By Guest Contributor Bill Connor
After Donald Trump’s overwhelming election victory, the handwringing began. In the days following the election, multiple leftist pundits placed blame for the loss on racism and sexism.
It got so bad that even far Left MSNBC Host Jen Psaki had to chastise progressive compatriots by making clear the “racial blame game” wasn’t the answer https://www.foxnews.com/media/jen-psaki-hits-back-lefts-racial-blame-game-harris-loss-thats-not-how-democracy-works. In attempting to determine what happened, the exit polling data has the more scientific answer “Exit polls and county-by-county analyses, however imprecise, indicated that young voters had shifted right since 2020. That’s especially true for young men—most of all young white men, who made up one of Trump’s most supportive cohorts. Democrats also lost ground with young women, though.
According to some national exit poll data, the party’s lead among 18-to-29-year-olds was cut nearly in half. And county data (considered more reliable, though still imperfect) indicate that counties with large populations of 18-to-34-year-olds moved 5.6 points rightward since the 2020 election.” https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2024/11/gen-z-woke-yth-election/680653/ America’s young voters are much more sophisticated with their information, which has made the difference.
First, the conservative trend among Gen Z young voters breaks the long-standing trend of young voters being hyper-progressive compared to other age groups. Gen Z voters have trended Progressive in voting, mainly since Obama, and have been a mainstay of the Democrat Party electorate. The youth vote went against the Democrats more than at any other time this century:
As voters age and gain life experience, they generally become more conservative in voting. Ironically, older voters in this election were almost evenly divided between Harris and Trump, with only around a 3-point lead for Trump. Gen Z appears to have broken trends with the sizable shift to the right.
Even more notable and a prime reason for the conservative trend among Gen Z voters is their loss of trust in the mainstream media. A post-election Pew poll found a steep loss in mainstream media trust among Republicans and Gen Z.
It is so bad that both groups are nearly as likely to trust information from social media as they are from mainstream media. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/10/16/republicans-young-adults-now-nearly-as-likely-to-trust-info-from-social-media-as-from-national-news-outlets/ Democrats and mainstream media pounded the airwaves for years with stories condemning Trump as a Fascist, Hitler, and worse. Gen Z was a prime target of the anti-Trump hysteria among the mainstream media with the warnings of Trump destroying democracy and Gen Z’s future. Many of us found that after publicizing false anti-Trump stories, most young adults already knew the stories were likely false. Young voters relied on various sources of information, particularly alternative media. They had a healthy skepticism, more so than many elderly voters who were set in their ways and relied almost exclusively on mainstream media for their information. This dynamic likely explains the aberration of elderly voters in this election, which was nearly split between Trump and Harris when the other age groups were solidly Trump.
Unlike elderly voters who grew up watching Walter Cronkite and other such media leaders of the major networks, Gen Z has grown up watching a different mainstream media continually dissembling in favor of the Left. Over the past decade, young voters have watched the despicable mainstream “coverage” of the bogus Russian Collusion hoax against Trump. They watched sham-biased “reporting” on the Covington Kids, Jesse Smollett, and Trump’s misreported comments about Charlottesville. They watched media and big tech suppression of the Hunter Biden Laptop scandal while promoting the false narrative that it was Russian disinformation. They lived through media “coverage” of COVID, in which the objective was to find every way possible to embarrass Trump and promote government overreach against Constitutional protections. Unlike in previous eras, when Americans had no natural alternatives beyond the mainstream news, the young know where to find more credible sources of information. During this past election, young voters did not believe the hyperbole of Trump being called a Fascist and followed the information on sites like X and Joe Rogan.
The reaction of the Left and media allies after Trump’s election puts a lie to their hyperbole of Trump as Hitler. Young voters know it. Perhaps the greatest source of hyperbolic Trump Defamation was Joe Scarborough and his “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. Joe made the worst accusations of Trump as the new Hitler who would destroy Democracy. Yet right after the election, Joe and his sidekick Mika visited with Trump at Mar-a-Lago to ensure they would have access to him for their show. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14096317/Joe-Scarborough-Mika-Brzezinski-trump-trip-Mar-Lago.html No sane person would be taking these kinds of actions, followed by a number in the mainstream media, if they had believed what they were spewing in biased misreporting.
Despite the widespread false impression Gen Z is hopelessly “woke”, this election has been illuminating for all Americans about Gen Z. These young voters have learned better than many others to seek alternative sources of information from the discredited mainstream media. As Gen Z grows older, America never returns to the prior days of network monopoly over information. The truth from alternative media led to a landslide election for Trump and America getting back to being one nation under God and His blessing.
