It's no secret that Republicans have made significant strides in winning over younger voters over the years, and New York-based writer Nathan Taylor Pemberton thinks it may already be too late for Democrats to catch up.
In an op-ed for The New York Times, Pemberton argues that the groyper movement has been the GOP's best recruiting tool to reach young voters. Groypers are a "young and almost exclusively online faction of white nationalists," according to Pemberton. He adds that they reached junior staffers and political operatives throughout the GOP's organization.
Groyper content not only reached people who agree with the group's ideology, but also taught the GOP how to make engaging online content, the op-ed argues.
"The groyper style is the Republican playbook right now," Caleb Brock, a 24-year-old digital strategy director for Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), told the NYT.
There are two aspects of Groyper content that Democrats have failed to counter. First, the content is conflict-based and is "optimized for negative attention," according to right-wing activist Christopher Rufo. Second, it is easy to reproduce because it's being created by "a generation trained in this kind of content for the past 10 years,” Brock added.
To stay relevant, groyper content is most often conveyed through memes. "Like an unhinged Zoomer, they’ve relentlessly posted sadistic memes about policy decisions in the style of social media trends," Pemberton continued.
Pemberton is also cynical about the Democrats' ability to address their communication problems with young voters.
"We shouldn’t count on the Democrats to swoop in with a fix anytime soon," Pemberton added. "Historically, they’ve exhibited a smug indifference toward the concerns of young voters and the online cultures that shape their opinions."
He pointed to Kamala Harris' 2024 presidential campaign of how the party's smugness toward young voters impacted the election results.
"Rather than attempt to engage the so-called manosphere and reach its mass audience of young men in the weeks leading up to the election, Ms. Harris’s team fumbled on the internet’s most crucial battleground spaces, YouTube and TikTok," Pemberton wrote. "Free to dominate this messaging vacuum, Mr. Trump had eye-popping support among white men under the age of 30 — earning the votes of roughly six in 10 — while eating into the Democrats’ margins with young Black and Latino men."
You can read the entire op-ed here.
