The Contrarian/Anti-Woke left continue trend of Anti-Democrat/Black & Dirtbag Leftist grift
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How Some Voters Moved From Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump
For some young men in particular, the populist pitches from Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump aligned with their attitudes about the ruling class.
How Some Voters Moved From Bernie Sanders to Donald Trump
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, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET
Bernie Sanders on a stage with his hand raised, with people seated behind him and someone in the audience in front of him wearing a white T-shirt with "Trump" written on it in black letters.
“The connective tissue from Trump to Sanders is something akin to populism,” a political scientist said.Joe Raedle/Getty Images
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.
“The politics of anti-elite grievance is not just popular in the United States and it’s not just popular on the right,” he said. “It is the story of politics right now.”
Perhaps the highest-profile Sanders-to-Trump supporter is Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, especially among young men. He endorsed Mr. Sanders in 2020, and while he once disavowed Mr. Trump, this year he had him on his show and endorsed him.
In interviews, young men who once supported Mr. Sanders and voted for Mr. Trump this election said they wanted drastic change. They didn’t necessarily consider themselves to be very conservative — they had voted for Democrats in the past, identified as independents or were liberal on social issues.
But they distrusted politicians and wanted candidates who could relate to ordinary people. They wished the United States spent more money helping working Americans, and less on helping other countries fight wars or supporting immigrants.
“A lot of the established political class has kind of forgotten what it’s like to be a regular person,” said Matthew Michels, 24, a mechanical engineer in Hancock, Mich.
Mr. Michels said he liked economic policy ideas Mr. Trump had mentioned, like using tariffs to bring more manufacturing back to the United States and eliminating income taxes. But mostly, he appreciated that Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders, along with Vice President-elect JD Vance, “understood what it’s like to not be in that sort of upper crust of society position,” he said.
“Trump obviously didn’t start life as a regular person, he was wealthy from the start, but everything I heard him say, he got the sense of what it’s like to be an average person a lot more,” he said.
“If Democrats had somebody like Bernie, who was very focused on working people, with a track record,” he said, “they could probably win me back.”
The idea that the interests of ordinary people and elites are fundamentally opposed is the key tenet of populism, according to the commonly used definition by Cas Mudde, a Dutch political scientist. These groups are vaguely defined, but populism holds that elites use their power to their advantage. Research has shown that this message is particularly powerful with men, particularly those in the working class, who may feel marginalized by economic and cultural changes.
For all their differences in policy and personality, Mr. Trump and Mr. Sanders sound very similar when they speak to these concerns.
Mr. Trump, at a rally in June, said President Biden was “fighting for all of the corrupt interests that get rich off the suffering of the middle class,” while he was “fighting for the working people.”
Mr. Sanders, on “The Daily” podcast last month, said Americans living paycheck to paycheck are rightfully angry, while “the very wealthiest people in this country have never ever had it so good.”
They disagree on whom to blame for voters’ anger — Mr. Sanders largely blames billionaires, while Mr. Trump focuses on undocumented immigrants — but both politicians provide an enemy.
In some cases, they also differ on how to help these voters. Medicare for all, abortion rights and taxes on the rich, for example, are all liberal policies that Mr. Sanders supports and that Mr. Trump doesn’t.
But in other areas, like their opposition to free trade and to intervention in foreign conflicts, they sound similar. Mr. Trump’s populist streak has led to a blurring of traditional party lines.
He unnerved some Republicans when he picked a pro-union secretary of labor. When he spoke earlier this year about expanding the child tax credit, a traditionally Democratic goal, he said, “I do things that aren’t necessarily Republican.”
The biggest concern for Jose Rodriguez Vazquez, 37, an iron welder in Lakeland, Fla., is “making sure that citizens get taken care of before anyone else, before outsiders,” he said, something he thought that both candidates seemed to understand.
He said he appreciated Mr. Trump’s promise to cut off aid to Ukraine: “Instead of just throwing money away on a war that has nothing to do with us, why not say, hey, maybe we should raise the tax credits for the families that work throughout the year?”
Gideon Smith, 39, a crane operator outside Tacoma, Wash., is a veteran with a political science degree, but he left the field because he was fed up with government. “I met one too many politicians and despised all of them,” he said. But he likes Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump, and their opposition to war and support of unions.
“I’m a union man, so making things American-made is huge, and this is Bernie and Trump,” he said. “Trump has been the best president for union workers we had in ages.”
Mr. Biden was the first president to join a picket line, and dozens of unions endorsed Ms. Harris for president. Mr. Trump has offered some proposals to help unionized workers, but he also weakened labor regulations in his first term, and during the campaign he said striking workers should be fired.
Mr. Smith said he was aware of Mr. Trump’s reputation for being anti-worker, but said, “Union members’ pocketbooks looked pretty good when he was president.”
Tim Chapman is the president of Advancing American Freedom, a political advocacy group started by former Vice President Mike Pence that hews to traditional Republican priorities of limited government and free markets. “I think Donald Trump is far closer to Bernie Sanders than a lot of Republicans might be comfortable admitting, especially on economic policy,” he said.
Still, he and other analysts said, the young men who have supported both candidates may have been motivated less by specific policies and more by a feeling of being left behind. Economic changes, like the falling relative income of men without college degrees, and cultural forces, like cancel culture, have made it seem harder to be a man. They might also have been motivated by sexism, said Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, given that both candidates ran against women.
These voters may not be aligned with a party as much as an anti-establishment ethos — one that is fostered online, sometimes in a conspiratorial vein, on social media, gaming platforms and podcasts.
