Kamala Harris underperformed President Joe Biden's 2020 numbers among young and first time voters in the 2024 election.
Similar improvements for Trump among younger voters were cited in CNN's 2024 exit polling of more than 22,000 voters. In the last election, Biden beat Trump in this demographic by 23 points. This year, Harris' lead over Trump among those aged 18 to 29 was 13 points, a 10-point dip in the key demographic.
Basically democrats are losing: the youth, minorities, and the working class. They're gaining among white college-educated. They're also mildly gaining among women, but they were already the party of choice for non-white women. Crazy to see the democrats becoming the party of white privilege.
When the initial disbelief wears off a little it becomes more clear that the democrats are not a very good alternative for people. If they were they should have won this by a landslide. Their current path seems like a dead end and they need some new thoughts.
Tbf, Democrats are centrist not left. It's just us politics collectively is so right leaning you folks don't have a real representative left leaning 3rd party. A real left party would institute policies to give everyone access to bread (so long as it isn't in short supply). It's absurd a country as big and rich as the US has such poor social support programs.
Half a century of sabre-rattling and proxy wars with another superpower with an opposing ideology will do that to a country. It's going to take a long time before "socialism" isn't a dirty word here, if ever. The Cold War fucked us, ideologically. We still cling to raw capitalism like the Bolsheviks are hiding around every corner. This stuff is still huge in living memory, my own included. As a kid spending my childhood under Ronald Reagan, I'd often hear about the Berlin wall and how it was being used to keep people from escaping to the West. Which is true, yes, but it was definitely also used as a propaganda tool here, a showcase of what "socialist thinking" can bring.
Morality is easy in some sense, it just requires thinking to figure it out, and in practice being the moral choice when the other side is this bad requires doing basically nothing at all. Retooling the economy to increase the wealth of average people, directly against the forces of the already wealthy seeking to suck up all the available wealth for themselves, is both much harder and requires being given an amount of power that's rarely won these days.