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For some young men in particular, the populist pitches from Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump aligned with their attitudes about the ruling class.
Dec. 9, 2024Updated 11:01 a.m. ET
They feel frustrated by the status quo, and they’re fed up with the system. They don’t trust politicians, and they want revolutionary change.
They are men, many of them younger, who are looking for a champion. Once, they liked Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont as a presidential candidate. This election, they voted for Donald J. Trump.
The number of Sanders supporters who have gone MAGA is most likely a sliver of the electorate. But they illustrate an important pattern in American politics, political scientists say, one that might help explain Mr. Trump’s success with young men in particular. For certain voters, political preferences are defined not by party, but by their attitudes about the ruling class — whether they trust people in power, or think they’ve rigged the system against ordinary people.
In the final New York Times/Siena College national poll in late October, nearly two-thirds of voters said the government was “mostly working to benefit itself and the elites,” rather than “the people and the country.” Eighty-two percent of Trump voters said so, twice as many as Kamala Harris voters.
The idea resonated in particular with men and younger voters, the poll found — groups that Mr. Trump especially courted in this election and that Mr. Sanders did well with in his Democratic primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020.
“The connective tissue from Trump to Sanders is something akin to populism — the ruling class sucks — and that rhetoric plays well among a certain class of people who don’t feel the government works for them,” said Joshua Dyck, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.
