Category: Men’s Issues

The Youth Vote Is Reached By Influencers

The Daily  Escape:

Wrongo’s writing about how to Resist the Trump administration has focused on how in 2024 we didn’t target our messaging at the family or at workers. Those lessons give insight into how to persuade voters in 2026 and beyond when Trump promises to be deeply unpopular. A third lesson is how Harris failed to hold on to the youth vote after a promising start.

One of the biggest stories of the 2024 election was Trump’s gains with young voters, particularly young men. To understand the youth vote, we turn to John Della Volpe (JDV), the director of polling at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and one of the leading experts on the youth vote in America.

From JDV in the NYT: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Democratic Party leaders did not listen deeply to and earn the trust of young voters, who could have helped her prevail in Michigan and other swing states. As a pollster who focuses on the hopes and worries of these Americans, losing to Donald Trump — not once but twice — represents a profound failure. Ms. Harris’s campaign needed to shift about one percentage point of voters across Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin to secure the presidency, but instead struggled in college towns like Ann Arbor, Mich., and other blue places. Think about that: Flipping just one in every hundred voters would have stopped the likelihood of mass deportations, tax cuts for the wealthy, rollbacks of L.G.B.T.Q. protections and the reversal of climate regulations.”

The story from the last six presidential elections is simple: When Democrats capture 60% of the youth vote, like Biden did in 2020 and Obama in 2008 and 2012, they win the White House. Harris garnered just 54%. Looking at CNN’s exit polls, Biden’s 24-point average margin among young voters in the seven battleground states collapsed to just 13 points under Harris, failing to hold 2020 margins among both young men and women.

The most dramatic shift came among the youngest voters (18-24), who swung 22 points to the Right from 2020, while their slightly older peers (25-29) showed more stability.

Wrongo has written before about how to reach the young voter. Reaching them required using different media than reaching the older generations. The young are largely on social media.

From NBC:

“…a new Pew Research Center survey reveals just how impactful so-called news influencers are in the current information ecosystem. About 21% of U.S. adults are turning to news influencers for information, with most saying creators “helped them better understand current events and civic issues,…”

Here’s a chart that breaks down how many people get news from influencers:

The number was highest among young adults, with 37% of people ages 18 to 29 saying they turn to influencers for news.

(Pew surveyed 10,000 adults and analyzed 500 news influencers, which it defined as individuals who regularly post about current events and have over 100,000 followers on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X or YouTube).

The gap in Harris’s youth strategy was a failure to address the 37% where they get their news. And to provide persuasive messaging that resonated with their interests.

At the end of the 2024 campaign, nearly all of Trump’s media interactions were with Right-leaning podcasters with massive social media followings. The GOP has actively tried to support their influencers with interviews and attention. While Kamala Harris did appear on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast, most Democrats kept podcasters and news influencers at arm’s length.

From JDV:

“The youth vote that emerged in 2024 defied every partisan prediction and stereotype – it was something entirely new. Generation Z maintained progressive positions on social issues while showing deep skepticism of foreign intervention. They combined concerns about economic inequality with support for free trade. They rated Trump higher on pure leadership while backing Harris overall.”

The vote shift from blue to red in college towns like Ann Arbor was staggering; in some University of Michigan precincts, the vote shifted 20 points toward Mr. Trump in just four years.

From Dan Peiffer:

“Democrats must radically reshape how we think about reaching the public. During the careers of powerful Democratic Party members (especially President Biden and some folks in the Senate), the press was the best way to reach the public….That world is gone, but too many folks in our party still run to CNN or the New York Times when they have news to make.’

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“We need to widen the aperture when we think of the media. We must include folks who don’t have a White House press pass. We must learn to reach the voters who don’t pay attention to traditional news. We have to aggressively support the nascent progressive media ecosystem. Most importantly, we have to recognize that politics in 2024 is information warfare, and we are getting our asses kicked.”

In the campaign’s final weeks, Trump pulled out of interviews with CNBC and NBC News. He turned down a prime-time CNN town hall. In fact, Trump didn’t do a single interview with a traditional news outlet in the campaign’s final stretch. No national broadcast interviews, no sit-downs with local TV anchors or newspapers journalists.

The winning candidate ignored the traditional media, focusing instead on partisan media outlets and politics-adjacent podcasts. While this change isn’t new, it seems clear that 2024 was a pivot point for the role of the legacy media in politics.

The biggest lesson is that the youth vote is reached by influencers. Our older-than-dirt politicians need to give way to the younger pols who can survive on social media. We need a generational shift in who communicates. A younger generation of elected Democrats who prefer to fight back instead of curling into a ball and hope Republicans leave them alone.

Think Josh Shapiro, AOC, Fetterman, Katie Porter, Gretchen Whitmer, Abigail Spanberger and Chris Murphy. There are a hundred others but Harris wasn’t one of them.

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Where 2024 Went Wrong

The Daily Escape:

If you’re planning on being a part of the resistance, you need to start from having a few ideas about what went wrong and why in 2024.

Plenty of people have ideas about what we should be doing next. Rachael Bitecofer’s latest “Identity Politics and Microtargeting Killed The Party’s Brand” raises a great concern expressed by many Democrats, that the Party no longer identifies with the working class, and the working class isn’t who it used to be. It’s much bigger and much more diverse.

Bitecofer’s big idea is that the culture wars were the prime driver of the 2024 election. The culture wars were created after the era of Individual Freedom that arose in the 1950s and 1960s. The Democratic Party had morphed into an alliance, merging a Party of liberal Whites and racist White Southerners into one big coalition that by staying together, dominated Congress for decades.

By the 1960s, the activism of MLK. Jr and thousands of other civil rights activists forced the Democratic Party to choose: Either preserve their large coalition or end segregation. After the assassination of JFK, LBJ sided with civil rights for Blacks signing both the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Acts of 1965. In doing so, this set off the realignment that would lead to total domination of the South by the Republican Party a few decades later.

Nixon’s Southern Strategy recognized that white Southern conservatives were there for the taking, and they took them. Meanwhile, the Democrats began to absorb liberal Republicans, predominantly in the North East and West Coast. Ideological liberals became Democrats and ideological conservatives became Republicans. And the today’s 270 Electoral College map dominated by the handful of swing states became the norm for success in American presidential elections.

From Bitecofer:

“In building their new multi-racial coalition Democrats…turned to something called identity politics. Identity politics is…based on a particular identity, such as ethnicity, race, nationality, religion, denomination, gender, sexual orientation, social background, caste, and social class….as the new Democratic Party became a multi-racial coalition hyper-focused on gaining civil rights for marginalized groups…”

This chart represents the outcome of Democrats following a microtargeting strategy for the past 30+ years:

This one graph tells us exactly why Democrats lost. First and foremost, it tells us that the Democratic Party is a brand “that stands up for marginalized groups.”

Let’s focus on the time window on the graph. As you can see, the Democrats used to have a massive advantage with the working class which began to erode around the time of the Reagan Revolution and round two of Nixon’s Southern strategy. Please keep in mind, the erosion also corresponds with the diversification of America both in terms of ethnicity and gender and reflects in part the backlash to civil rights.

From Bitecofer about the working class:

“Donald Trump just accomplished the same thing by focusing most of his ads on scary trans people and the data don’t lie, millions of ads repeating the sex changes for prisoners broke through.”

More: (emphasis by Wrongo)

“Now, that’s a great brand to have if you’re…an ideological liberal who cares deeply about the rights of the powerless!! The issue is just about a quarter of the electorate is liberal and psychologically predisposed to care about marginalized groups. The rest of the electorate doesn’t get the warm fuzzies we get from marginalized groups, because most humans are hardwired to prefer in groups over out groups and Republican strategists have exploited this expertly.”

Bitecofer argues that what matters for marginalized groups is policy, and that policy only comes from power. The way to represent marginalized groups is by wielding the power to represent them in majorities, not by identity politics in campaigns.

Bitecofer’s central point is that working class voters no longer primarily vote on economics. They did at one time, but those days were done as soon as cultural issues emerged and segregation was ended by the federal government. Here’s how the working class has grown and diversified over the last few decades:

Can the GOP, a Party financed by industry and bankers, permanently “represent the working class”? Maybe so, if the GOP can keep them distracted enough from the economic warfare they are conducting against them by leveraging grievance politics as a backlash to the Dem’s identity politics strategy.

Bitecofer closes with this:

“If we are lucky enough to get another election in this country, the messaging must focus on telling America the story of what happened to all their money, their rural communities, their paychecks, and their health under Republican Party governance.”

A prime part of the coming resistance is to return the GOP Party back to being at war with working America.

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Cartoons of the Week Plus Commentary – October 6, 2024

Cartoons this week were mostly about Vance failing to answer the “Who Won?” question. Here’s one Wrongo liked:

There’s always something in October:

Wrongo wants to update his last column about why Harris needs to speak with more empathy to Gen Z and younger voters. Friend of the Blog John S. left this comment:

“I believe Harris is speaking but perhaps not loud enough or Gen Z isn’t listening. Her plans do include downpayment money for new housing, tax incentives for builders to sell to first time home buyers, 3 million new homes constructed, business startup credits, earned income credits for low wage earners, newborn tax credits, food price regulations, and reduction of medical debt. Maybe you can say it won’t be enough or that some of these things can’t be implemented but nonetheless they are in “the plan”. Perhaps if her message was stronger on social media, as you mentioned in another column, the “Z’ers” would listen.”

He’ s right but Harris like most Dem politicians, isn’t offering sufficient “feel your pain” context to get people to listen. Obama was one of the few Democrats to place policy in a human context, but most of the time, the Democrats are relying on a laundry list of policies that may or may not ever be enacted.

America had good economic news yesterday, but no Republican was willing to cede that to Biden or the Democrats. Sen. Rubio (R-FL) claimed in a post on Twitter/X that the great jobs numbers were “fake” because past months had to be revised (most jobs reports are revised in subsequent months).

It’s true that the economy added jobs. But most were low-income service jobs. Meanwhile, the pathways to the middle class, manufacturing and white collar jobs, actually shrank. The Gen Z and younger workers suspect that the American Dream is fading because middle class jobs are going away, and they’re precisely correct in that intuition.

The GenZ’ers can’t square their lived reality with the commentary that comes from on high, particularly regarding the economy. Over time, they’ve come to distrust institutions. That’s true at a social level—levels of trust have cratered over time. And this is a key reason why this gulf between what young people live, experience, feel, and the skin-deep recitation of the miracle of the “Booming Economy”. It doesn’t reach deeply enough into their lives.

Harris shouldn’t cede any of this ground to Trump. Wrongo quoted Vance during the VP debate:

  • People are struggling to pay the bills. Times are tough.
  • The American Dream is fading, and feels unattainable.
  • We should stop shipping jobs offshore.

And Republicans understand the task at hand is to peel younger voters in swing states away from Harris. FWIW reports that a constellation of Right-wing groups are spending millions online to get their messaging in front of swing state voters. Probably the biggest line of attack being used against Harris has to do with inflation and the state of the economy: (brackets by Wrongo)

“For example, Duty to America is specifically targeting Gen Z and Millennial men in battleground states with ads bemoaning the state of the economy, saying: ‘According to…Harris, the economy is fixed [repaired]…at our age, our parents owned a home, had kids, saved for retirement, and we can barely buy groceries, gas, or pay our rent.’”

More:

“This ad is running across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Google, but also on Roku devices and streaming services where young people actually watch TV shows. Duty to America has spent the majority of its ad dollars targeting Michigan, Pennsylvania, Georgia and North Carolina.”

More:

“Similarly, Preserve America is running direct-to-camera video ads on Facebook and Instagram from a trio of white women who are complaining about high inflation and grocery prices, sometimes tying the issue to illegal immigration. You can browse through some of those ads here.”

FWIW adds a chart about ad spending: (note that the red and blue here are 100% pro-Trump spending)

A few other groups have also emphasized economic attacks among younger members of the electorate. One from Our American Century says “Kamala Harris thinks young people are stupid” when it comes to the economy, and Right for America is also running with the “stupid” line.

FWIW notes that Harris is outspending Trump on Facebook and Instagram: Harris spent $8.1 million to Trump’s $1.1 million between September 21 to 28. Meanwhile, political campaigns spent $40.3 million on Google and YouTube ads last week, with Harris and affiliates spent $10.8 million to Trump’s $2.8 million.

Here’s a recap of spending by both campaigns:

The Democrats instead should invest more money where the young people are. They should challenge the Republicans by admitting that things look pretty dire for Gen Z and younger people. That over time, the American Dream’s faded. That times are rough. That people are struggling.

They should use exactly those words like Vance did, because they’re the ones that count. They resonate. You have to hope that the Harris brain trust will match Trump’s initiative by spending some of this money targeting Gen Z and younger voters with empathetic messaging like the Republicans are already doing.

The policy details can come once they’re listening.

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State Of The Race: What Polling Tells Us And What It Does Not

(Welcome to another of Wrongo’s occasional thoughts about the election. He wants to thank you for your concern as he travels through Chemo land.)

The Daily Escape:

Polling isn’t all that we want it to be or think it can be. But the recent trends support growing confidence that Harris is succeeding Biden. For example, a recent USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll (highly rated in the 538’s curation of polls), shows an eight or nine-point swing in favor of Harris, relative to the survey it took at the end of June, after the disastrous Biden debate:

“Democrat Kamala Harris has surged ahead of Republican Donald Trump, 48%-43%, a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll found….The findings reflect an eight-point turnaround in the presidential race from late June, when Trump had led President Joe Biden in the survey by nearly four points.

The vice president’s small lead was fueled by big shifts among some key demographic groups traditionally crucial for Democrats, including Hispanic and Black voters and young people. Among those with annual incomes of less than $20,000, in the biggest change, a three-point Trump edge over Biden in June has become a 23-point Harris advantage over Trump in August.”

The poll of 1,000 likely voters, taken by landline and cell phone Sunday through Wednesday, has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percentage points. With the election approaching, the survey is now measuring likely voters; previous polls were of registered voters.”

It’s a tiny sample that needs more supportive data. Sunday’s ABC News/Ipsos poll showed Harris leading 52%-46% among likely voters, a six-point lead. But the race is much closer in swing states. This means that the whole ball game is going to come down to turnout and enthusiasm. There are very few real swing voters left in America today, because the kind of person who has trouble choosing between the Democrats and the Republicans is somebody who probably couldn’t decide which country is directly north of the USA.

Two factors in turnout are the changes in voter enthusiasm and spending by the Parties. Here’s Gallup on changes in enthusiasm:

We should remember that enthusiasm for Harris is driven by hope, while enthusiasm for Trump is driven by fear. One is easier to stoke than the other.

Second, Ad Impact Politics, a firm that tracks political spending, says that between Labor Day and Election Day, 96 different markets are set to see at least $1M in political ad spending on TV. Twenty- eight markets are set to see over $20M, and Philadelphia, Phoenix, and Las Vegas are all set to see over $110M! Here’s how that breaks down by TV time slot reservations:

The Trump campaign is only going to be competitive in Pennsylvania and Georgia. The other swing states are apparently being left to their own devices. Their strategy seems to be if they can hold all their 2020 states they can put all their money on picking up those two states which will bring them to exactly 270. If they lose either one (or NC) that’s the ballgame.

A subtext is that their real strategy is the coming post-election legal challenge in any or all of those states, claiming that the Democrats stole the election. They’re clearly doing that in Pennsylvania and Georgia where they are already plotting with local officials.

Overall, Harris is now in a far better position than Biden was in late July. Harris, by contrast, has probably become a slight favorite.

Second, Harris’s improved position has essentially nothing to do with peeling off persuadable Trump voters. What has changed is that people who would vote for the Democrat if they were to vote at all are now much more likely to vote than they were when Biden was the candidate. This is reflected in the responses of potential voters in key Democratic constituencies — especially young people, and blacks and Latinos — to Harris’s entry into the race.

Third, motivating supporters to actually vote is going to be far more important than persuading swing voters. Swing voters remain important because the race is so close, and likely to remain so. Such voters might represent only one or two percent of the electorate in the seven states that will almost certainly decide the election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and one or two percent could easily be the decisive margin in all of these places. This is where the enthusiasm for Harris in the Democratic base has proven to be so critical to this point.

Pundits say “It all comes down to PA”. That may be true if your only concern is the presidential race. But control of the Senate and the House are just as important. That means hacking a path to at least 50 Senate seats in a world where MT and OH could both flip to the GOP. It means flipping the House. Neither path runs through PA. And reproductive liberty is on the ballot in 11 states and indirectly on the ballot in all fifty states via Project 2025’s plan to ban abortion nationally. How does that factor into polling? It doesn’t.

Another example: the Boston Globe published a leaked email from a top Trump volunteer with the Trump campaign telling other volunteers that the Trump campaign “no longer thinks New Hampshire is winnable” and is “pulling back”.

Not all is bright. Dan Pfeiffer notes Harris isn’t doing well with GEN Z men:

Peiffer notes that what’s alarming is that Harris’s entry into race excited young women, but not men. When Biden was the nominee, Trump was up with young men by 11. In national polling, the gap still exists, but Trump does less well with men under 30. Trump’s campaign is targeting these younger men. That’s why his convention featured a wife beating MMA fighter introducing him and he entered the stage to the tune of “It’s a man’s world.”

Peiffer says that if Trump maintains these numbers with Gen Z men, he might win the election:

“To put a finer point on it, Biden won voters under 30 by 24 points. According to the NBC News poll, Harris is up only 16 points with this cohort.”

So many bros…so few brains!

To deal with the rapid changes, polling organization 538 has changed its presidential prediction model from one based on “fundamentals” to one based on changes to polls. Which acknowledges that the old “fundamentals” no longer work.

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Sunday Cartoon Blogging – January 15, 2023

With all of the false equivalency about secret documents that mysteriously travel outside their protected locations, you can be forgiven for not hearing about the antics in Missouri’s state legislature. From the WaPo:

“The Republican-controlled Missouri House of Representatives used its session’s opening day Wednesday to tighten the dress code for female legislators, while leaving the men’s dress code alone.”

The state’s House-approved bill requires women’s arms to be concealed. Missouri wouldn’t force its citizens to wear masks during Covid – even with lives at risk. But Missouri is forcing women to wear long sleeves instead of going sleeveless, something that endangers no one.

Imagine if Rep. Jim Jordan (R-OH) was instead a member of the Missouri House. He would finally have to roll his sleeves down and put on a jacket.

Republican legislators need to become enraged to go to work — not perturbed, not irritated, not annoyed, but furious — and it’s always a made-up crisis and always someone else’s fault, most likely a Democrat’s. Take your pick: Drag queen story hour. Pedophiles in pizza parlors. Genderless potato head toys. Migrant caravans. M&M’s in a lesbian relationship. Trans takeover of sports and bathrooms. Critical Race Theory. Antifa mobs dressing up like MAGAs and attacking the Capitol. Jewish space lasers starting forest fires. Dems are coming for your gas stoves. And so, so many more. On to cartoons.

Joe’s garage finds a problem:

MAGAs want more:

Didn’t we seen this before?

And Trump’s crowds were bigger:

Santos, if that’s really your name, we have a job for you:

Spare:

It takes courage to speak about things that we’re traumatized into not speaking about. What surprises Wrongo most about this is the lack of empathy or understanding he sees by Americans toward Harry as a young boy who, as a 12 year-old had to perform as an adult at his mother’s funeral.

Now he is an adult, a husband and father. So many people in the US have scorn for him. Why does he have to dump all of this on us? Why doesn’t he simply get on with his life rather than telling this story over and over on Oprah, 60 Minutes, and in his book?

Wrongo has watched the Netflix documentary. He will not read the book. But it’s evident that Harry’s rage, and his grief, remain. He’s still trying to make sense of what happened to him after his mother died. While his Royal family may have moved on, he hasn’t.

Worse yet, he’s a male. Western society isn’t tolerant of males who show vulnerability or confusion as an adult. Worse, his own family’s expectations are to simply soldier on.

America likes big stories of family dysfunction, and we sure have a good one in the long-lived soap opera called the British Royals.

Harry deserves closure and happiness. He stood up for his wife and kids. His birth “family” treated him horribly. He’s written his book, and he may make a ton of money off it. Why should any of that make Americans angry?

 

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Tuesday Wake Up Call, Unhappiness Edition – July 26, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Smoke in Yosemite Valley from the nearby Oak fire – July 25, 2022 photo via Today’s California

At a family party this weekend, my daughter who owns an upscale restaurant, mentioned that while post-Covid, the restaurant is full again, the patrons are much more mean and nasty. That made Wrongo revisit the answers to the latest data on the happiness of Americans from the General Social Survey (GSS), produced by NORC, a nonpartisan research organization at the University of Chicago.

The GSS has been monitoring societal change since 1972. The last GSS survey came out in January 2022. Here’s a significant chart:

Since 1972, the GSS has asked the question: “Taken all together, how would you say things are these days–would you say that you are very happy, pretty happy, or not too happy?” As you can see above, historically the “very happy” people have outnumbered the “not too happy” group by about 3:1 for about 45 years.

But in 2021, the very-happies plummeted from 31% of the population in 2018 down to 19%, while the not-too-happies surged to 24% (the “pretty happys” remained constant at about 57%). For the first time in polling history, Americans are more likely to say they’re not happy than to say they’re very happy.

The Institute for Family Studies (IFS) has taken a look at the GSS data to see what’s driving this precipitous change. Here’s their chart of unhappiness by age:

Until 2018, fewer than 18% of Americans ages 35 and over claimed to be “not too happy”, while fewer than 16% of Americans under 35 had done so. But in 2021, unhappiness rocketed upwards for both groups, to 22% for those 35 and over, and to 30% for those under age 35.

The sharp increase for those under 35 indicates young adults are carrying a unique burden. They’re taking an extraordinarily dim view of the world and their own lives.

Among young adults, different groups had different levels of unhappiness even before Covid. For example, only 6% of married people said they were “not too happy,” versus 16% of the unmarried. The question is whether all groups saw the same spike in unhappiness. Here’s another chart from the IFS:

Unhappiness rose for every group: In each case, the red bars are higher than the blue bars.

In the GSS, social class didn’t protect people very much: Unhappiness rose about 16% for people with prestigious jobs vs. 15% for other people. People who attended college saw their unhappiness rise by 16% vs. 15% for people who didn’t attend college.

Some demographic traits did matter: Men saw their unhappiness rise 18%, vs. 12% for women. Unhappiness rose about 17% for non-Hispanic whites, vs. 12% for racial and ethnic minorities.

Religion seems to have buffered unhappiness. Among people who attended religious services at least two times per month, unhappiness rose only 4%, the smallest increase of any group.

Liberal Americans saw the largest increase in unhappiness of any group, by 19%. For moderates, it was 15%, and for conservatives, 13%. Despite what Tucker Carlson might try to make of this, the IFS says that given the sample sizes involved, those differences aren’t statistically significant.

We can blame the Covid pandemic for much of the increase in unhappiness, but we’ve also seen huge social disruption. Here’s a chart showing the percentage of 25-34 year-olds living with parents or relatives in the US:

In 1970, 11% lived with their parents, while in 2020, it was 29%. Note the decline in living with a spouse. From 80% to 38%. While people are getting married later, living alone is relatively unchanged since 1980.

This has occurred during a period when there was very little upside in real wages, and a huge increase in financial assets, which few young adults have, and in the cost of housing. This may also partially explain why young people are unhappy.

We’re about to head into a global recession and most of our politicians have zero idea how bad it will be, or how to fix it. When it comes to the midterm elections, nearly a third of voters say it doesn’t matter who wins.

Time to wake up America! We’re hoping that demography will save us before climate change slays us, or fascism overtakes us.

To help you wake up, listen to 9 year-old musical prodigy Ellen Alaverdyan perform a cover of Geddy Lee‘s iconic bassline on the classic Rush song “Tom Sawyer”:

Scroll away from the video, and she sounds like a pro. Very nice!

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Saturday Wake Up Call – June 4, 2022

The Daily Escape:

Curtis Island Lighthouse, Camden, ME – May 2022 photo by Daniel F. Dishner

Wrongo and Ms. Right are in Pennsylvania for the weekend. A highlight of this trip will be a visit to Longwood Gardens, after which we’ll return home and berate our gardens for their unworthiness. But since we’re in PA, let’s spend a few minutes on their Republican Senatorial primary.

The two leading Republican candidates are using the current debate on gun control as campaign fodder. Former hedge fund CEO David McCormick can be seen in this campaign video shooting a hunting rifle he says he used as a teenager. Next, he picks up a rifle he says he used at the US Military Academy and fires. Then he shoots a semiautomatic assault rifle similar to one he says he used in Iraq.

His competition in the Senate primary, television personality and surgeon Mehmet Oz, has a gun video too. He loads a shotgun and shoots. Then he shoots a semi-automatic pistol. He closes with an AR-15 style rifle. During the clip, he says:

“When people say I don’t support guns? They’re dead wrong,”

These guys have spent millions and months trying to showcase their conservative bona fides to PA’s GOP base voters while attempting to head off skepticism about their elite backgrounds on Wall Street and in Media, respectively. Part of their strategies involved commercials showing them shooting guns. Basically, they are saying to PA voters:

“Hey everyone, I can shoot a gun! Vote for me because I will do nothing to help you in Washington!”

Since we are already reeling from the ongoing and deadly mass shootings, should Republicans glorify the use and ownership of firearms that are weapons of war?

Let’s spend a minute on the current gun culture in America. Despite what Republican politicians say, guns are not a passive defensive tool like a bullet proof vest. They won’t stop a bullet coming at you. Guns are an active, offensive weapon. This active, offensive role of the “virtuous person with a gun” appeals to Republican men who say real men want to actively respond to threats to their property and their families.

The Republicans are pushing to get more guns in schools following the Uvalde shooting. This is the only kind of “do something” action that the Republicans can get behind. It follows the premise that people with guns in school will be able to put down active shooters before they kill kids.

This flies in the face of the facts. That didn’t happen in Uvalde, or in Parkland Memorial in Florida, or in many other places. In the majority of school shootings, the incident ends with unarmed people tackling the shooter. But Republicans will keep saying that armed guards are “deterrents,” even though this isn’t supported by facts. Candidates in both parties have used guns as a campaign prop, but lately, the images have become intentionally provocative in Republican advertising. Their messages convey a cultural and political solidarity more powerfully than most anything else, according to Republican strategists.

Wrongo knows it’s Saturday, our time to chill, but today, it’s time to wake up America! These ads create a dangerous impression that assault-style firearms are casual tools rather than dangerous weapons. They shouldn’t be used to grandstand at Starbucks on the  weekend.

To help you wake up, spend a few minutes celebrating the life of Ronnie Hawkins, a rockabilly singer who helped create and launch The Band. He died this week. From Robbie Robertson:

“Ronnie Hawkins brought me down from Canada to the Mississippi delta when I was 16. He recorded two songs I’d written and thought I might be talented….Ron prided himself in always having top notch players in his group. Levon Helm was his drummer in the Hawks and I talked Ron into hiring Rick Danko on bass and vocals, Richard Manuel on piano and vocals and Garth Hudson on organ and sax. Along with Levon and me this became the magic combination.

Ronnie was the godfather. The one who made this all happen. After the Hawks left Ron and went out on our own, we joined up with Bob Dylan. Next the Hawks became “The Band” and the rest is history….All starting out with Ronnie Hawkins.”

There are tons of Ronnie Hawkins videos out there. Here’s one from the 1978 epic “The Last Waltz” a documentary film by Martin Scorsese, capturing The Band’s last performance. Ronnie Hawkins was invited back to participate in covering Bo Diddley’s tune “Who Do You Love?”:

Ronnie Hawkins has the greatest rock & roll quote ever:

“90% of all the money I’ve ever had in my life I spent on women, booze and drugs. The other 10% I just blew.”

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College Enrollment is Down, Student Debt is Way Up

The Daily Escape:

Cathedral Rock at sunset, Sedona AZ – 2019 photo by microadventures

The Student Clearing House reports that the college student headcount of undergraduate and graduate students combined fell by 1.3% in the fall semester of 2019 over the same semester last year. That equals 231,000 fewer students compared to 2018.

This is the continuation of a long decline. The peak year was the fall semester of 2011, when 20.14 million students were enrolled. Since then, enrollment has dropped by 10.8%, or by 2.17 million students. Here’s a helpful graph by Wolf Richter:

The report covers 97% of enrollments at degree-granting post secondary institutions that are eligible to receive federal financial aid. It does not include international students, who account for just under 5% of total student enrollment in the US.

Women by far outnumbered men in total enrollment in the fall semester of 2019 with 10.63 million women enrolled, compared to 7.61 million men, meaning that overall there are now 40% more women in college than men.

Inside Higher Ed reports that community college enrollments declined by 3.4%. Four-year public institutions saw a drop of 0.9%. Four-year private institutions bucked the trend with an increase of 3.2%. However, the Student Clearing House said most of this increase was due to the conversion of large for-profit institutions to nonprofit status. Grand Canyon University, for example, successfully made the transition last year.

Wolf Richter says that the 10.8% decline in enrollment since 2011 comes even as student loan balances have surged 74% over the same period, from $940 billion to $1.64 trillion:

Looking at the two charts, it’s clear that over the last eight years, enrollment has declined in a straight line at about 1.35% per year. And over the same eight years, student loan debt has increased in a straight line at nearly $90 billion per year!

We’re seeing three trends: First, the decline in enrollments. Second the decline in men attending college. Third, the soaring costs of college leading to soaring student debt.

No one has the answers to all three, but the decline in enrollments may have a demographic element. We are approaching the tail end of the college-aged millennial generation. Higher education has been facing demographic headwinds for a decade. The post-millennial generation is simply smaller than the previous generation.

Meanwhile, a big part of the enrollment peak spike in 2009-2012 period was due to people choosing education to avoid unemployment during the Great Recession. And 25% of the enrollment decline is due to the for-profit diploma mills losing their government support after years of robbing their “students” blind.

The rapidly increasing costs of college are a burden that can also drive down enrollments. The numbers do not favor investing in a college degree as much as they used to. Back in the day, a good entry level job’s salary was about 4 times the annual tuition. Now it’s under 2 times. If you check out some of the terrible numbers for 20-year net Return on Investment (ROI) on payscale.com, it’s clear that many colleges and universities have negative or relatively small ROIs.

OTOH, there’s still a massive income gap between people with a college degree and those without one. And outside of a few small business owners, there’s no way around it. College is the only reliable way to get into the middle class, and stay there.

The college industrial complex knows that it has a stranglehold on your future, and it will try to suck as much money out of you as possible.

The solutions involve some of the things that Sanders, Warren and others are talking about. Wrongo is for making college free for all. He isn’t for debt forgiveness, but for granting interest-free loans to students. Those loans should be carried only by the federal government.

Cost containment is the biggest issue. Online education is now readily available, and saves on both tuition and room and board. The economy is stronger, so on-the-job training is returning, and a lot of specific how-to knowledge is now available online.

Except for the male-female imbalance, much of this is solvable.

Finally, higher education serves many purposes in our society. As a people, we need it for its practical value, but also for sharpening our ideals, nurturing our growth, advancing our knowledge, and our arts.

Despite a popular subculture of anti-intellectualism and doubt, we should still know that a people without ideals are lost.

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Capitalism Is Past Its Sell-By Date

“This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations…” – Rutherford B. Hayes (March, 1888)

Nearly 130 years ago at the height of the Gilded Age, President Hayes had it right. Capitalism then was an economic free-for-all. Today, capitalism again is rewarding too few people. And data show that the problem is worse than we thought. The WSJ reported on a study by economists from Stanford, Harvard and the University of California that found:

Barely half of 30-year-olds earn more than their parents did at a similar age, a research team found, an enormous decline from the early 1970s when the incomes of nearly all offspring outpaced their parents.

Using tax and census data, they identified the income of 30-year-olds starting in 1970, and compared it with the earnings of their parents when they were about the same age. In 1970, 92% of American 30-year-olds earned more than their parents did at a similar age. By 2014, that number fell to 51%. Here is a chart showing the results:

wsj-30-year-olds-make-less

And we know that real median household income in the US today is basically the same as in 1989. The paper doesn’t provide specific reasons for the decline in incomes for younger Americans, but it generally blames slower economic growth and, especially, the rapidly widening income gap between the top 20% and the rest of society.

They found that the inability of children to out-earn their parents is greatest in the Midwest. This underlines that those who voted for Trump have a point: The Midwest has been hit harder by import competition, especially from Japan and China, and by technological changes, than other regions of the US.

When looking only at males nationally, the decline is even starker: In 2014, only 41% of 30-year-old men earned more than their fathers at a similar age.

There are some issues with the study worth mentioning: Most kids born in the 1940s did well in their thirties, maybe because their parents were 30 during the Depression and WWII. By the 1960s, an industrialized economy brought significantly higher wages to 30 year olds. A high denominator in the ratio of parent’s income to child’s income (compared to the past) made it more difficult for succeeding generations to exceed their parents’ incomes.

The economy also has shifted in the past 30 years and is now service-based, as factories moved overseas, and automation became prevalent. This change swapped higher wage manufacturing jobs for mostly lower wage service jobs. That alone could make it all but impossible for young adults to hit the ratios that their parents did relative to their grandparents.

Maybe the American Dream didn’t die; it just never really existed in the sense of broadly-based income mobility. Have another look at the chart, upward mobility (as measured by making more than your parents) has been declining since the mid-1940s.

Why? Between rising globalization and rapid advances in automation, we now have more people than jobs. And no matter whom we elect, this trend will continue. Those manufacturing jobs are never coming back. Even in China, robots are now displacing workers in factories.

We don’t need “good paying manufacturing jobs”; we need good paying jobs.

This is the most serious challenge capitalism has faced in the US. Without improving personal income, there will be fewer who can afford college, or afford to buy the things that capitalism produces. Low personal income growth puts sand in the gears of our economy.

The left offers a critique of contemporary global capitalism but no real practical alternative. Neither does the right, but their memes of America First, nostalgia for a golden (gilded?) age, and more tax cuts seem like less of a stretch than a Bernie Sanders-like frontal assault on capitalism.

No one in either party has a plan for a world in which robots displace the demand for labor on a large scale. And the under-30 cohort is now spending at least 4 times more (in the case of Wrongo’s university, 10 times) for a college education than what their parents paid, and they are earning less.

If people matter at all to our leaders, and if 90+% of them lack the means to live without working, America must make employment our top priority, despite the fact that many have been deemed redundant by capitalists in the private sector.

Surplus labor drives the price of labor down; allowing the employer class to afford a pool boy, or a nanny, or another cook.

And it makes the waiters more attentive to Mr. Trump.

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