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Top Pollster Says Dems Losing Younger Voters: "Huge Concern"

Jonathan Della Volpe, polling director at Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics, voiced concern on Friday's episode of 
Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that Democrats may be slipping with younger voters.

Della Volpe said he worries the Democratic Party has squandered a rare opportunity in recent years to cement its connection with 
young Americans.

"The concern I have for Democrats is just a handful of years ago, I would say that every day that, for every thousand young 
people who turn 18, Molly, like 700 of them, six or 700 of them, have values aligned with the Democrat Party," Della Volpe said. 
"It was like this incredible opportunity for the Democrats to kind of cement kind of their values with an emerging generation. 
They didn't communicate that very well.

"And now we're living, you know, in what I think is the beginning of a post-ideological era with younger people, okay, where, 
because of the concerns about economics, they're voting in what they would say is a much more pragmatic way than they did, you 
know, in maybe "16 or, you know, in "18 or even in "20," he continued. "So that's a concern if younger people agree with 
Democrats on most issues, but they're not voting in the numbers that they voted with Democrats in the past. That's a huge concern 
because my generation is just getting more conservative, right?"

According to his website, Della Volpe is a member of Generation X, which includes individuals born between 1965 and 1980, as 
defined by the National Institute on Retirement Security.

CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten noted that in the 2024 election, President Donald Trump made notable gains with young voters 
in his race against former Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to his support from that key demographic in his 2020 matchup 
with former President Joe Biden.

"If you look at the Trump versus Democrat margin, you look at voters under the age of 25, you go back to 2020," the data analyst 
said during a recent segment on the network. "Look, Joe Biden won this group overwhelmingly. Look at that, by 34 points. You look 
at 2024. Look, Kamala Harris won it, but just by 11."

"Trump gained more among voters under the age of 25 than any other age group," he continued. "If you think of young people as 
being Democrats, while they may still lean Democrat, not in any way in the same numbers that they used to just even four years 
ago, Donald Trump doing considerably better among younger voters."

Trump also made significant inroads with Hispanic men during the 2024 election, securing a majority of their votes nationwide, 
according to polling.

The president has moved at breakneck speed in his second term, aggressively asserting executive power as he dismantles long-
standing government policies and slashes the federal workforce through a wave of executive actions.

Since his January 20 inauguration, Trump has signed nearly 100 executive orders, according to a Fox News tally-far outpacing the 
early pace of his recent predecessors.

An average of the latest national polls that measure presidential approval shows Trump with ratings just below water. His numbers 
have dipped slightly since the start of his second term, when polling averages had his approval in the low 50s and disapproval in 
the mid-40s.

Driving the decline are growing concerns about the economy and fears that Trump's tariffs on major U.S. trading partners could 
fuel further inflation-an issue that plagued former President Joe Biden and kept his approval ratings underwater for much of his 
term.

Still, the president's 49% overall approval rating in the latest Fox News poll ties his all-time high in the network's surveys-a 
mark he last hit in April 2020, near the close of his first term. It also places him six points higher than he was at this stage 
in his first administration, when he held a 43% approval rating in March 2017.

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"Trump Derangement Syndrome" Is a Real Mental Condition

All you need to know about "Trump Derangement Syndrome," or TDS.

"Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) is a mental condition in which a person has been driven effectively insane due to their dislike 
of Donald Trump, to the point at which they will abandon all logic and reason."

Justin Raimondo, the editorial director of Antiwar.com, wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times in 2016 that broke TDS down into 
three distinct phases or stages:

"In the first stage of the disease, victims lose all sense of proportion. The president-elect's every tweet provokes a firestorm, 
as if 140 characters were all it took to change the world."

"The mid-level stages of TDS have a profound effect on the victim's vocabulary: Sufferers speak a distinctive language consisting 
solely of hyperbole."

"As TDS progresses, the afflicted lose the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality."

The Point here is simple: TDS is, in the eyes of its adherents, the knee-jerk opposition from liberals to anything and everything 
Trump does. If Trump announced he was donating every dollar he's ever made, TDS sufferers would suggest he was up to something 
nefarious, according to the logic of TDS. There's nothing - not. one. thing. - that Trump could do or say that would be received 
positively by TDSers.

The history of Trump Derangement Syndrome actually goes back to the early 2000s - a time when the idea of Trump as president was 
a punch line for late-night comics and nothing more.

Wikipedia traces its roots to "Bush Derangement Syndrome" - a term first coined by the late conservative columnist Charles 
Krauthammer back in 2003. The condition, as Krauthammer defined it, was "the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people 
in reaction to the policies, the presidency - nay - the very existence of George W. Bush."