Will young men save Trump?
Black voters in Louisiana, polls vs. specials, South Carolina preview, race and gender in schools, 25% of TikTok users produce 98% of its content
No. 304 | February 23, 2024
🗳️ Elections
Daniel Cox: Will Young Men Vote for Trump in 2024? (American Storylines)
“Recent polling has shown unbelievable shifts among young voters. The New York Times found Biden losing the youth vote to Trump in a head-to-head matchup, despite winning these voters by 24 points in 2020. Such swings would represent a sudden and dramatic realignment in American politics—so there is good reason for skepticism. Young voters are generally left-leaning and have supported Democratic candidates by sizable margins in every election for more than two decades.
Biden will almost assuredly win young voters by a healthy, if more modest than 2020, margin. That’s hardly newsworthy. What interests me is the possibility that Trump could gain traction among young men, a group that has shown far less Democratic loyalty in recent elections. In the 2022 midterm election, 72 percent of young women cast votes for Democrats compared to 54 percent of young men.”
Armin Thomas: What Happened With Black Voters in Louisiana? (Split Ticket)
“After the 2023 elections, Louisiana Republicans are arguably in their strongest position in history. The establishment of a firm supermajority eliminated the last vestiges of Democratic control from this formerly-blue “Solid South” state. As Democratic margins with southern white voters have steadily slipped cycle after cycle, margins with southern Black voters have usually held steady.
But in 2023, that changed. Republicans won a majority of the vote in most of the state’s parishes with large black populations, with Democrats seeing reduced margins in strongholds like New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The bleeding was even worse in rural areas, with 70% black East Carroll Parish giving only 50% of its votes to Democrats, after Biden won the parish by 27 just three years earlier. While the blame for these results was attributed to turnout, these results appeared to fit a continuing pattern of working-class minorities fleeing the Democratic Party.”
Nathaniel Rakich: Which is the better 2024 predictor: polls or special elections? (538)
“When it comes to predicting the 2024 election, it’s choose your own adventure. Republicans can point to national polls finding their likely nominee, former President Donald Trump, leading the likely Democratic nominee, President Joe Biden. Democrats can point to the success that their party has had in special elections since the beginning of 2023.
In the past, special elections have been more predictive of the next election than early general-election polls. But there are reasons to think 2024 could be different. Historically, general-election polls get more predictive during presidential primary season, when voters learn who their choices will be and get to know the candidates. But this year, virtually everyone in America already knows and has an opinion of the two likely nominees. According to 538’s polling averages, 95 percent of Americans have some opinion (either positive or negative) of Trump, and 95 percent have an opinion of how Biden is doing his job as well.”
Geoffrey Skelley: South Carolina's conservative electorate gives Trump a big edge (538)
“South Carolina is known as the Palmetto State, but when it comes to Republican presidential nomination contests, a more apt nickname might be the Kingmaker State. Since the South Carolina Republican Party introduced the state's "First in the South" presidential primary in 1980, the race has often positioned one GOP contender as the unquestioned front-runner moving into later primaries. And over the past four decades, all but one Republican aspirant who won South Carolina went on to win the party's nomination.
In 2024, South Carolina could once again prove decisive in the Republican presidential primary, albeit as a potential final nail in the coffin. Heading into Saturday's contest, former President Donald Trump holds a dominant position in the GOP race over his only remaining major opponent, former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley. As a former South Carolina governor, Haley surely hoped a strong home-state showing would boost her chances for the Republican nomination. But while New Hampshire's primary electorate was relatively friendly to Haley (who lost to Trump by 11 percentage points in the Granite State a month ago), a more conservative and religious Republican electorate has helped buoy Trump to a much more commanding polling lead in South Carolina.”
📊 Public Opinion
Luona Lin, Juliana Menasce Horowitz, Kiley Hurst, and Dana Braga: Race and LGBTQ Issues in K-12 Schools (Pew Research Center)
“Amid national debates about what schools are teaching, we asked public K-12 teachers, teens and the American public how they see topics related to race, sexual orientation and gender identity playing out in the classroom.
A sizeable share of teachers (41%) say these debates have had a negative impact on their ability to do their job. Just 4% say these debates have had a positive impact, while 53% say the impact has been neither positive nor negative or that these debates have had no impact.”
🗺️ Data Visualization
📰 Media Habits
Samuel Bestvater: How U.S. Adults Use TikTok (Pew Research Center)
“A new Pew Research Center study matching the survey responses and on-site behaviors of U.S. adult TikTok users finds that a minority of avid posters create the vast majority of content on the site. And most users post seldom, if at all – instead using TikTok primarily to view and consume content made by others.
These findings come at a time when one-third of U.S. adults say they use the site and a growing share get news there. Among our key findings about how the American public is using TikTok…”
🤖 Artificial Intelligence
Simon Willison: The killer app of Gemini Pro 1.5 is video (Simon Willison’s Weblog)
“Gemini Pro 1.5 has a 1,000,000 token context size. This is huge—previously that record was held by Claude 2.1 (200,000 tokens) and gpt-4-turbo (128,000 tokens)—though the difference in tokenizer implementations between the models means this isn’t a perfectly direct comparison.
I’ve been playing with Gemini Pro 1.5 for a few days, and I think the most exciting feature isn’t so much the token count... it’s the ability to use video as an input.”
