28% of seniors viewed socialism favorably.
3. Political parties: Millennials and members of Gen Z are twice as likely to consider themselves political independents (52%) as the oldest generation of Americans (26%), according to Gallup data.
Mehlman, who writes the "Age of Disruption" Substack, told Axios younger voters are shunning "the two tired parties."
4. The Middle East: Americans under 30 are twice as likely to sympathize with Palestinians than the U.S. population as a whole, according to Pew data from February.
Mehlman told Axios: "I got the idea [for this "Generation Gaps" mashup] when reading a Washington Post story showing the favorite music genres by generation that I ended up not even using!"
In 1858, while running for the US Senate in Illinois, incumbent Senator Stephen A. Douglas agreed to debate his opponent, Abraham Lincoln, seven times — once in each congressional district in which they had not yet spoken.
Douglas was frustrated. Lincoln had spoken in Springfield and Chicago one day after Douglas and just torn apart all of Douglas’s arguments leaving him with no chance to respond. So, even though he was the incumbent, Douglas thought he was better off to debate Lincoln and they agreed to a series of debates from August 21 to October 15, 1858.
These were the most consequential political debates for office in American history. When they were over, Lincoln was a national figure. Douglas lost the popular vote for the US Senate, but the state legislature was reapportioned so the Democrats had the votes to elect him despite him earning fewer votes. Two years later, Lincoln defeated Douglas for president.
Each debate lasted three hours. One candidate would start for an hour, while the other candidate would then have ninety minutes. The first candidate would then have thirty minutes to respond. They had a timekeeper, but no one to asked questions or moderated the debates.
Big crowds showed up for the three hours of political entertainment across the state. The newspapers estimated 12,000 in Ottawa, 15,000 in Freeport, 1,500 in rural Jonesboro, 12,000 in Charleston, 15,000 in Galesburg, 12,000 in Quincy and 5,000 in Alton.
Every debate was transcribed and printed in full in the leading Democratic and Republican newspapers. C-SPAN developed the best version of the debate by bringing together the Democratic and Republican newspaper versions and blending them together into the most likely unified version.
Lincoln had the debates printed as a book which went all over the country. This was a key to launching his presidential campaign two years later.
By comparison, our modern debates are totally Mickey Mouse. The news media dominates the conversation and defines the topics. Candidates (the ones actually running for election) are limited to brief answers on the media-defined topics. It is a pathetic decline from the great speeches of 1858.
Furthermore, the idea that the debates should be in sterile studios — with no audience of citizens — is a direct rejection of the right of the American people to participate. Lincoln and Douglas debated in front thousands — many of whom were standing. Having the debate in an empty studio is simply anti-democratic, anti-populist elitism. It fits the Biden and American left perfectly.
Nevada is the only state Donald Trump lost twice that he might be favored to win in 2024. It’s also, effectively, a city-state: more than two thirds of the population lives in Las Vegas, with much of the rest in a small geographic cluster surrounding Reno. The rest is some of the most sparsely populated land in the United States, with 10% of the population and 85% of the state’s land area owned by the federal government.
The GOP has not won Nevada in a presidential election since 2004, and has lost the biggest prizes federally, winning just two Senate elections since. Under the storied “Reid machine,” Nevada Democrats have earned a reputation for eking out close elections, especially for Senate — with narrow wins by Harry Reid in 2010, Catherine Cortez-Masto in 2016, Jacky Rosen in 2018, and Cortez-Masto again in 2022.
But the Democratic tide that flowed in during the Obama years is now ebbing. Nevada is one of the most working class states in the union — 71.4% of 2020 voters did not have college degrees, the most of any battleground state. This has meant the GOP has done better in the Trump years, with the state voting to the right of the country in 2020 and electing Republican Joe Lombardo governor in 2022. Nonetheless, the trend has not been as fast-moving as in the Blue Wall states or another minority-heavy Sun Belt state like Florida. So, the Silver State has mostly continued to hand out silver medals to GOP candidates. And the fact that there are a lot of areas that are just narrowly Democratic in the state’s urban centers means that political geography actually favors Democrats legislatively. Can Trump reverse the GOP’s string of defeats to win Nevada in November?
Through the 1990s, Nevada was a small state with a reputation as competitive but Republican-leaning at the federal level. With the nation’s fastest population growth, especially in and around Las Vegas, this began to change at the turn of the millennium. And with this shift came much more diversity. Today, Nevada has a mix of racial and ethnic minorities that closely reflects the country as a whole but is unique among states. While most states have one dominant minority group — outside Hawaii, Blacks or Hispanics — all minorities are well represented in Nevada, with double digit percentages of Blacks and Hispanics and the fourth largest AAPI population in the mainland United States.
In 2000, Nevada was voting 4 points to the right of the nation. In 2004, this lean had eroded to just 0.2 points. And in 2008, Obama won the state by 12.5 points — more than 5 points more than his national margin.
2008 was a breaking point for the state’s growth. The financial crisis ravaged a real estate market more over-leveraged than any other in the country. That in itself does a lot to explain the state’s dramatic shift left in 2008. But it also meant slower growth and more demographic stability in the years following.
And so Nevada began to inch back right. By 2016, it was a bona-fide swing state again, with a Clinton margin of 2.4 points, closely matching the national margin, and this was exactly Joe Biden’s margin four years later. But while the country swung a couple of points against Trump in 2020, Nevada stood pat. Polls this year showing Trump stronger among minorities than he was in 2020 translate to a stronger than average swing in Nevada, pushing the state for now into the Trump column and placing it right of the Rust Belt battlegrounds.
But the state’s shift right has been far from uniform, as seen in the graphic below, looking at margins and leans statewide in the two major urban counties. Nevada’s Trump-era shift right has been driven by the majority-minority Las Vegas area. While Washoe County, home to Reno, swung wildly in the 2000s, it has moved hardly at all since 2012 and recent trends are worse for the GOP there.
Perhaps you have heard of Harrison Butker, the 28-year-old Kansas City Chiefs kicker at the center of the latest viral outrage. Butker was the commencement speaker last week at Benedictine College, a Catholic liberal arts school in Kansas, where he appears to have been engaged in some kind of record-setting effort to offend as many progressives as possible in less time than it takes to deliver the average TED Talk. His speech was critical of abortion, IVF, even surrogacy. He told the men to be “unapologetic in your masculinity”; he suggested the women were probably looking forward more to marriage and children than to high-powered careers. Oh, and there was some stuff in there too about the identity of the guys who killed Jesus, if you know what I mean.
Butker’s speech was very trad and frequently interrupted by the audience, who, rather than being affronted, kept erupting in cheers and applause. Perhaps they did not realize that this speech by a Catholic kicker at a Catholic university wasn’t for them, the Catholic graduating seniors. It was for me, a 42-year-old woman in New England eating peanut butter straight out of the jar because a sandwich seemed like too much work.
Or at least, that’s what it feels like: for days now, the story of Butker’s speech and subsequent backlash, including a statement of denunciation from the NFL itself, has been the subject of wall-to-wall coverage from TheNew York Times to People magazine. It’s as if the media has set aside its differences in service of a single unified mission: to make sure I know this happened and that I am good and mad at it.
Well, fine. I have watched the speech, and true enough, there is little in it I agree with. If Butker broke into my house, tied me to a chair, and forced me to watch the whole thing with my eyelids taped open Clockwork Orange–style, I wouldn’t be thrilled! But he didn’t do this, and as such, I am far less mad at him than I am the shrieking discourse hall monitors demanding I be outraged by it. Not only is it hard to imagine a more joyless—or fruitless— way to spend my limited time on this planet, it’s hard to see how Butker’s comments differ from the hundreds of thousands of speeches delivered to approving crowds every day, in various settings, by faith leaders of all stripes. Given the sheer diversity of ideology in this country, there’s probably something in there to offend everyone! But this is America; isn’t freedom of speech and assembly, no matter how offensive some might find the ideas involved, kind of what we do here? Indeed, the culture of free expression that allowed Butker to speak his mind to an appreciative audience is the same culture that permits me to host weekly discussion salons with my all-female neighborhood watch group, the Kindred Alliance for Rights, Equality, and Nurturing Society (KARENS). . . which for some reason nobody wants to join, but whatever.
Join us for our next get-together, where we’ll stage a live dramatic reading of the HOA Regulations, Chapter 4, Section 7: Proper Identification and Reporting of Microaggressive Lawn Gnomes. My guess is it will really get the crowds going.
