Shor's autopsy

The youth gender gap is a marriage gap, moderates are more electable, white non-college men vs. white college women, Helene survivor focus group, the NYT's Trump approval tracker, March Madness

Mar 21, 2025

No. 354 | March 21th, 2025

🇺🇲 2024

David Shor is out with his Democratic autopsy. He gives the full presentation on the latest Ezra Klein Show.

#1. There were huge swings against the Democrats among nonwhite moderates and conservatives. Democrats lost 23% of the vote from 2016 to 2024 among Hispanic moderates. That’s a net 46 point swing in the two-party margin.

#2. It wasn’t just demographics. Voters were polarized by media consumption and civic engagement. People who followed the mainstream media closely and were very-high propensity voters swung towards Harris.

#3. A net 28-point swing among immigrants represents one half of the total swing to Trump nationally.

#4. There’s a massive gender divide among nonwhites and young people. Shor’s large sample sizes let him see that Trump likely won nonwhite 18 year old men.

#5. The gender gap among young voters is double that of any other group. (More on this later in the newsletter.)

#6. Republicans were more trusted on the issues that mattered most to voters. Trust on the top issue has literally never failed to predict the presidential election winner.

#7. Through Shor, Democrats tested thousands of ads. They conducted 26 million interviews of 8 million individual voters. The top-testing ads were about kitchen-table issues.

#8. 53% of voters wanted “a shock to the system.”

#9. TikTok users swung towards Trump.

The full interview:

On the youth gender gap, it’s mostly a marriage gap. I’ve made this point in a previous piece. But it’s confirmed by more than 120,000 AP VoteCast interviews. The gender gap is extremely wide for singles in every age group, and balloons to 44 points among 18 to 24 year olds. It’s much lower among married couples — especially middle-aged couples aged 30 to 50 — where it may even reverse. It’s because the young voters are overwhelmingly likely to be single that the youth gender gap is so high.

A mild Laksyha Jain rebuke to the Bonica et al. paper on ideological moderation from last week.

📊 Public Opinion

White non-college men vs. white college women is basically a proxy for partisanship.

Monmouth University is shutting down their polling operation.

“Monmouth President Patrick Leahy stated, ‘the changing political and media landscapes have made it both more difficult and more expensive for polling organizations to operate.’ He later added, ‘our efforts over the years to integrate the work of the Polling Institute with both the student experience and the broader academic enterprise at Monmouth University have been met with mixed results.’ Leahy did not elaborate on the ‘mixed results’ or the expenses involved, and his office declined to offer more information on the polling institute’s budget or overall university expenses.

Echelon was part conducting of a New York Times focus group of Hurricane Helene survivors.