Democratic attempts to rebuild support among younger voters, especially younger men, have reached epic levels of — as the kids might say — ‘cringe.’
The most recent example was a proposed $20 million strategy, uncovered by The New York Times, code-named SAM (short for “Speaking with American Men”), which aims to “study the syntax, language and content that gains attention and virality in these spaces.”
How did Democrats, the party most associated with youth, become so mystified about how to connect with young people?
One reason is that the Democratic Party is stuck in a trap of its own making. They’ve been so busy trying to re-create the coalition that first elected Barack Obama in 2008 that they lost sight of the reasons those voters were attracted to him in the first place: He didn’t look like or sound like any other candidate they’d seen before. What’s more, he didn’t reverse-engineer his campaign to fit into a traditional model; he created something totally different from what anyone had seen before.
To find success in 2028, Democrats need to do what
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