Sold a Lie: Why Young Men Punished Trump

David Corn and Garrison Hayes break down the Democrats’ sweeping election win, why young men abandoned Trump’s culture-war promises, and whether the Electoral College’s days are numbered. On this episode of Stress Test, David Corn and Garrison Hayes process the thumping received by Donald Trump and the GOP and the road ahead for Democrats. How the party balances investigating Trump and his cronies with delivering everyday economic relief will define the opening chapter of the new session. “I think it’s a great message: affordability and accountability,” co-host David Corn explains. But knitting those themes together into a coherent governing strategy won’t be simple. As David notes, Democrats must be strategic about timing their oversight so investigations “don’t step on each other,” while proving they can walk and chew gum by pushing legislation on healthcare, wages, the cost of living, the Iran war, and government ethics. That imperative was made even clearer by a review of the voters who hit the polls on Tuesday. “It kind of turns out it’s a pretty easy, simple analysis: everybody voted for Democrats,” David says. “Old people, young people, Black people, white people, Hispanics, Latinos… it’s just a total, total sweep.” But co-host Garrison Hayes cautions against treating the wave as an ideological blank check: “Democrats have to keep in mind that this mandate is certainly not a party mandate. [Voters] want to see change in their lives, and that is the thing that people were voting for.” Garrison zeroes in on one of the cycle’s most striking shifts: young men breaking away from MAGA culture-war promises. “We started to see these groups, especially younger men, experience real economic anxiety,” he observes, arguing they were sold a bill of goods. “Young men were given a very specific story… that if women were just more subservient to them, if the immigrants were kicked out, if the Black people were removed from the workplace… all this stuff that they were talking about just turns out to not be true. The economics did not align with the promises that were being made.” Plus Mother Jones reporter Pema Levy joins the show to examine a tantalizing possibility: With Democratic gains in states across the country, is there now the potential to end the Electoral College? She explains it all.