This is what loses elections, and rightfully so:
Delayed homeownership means delayed childbirth. It means fewer or no children. This is a catastrophe for regular people. And prattling moronically how we are in the Golden Age of the US economy sounds like a cruel joke to pretty much everybody who is not wealthy. 82% of women under 30 and 68% of men in the same age group in NYC voted for Mamdani. And yes, he’s a nepo baby fraud. But he got these young people’s support by taking these very serious issues seriously. Because nobody else is doing it.
Trump announced the other day that “grocery prices are way down.” Why, in the name of everything normal, would they be down? This is delusional and is precisely the kind of stuff that loses elections, as it well should. We mocked Biden for exactly this kind of ridiculous lying.
Instead of exercising pressure on our elected leaders to abandon the la la land of this utter fantasy, the Right is mired in whiny complaints about microaggressions and inclusivity and who said what to whom that hurt their everloving fee-fees. Lonely Matt Walsh is begging people to get their heads out of their Israel-obsessed anal cavities and start paying attention to what is happening in our country.
This is very embarrassing and very self-defeating.
Clarissa's Blog 
I appreciate your analysis, especially since, living outside America, I find it difficult to stay on top of all political developments.
Still, what I don’t understand is, why would a majority of young electors – who are already leaning on the Left – use these elections to complain about lack of access to affordable housing when they say that they do not want children, do not want to get married, and are overwhelmingly focused on their careers, especially female voters.
I suspect something else may be at work. First of all, the share of the under-40s who actually turn out at elections is higher among women, and younger women are known to favour the Left. Also, conservatives tend to vote less frequently than left-leaning people, especially in election rounds, such as the recent ones in NYC, Va. and NJ, where a Democratic win is more or less a done deal. I am not endorsing this, but it is a fact. I used to be a Leftist and it was drilled into me from a very young age that I was supposed to vote at any and every opportunity, for whatever elective office being contested and I’ve kept this habit to this day. Conservatives do not seem to have the same instinct for mobilising in these circumstances.
Finally, it must be remembered that so many young people, especially in urban areas, are feeling increasingly frustrated by the reality that was so carefully concealed from them for so long: over-schooled, over-educated and in terribly underpaid jobs. All their lives long they were told that education was the key to success, and now that they’ve got diplomas, Master’s degrees and other qualifications, those really good job opportunities they’d been dreaming of since their teenage years have not materialised, and chances are that they never will.
Overqualified, underemployed, childless, and often single, women are the powder keg of revolutions: a never-ending reservoir of votes for the posturing agitators in the Democratic party. Meanwhile, conservative young men and women are busy living their lives, having children and looking after them, often in the heart of rural Mid-America, a far, far cry from the madding crowds of Manhattan and their class grievances, and those Virginia’s suburbs teeming with Federal employees with an axe to grind against the current presidential incumbent.
LikeLike
68% of young men also went for Mamdani. We are lying to ourselves by presenting this as an exclusively female problem. The Right is losing all of the gains it made with the young, with Hispanics, with every group that saw gains in 2024.
Housing prices are absolutely terrible here in the Midwest, too. Tiny houses, one room on top, one on the bottom, zero privacy, zero land, behind a gas station, ugly and completely see-through because there’s no space for a wall around the windows, no place to park, obviously no garage, were snapped up at $310,000.
To compare, 11 years ago, we bought our 3-storey 4-bedroom, 4-bath, real fireplace, two-car garage, large front and backyards and a walkout apartment-type basement with a kitchen and a bathroom for $327,000. That’s only a decade of difference! No normal person of any political views can consider this dramatic rise in costs reasonable.
We are deluding ourselves if we blame this on absolutely anything and anybody except for a tragic and continued mismanagement of the economy.
And again stupid Lutnick goes on TV to say that the economy is great because the stock market goes up. This is such cluelessness that I have no words to describe it.
LikeLike
The politician-right is in a huge bind on this one, because anything that brings house prices down, is untenable to boomers who are using their inflated house “values” as retirement piggy banks, and untenable to all the mega-investment-firms who are neck-deep in real estate. That includes everybody’s 401k.
I wish they’d start attacking it from a fraud standpoint, but even the fraud is SO BAD that a cleanup would likely collapse prices.
The socialists have the optics high ground, because they can just say shite and not worry about whether it’s real or not. Their constituents will believe anything.
Price collapse would be the greatest thing ever for… everybody under fifty who hasn’t bought a house yet. But politically radioactive for everyone else.
This is one of those predicament/problem things. Problems have solutions. This isn’t a problem: it’s a predicament. It sucks. There’s no solution. Bad stuff is happening and we just have to deal with it, any way around. We could’ve solved it back in 2008, and chose not to. Too late now.
-ethyl
LikeLike
There is concern in B.C. that “giving land back to the indigenous tribes” will destabilize property values.
LikeLike
That is the entire purpose of land acknowledgements. They exist to habituate the middle class to the idea of not owning real estate.
LikeLike
I’m at this very moment seeing pictures of Hasidic rabbis congratulating Mamdani and shaking hands with him, so I am now convinced by your argument. Thank you.
LikeLike
Kid, what you have been seeing is the continual deliberate debasing of the currency. Nevermind what any government agency claims, pay attention to what the world says, during that 11 years the price of gold went from ~$1000 an ounce to over $3000.
https://mostlycajun.com/wordpress/?attachment_id=78513
LikeLike
True. One of our biggest assets, our national currency, is being undermined. That’s a major issue.
LikeLike
It’s hovering around 4000 right now.
https://www.kitco.com/charts/gold
LikeLike
Once again, I don’t think you’re framing this correctly. “People” aren’t obsessed with israel. This fucking administration is, and the entire GOP is. Matt Walsh has an excuse for framing it this way (his boss is an israel-firster turbo zionist who couldn’t give a shit about what happens to america). What’s your reason?
We’ve been conditioned to think this is “normal.” But it’s not. It’s insanity.
LikeLike
We need a bunch of public audits, and everybody getting a paycheck to shill for ISR needs to be required to wear a giant red letter i on their chest every time they go out in public.
LikeLike
The man who writes Matt Walsh’s checks:
LikeLike
2011? I stanned Obama like crazy in 2011, so I can’t blame anybody else for pretty much anything. ☺️
LikeLike
Jesus, what a dodge. Do you really believe Shapiro has changed his mind about netanyahu? He’s practically a mossad agent.
LikeLike
I think that the idea that Shapiro pays Walsh’s salary is bizarre. Walsh is the rainmaker for the whole outfit. They are nothing without him. And who cares anyway? Walsh gets results. Everybody else just bickers and moans.
LikeLike
He’s Walsh’s boss.
LikeLike
I’m totally fine giving Bernie Sanders and Co economic populism a try. Anything to reign in the billionaires that are never satisfied and just want more and more wealth and power. That’s where the real culprits and struggle lies. Everything else is a distraction.
LikeLike
The GOP’s not done yet. Endorsed by Trump!
LikeLike
Rightful losses, indeed.
LikeLike
\ we bought our 3-storey 4-bedroom, 4-bath, real fireplace, two-car garage, large front and backyards and a walkout apartment-type basement with a kitchen and a bathroom for $327,000.
Now I understand how you could afford this house. Before I thought N had to earn like a bank manager to afford this house, like he would in my country.
$327,000 is 1,070,152 shekels.
For this sum it is literally impossible to buy a flat in a slum in Israel.
My mother bought a 3-room flat we live in around 20 years ago. Then it cost close to $200 000.
Now our flat – which is 20 years older than then (~50 years old building), has no place to park a car and no reinforced room to protect from missiles (*)- costs around $611,128.
A 4-room flat in my city in a 25-year-old building with a parking place for 1 car and with a reinforced room costs $794,467 .
(*) “Since 1992, all new residential construction is mandated to include a private or communal safe room due to short early-warning times for attacks, which makes reaching a distant bomb shelter difficult.”
LikeLike
Everybody I know who bought in the past decade wouldn’t be able to afford to buy their own house today, only a few years later.
People are expected to be happy with such an economy but I don’t see how.
LikeLike
In Israel the rise in prices happened fast too, not long after my mother bought this flat. See the graph.
LikeLike
the problem is they’re being bribed with their fabulous, imaginary “net worth”.
OMG I bought a house twenty years ago, now I’m a millionaire!
I mean, you can’t eat it or anything, and everybody who’s in the stage of life you were in twenty years ago is f****d. But hey, you’re rich now. You made it.
And now, politically, it’s suicide to do anything that might take that away from people, even if it’s a giant scam. People who view themselves as having come down in the world are far far more resentful than people who just never made it.
-ethyl
LikeLike
I feel like I’m living in a lunatic asylum because I can’t convince people that this is a problem. Yesterday I had a very tense conversation with a MAGA friend who thinks that the economy has never been better. The cluelessness is shocking.
LikeLike
I’m cautious about this phenomenon, because there’s a huge divide between what I see people saying IRL, and what I see people saying online, which strongly suggests to me that a lot of it is bots, paid trolls, and people play-acting at success in the safe anonymity of electronic fora, where you can live in a roach-infested efficiency with sticky carpets, but LARP as a super-successful investment bro.
Online, on ‘the right’, I have heard it all: Stop your whining, you can’t afford a house because you’re a loser, you don’t work hard enough, you’re lazy, you think the world owes you something, etc. etc. etc. I don’t think any of these people have kids, and this seems like a very big tell.
Nobody says that to my face.
So… are those people real, or are they variously paid infiltrators, conmen selling getrichquick courses, and defensive very-online boomers? All of the above?
I do know people IRL who bought a rundown suburban house as blue-collar working people in the 90s, remodeled it themselves, and are now “rich” (they cannot afford to sell the place and move, because of course everything else got more expensive too). Neighbors’ house, which needed a ton of work, just sold for $700k. They are typcial New England liberals though, definitely not MAGA, and far more self-aware about the imagined wealth than any of the victim-blaming online right. They’re watching all the younger relatives fail to form families, struggle financially, fret over being able to get into low-income apartments, and they’re NOT going “You losers should have worked harder”.
The conservative people I know IRL, also not doing that.
So.
Who is?
What if they’re just fake people?
-ethyl
LikeLike
Trump and Lutnick have both been gushing about how fantastic the economy is. Huge Biden vibes.
LikeLike
Yeah.
“The economy is great!” at this point is basically the same as “I’m rich and out of touch, and I’ve completely forgotten how I got elected!”
-ethyl
LikeLiked by 1 person