Amy Walter's Message to the Up-and-Coming Generation

In late October of 2024, just a few days before President Trump’s win, Amy Walter gave a talk at Lakeside about - what else? - voting and elections. For those who don’t know, Walter is a highly respected political analyst and the editor-in-chief of the independent, nonpartisan Cook Political Report, which provides must-read election analysis to Washington DC insiders. 

Leo senior editors sat in on her lecture to the Uppers School and interviewed her afterward. She provided some insight into how we got to this place, politically, and why it matters to us in the Middle School. Some of us will be voting in the next presidential election. The country really will be in our hands soon!

Walter kicked off her talk with some statistics from the early voting that had been happening at the time. According to the polls, people who voted Trump in 2020 voted Trump once again in 2024, while people who voted Biden in 2020 voted Harris in 2024. Despite all the drama that had ensued in the four years of Biden’s presidency - from a messy withdrawal from 20 years in Afghanistan to an insurrection in Congress to an assassination attempt - people stuck with “their” party. Walter compared this mindset to being like a sports fan: regardless of what one’s favorite team has done or how they have performed, sports fanatics rarely deviate from unconditional support of their team. American politics has transformed, eerily enough, to mirror this.

But how? To understand, Walter took us back to the late 1970s. This was the baby boomers’ time - the people who are roughly 70 today were in their twenties back then. America was about 65 percent white. Those young boomers tended to vote the same as their parents, so politicians did not really try to capture them. In fact, young voters at this time couldn’t be counted on to actually fill out a ballot, and when they did, it was rarely to change parties. Politicians, of course, took this as a sign to focus on the older generations.

Obama, however, shook up everything. In 2004, the year he first came into public spotlight, the Iraq war was just getting started, and young people didn’t want to fight, even though the older generations would rather America take action after 9/11. Additionally, American demographics were shifting - the younger generation had many more non-white people, excited to see a face like theirs in American politics. Taking advantage of these facts, Obama did something no politician had ever done before: he prioritized the youth vote. He reached out to them in ways they could understand - in his 2004 Senate campaign, through blogs and targeted ads, and in his 2008 presidential run, through nascent forms of social media like MySpace and Facebook. And the risk paid off - Obama won young voters by 38 points and older voters by just one.

After Obama, Democrats rode his wave of success with youth, winning young voters handily across elections for the presidency, House and Senate - until Trump arrived, and at perhaps a perfect time for his strengths.

The divide between young men and young women has been widening. While young people have often leaned much further left than the rest of the population, young men have more recently been pushing that trend the other way - they are starting to lean further and further right. While it was once thought that only older men were uncomfortable with the ideas of female empowerment, or having a female boss, or anything along those lines, it turns out that young men are equally unsure about their place in such a world. Polls have found that just 30 percent of generation Z men describe themselves as “feminist,” and that 38 percent would outright prefer a male boss over a female one. 

President Trump has been able to capitalize on these trends. During his first campaign, he won 47 percent of the young vote, and held on to this last year, winning 46 percent of it. But how? The answer, once again, was reaching young people, and young men in particular, where they were at. That meant social media. That meant going on Joe Rogan’s podcast or inviting Hulk Hogan to the Republican National Convention.

Since these two politicians, politics has become less of a give and take between parties. It is no longer normal to be nice to the party in power and expect that to be reciprocated when you are in power. These days, as aforementioned, American politics is almost like a game with teams. People support their teams, regardless of what happens, and elections are viewed as a zero-sum, winner-takes-all game.

The common theme in both Trump and Obama’s upset campaigns is the power of social media to divide people, whether young and old or men and women. As the first generation to have been born basically with phones in our hands, we know the most about social media. We use it the most. And… we’re influenced by it the most. Without a doubt, tomorrow’s politicians will be working that even more than Obama and Trump did. 

That is not necessarily a bad thing. It means that we have access to as much information as we could possibly want - it’s just that, as in Walter’s words, “it’s a very narrow slice” of all that information that each person sees. But it doesn’t have to be that way. As long as we actively seek out more information and fully use the resources we have, we’ll be able to break away from the “zero-sum” mentality and move once again to a more bipartisan America.