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On this episode of The David Frum Show, The Atlantic’s David Frum opens with his thoughts about the impending end to the government shutdown. David argues that the fight within the Democratic Party about ending the shutdown isn’t about the shutdown itself; rather, it’s about the future face of the party. David argues that now is a good moment to make a deal and that the Democrats have accomplished all they could hope to from the shutdown. He also cautions that allowing the left wing of the Democrats’ base to use any potential deal as a means to push the party in a more confrontational, more radical path must be avoided.
Then David is joined by The Bulwark’s Sarah Longwell. David and Sarah discuss the exit polls from this year’s elections and the current state of play within the American electorate. Sarah discusses how the increasing gender gap in voting patterns reflects a broader polarization between higher- and lower-information voters. Sarah also discusses how Donald Trump has upended everything we thought we knew about voting patterns and the uneasy position Republicans find themselves in once he’s off the ballot.
Finally, David closes with a talk about The Emergency, a new novel by The Atlantic’s George Packer.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
David Frum: Hello, and welcome back to The David Frum Show. I’m David Frum, a staff writer at The Atlantic. My guest this week will be Sarah Longwell, known to so many of you from her many TV appearances discussing her focus groups. We’re going to be talking about the recent 2025 November elections, what they tell us about the American electorate, and especially what they tell us about the enormous gender gap that has opened between the voting patterns of women and men, and especially the youngest women and the youngest men. What is going on with the young voters who turned out, the women, so overwhelmingly for Democratic candidates in 2025? So I’ll be talking to Sarah about that.
My book this week will be a new novel by my Atlantic colleague George Packer. The novel is called The Emergency, and it’s a haunting portrait of a world in decline that bears important resemblances to our own while clearly not being our own. It is a disturbing but beautiful work, and I strongly recommend it, and I’ll talk at the end of this podcast about why the book so spoke to me.
But before any of that, I wanna offer some thoughts about the ending of the government shutdown. I’m recording this podcast on Monday, November 10, so the deal to end the government shutdown has not quite been concluded as I speak, but a conclusion of some kind is imminent, accelerated perhaps by the havoc of this past weekend of air travel, one of the worst weekends for air travel in the United States since 9/11, that has left many people delayed or outright stranded, flights canceled. And as the government shutdown has come to an end, there’s been an upsurge of protest and outright anger from some of the most active and committed Democrats that they have been sold out by their party, having led the longest shutdown in American history, and many on the Democratic side think that there’s been a kind of sellout or disappointment. I wanna put some context on this because I don’t agree with any of that, and I think the Democrats are in danger of making some very bad decisions in reaction to the impulses and pressure from their most activist wing.
It’s important to understand that many Washington arguments are not actually about what they purport to be about. When Democrats argue about the ending of the government shutdown, they’re not just arguing about that. What they’re really arguing about is: What should the future face of the Democratic Party look like? Should it be more radical, more confrontational? Or should it be trying to find some kind of alignment with a broader consensus in American society? And one of the reasons that the figures in the Democratic Party who have led the negotiation to end the government shutdown have come under such fire is they are attractive targets for a party some of whose leading voices wanna remake the party entirely, in a much more militant way.
Now, let’s talk about the merits of the complaint before we get to the larger discussion that this complaint stands in for. First, the merits of the complaint: There was no way the shutdown was going to end any way differently from the way it did. The only question was how long it would take. Would the Democrats arrive at their present outcome in 20 days or 30 or 40—or, as some now wish, 50? But if this shutdown went on for 10 more days or 12 more days, if it spoiled Thanksgiving travel, the outcome of the shutdown would be in no way different. What this shutdown was ostensibly about was the renewal of tax credits under the Affordable Care Act.
Now, I’m gonna go into some detail here because we need to be clear about the unrealism of the demands. So the Affordable Care Act, of course, was passed by President [Barack] Obama. It went into effect in 2014. And among its provisions were a series of tax credits to subsidize the purchase of health insurance by people whose incomes were below a certain level. Those tax credits were in effect from 2014 to 2020. During the pandemic, President [Joe] Biden made the tax credits temporarily more generous in 2021, and the next year, in 2022, he extended those more generous tax credits until 2025—he and the Democratic Congress of that time. The tax credits were written by President Biden to expire, and the reason they were written to expire, well, it was twofold. First, they were really expensive. And many even in President Biden’s own party didn’t think that this level of expense, which was justified by the pandemic, should go on forever. And anyway, there are budget rules where, if you had made the tax credits permanent, you would’ve needed a bigger voting majority to pass them into law than was needed when they were made temporary. So it was President Biden and the Democratic Congress of 2021 and 2022 that made them temporary in the first place.
Now, had the Democrats won the election of 2024, I’m sure that President Kamala Harris would’ve tried to make the tax credits more permanent, either extend them for a long period of time or write them into law altogether. And if she had carried a Democratic House with her and enough Democratic senators, maybe she would’ve been successful, but probably not, because unless she had a very liberal Senate, they probably would’ve flinched from the cost. So these tax credits were on their way out anyway.
Now, that is a counterfactual speculation because, of course, the important point is she lost, and it didn’t happen. And there was no way that they were going to be continued indefinitely by a President Trump administration; the votes just weren’t there to do it. So when the Democrats made this big demonstration, they were engaged not in a real-world legislating exercise. The votes were never there to do what the Democrats wanted. There was no amount of shutdown that would ever change the votes and conjure them into being. The question for Democrats was: How did they drive home the point that President Trump was not as keen on health-care credits as they were? How did they message that? And the shutdown was their chosen way of messaging.
Shutdowns come with a lot of pain. They do a lot of harm to the economy. In this case, they brought harm to people who depend on federal food-aid relief. They brought harm to air travelers. They brought harm to many, many people: government employees, who expect their salary to be paid on time, and military people, civilian people. They bring disruption. They are very painful events, and they should not be accepted as regular parts of American life, although that’s what they have become.
But the contest in a shutdown is to use this pain as a kind of teaching exercise. Normally, the party that initiates the shutdown fails, not only fails on getting what it wants—everyone always fails; they never succeed in getting you what they want—but they also fail even to change the conversation. When Newt Gingrich shut down the government in 1994 and ’95 under President [Bill] Clinton, he was trying to drive home a message of budget austerity affecting even the Medicare program. Not only did he fail to get what he wanted from Medicare, but he contributed to the fallen popularity of the Republican Congress, first elected in 1994, and helped to reelect Bill Clinton. When President Trump, in 2018, 2019, shut down the government to try to force funds for the border wall—billions of dollars for a new border wall—he didn’t get the money. But he also drove home the point that the Trump priorities were not the same as the priorities of the American voter, that he was not the voter for the average person that he had represented himself as in 2016. And again, that government shutdown was an important reason why President Trump lost reelection in 2020, along, of course, with the COVID nightmare.
This time, Democrats had better success. Of course, they didn’t get their tax-credit extension. They were never going to. That was never a reasonable thing to expect or imagine or hope for. But what they did do was actually score political points against the Trump administration in a way that the Republican shutdowns of the past had never been able to do. They drove home the point that there is chaos because of Trump, not because of the Democrats, who actually were the people who shut down the government: The chaos is because of Trump. The airline-travel chaos is because of Trump. Trump wants to stop food stamps. And Trump is doing all of this because he wants to take away your health-care credits, and he doesn’t have any kind of health-care plan of his own, and neither does his party. That messaging was very successful by the standards of past shutdowns. Surveys showed that more Americans blamed the Republicans for the shutdown than Democrats, and surveys showed President Trump’s standing declining steadily.
It didn’t help that, while people were going without food stamps, while air travel was snarled, while government workers were going unpaid, Trump’s top priority seemed to be this fantasy he has a giant gilded ballroom where the East Wing used to stand of the White House, and they drove home that his priorities were different from everyone else’s.
So it was as successful as such a jagged weapon can ever be, and it would not get more successful if it had gone on longer. They would’ve done more harm. There is no reason to believe that it would’ve continued to subtract from President Trump’s strength. It might well have gone into reverse at some point and subtracted from the Democrats’ strength. They scored their messaging win. They proved it in the elections of November 2025, where Democrats won so dramatically in New Jersey and Virginia—and other places as well—and now it was time to pocket the winnings and leave the table. And that is what the Democratic leadership has done; there’s going to be, it looks like, some kind of deal.
But many on the Democratic activist side are saying these people are sellouts. Now, when they say that—The people who made the deal, they are sellouts—when they say that, it’s not because they really think that, if this shutdown had continued longer, that Democrats would’ve won on the tax-credits point. That was never going to happen. And it’s not because they even really think that they would’ve scored some other win. One of the big fantasy ideas that Democrats have—or certain activist Democrats—is if the shutdown had gone on a little longer, President Trump would’ve been forced to tell his Republican senators, Abolish the filibuster so that we can pass a budget without the Democrats at all. And a lot of the activist Democrats want the filibuster abolished. But that probably wasn’t going to happen either.
My guess is what would’ve happened is President Trump would’ve counted on hostage-taking, would’ve used the shutdown to inflict more pain on Democratic constituencies, especially this food-stamps problem—or Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program; it’s no longer called food stamps—where he was inflicting real pain on very vulnerable Americans and real pain on the federal workforce. And in the end, Democrats were going to care about that pain more than he did. And he would’ve gambled—and the Republicans in Congress would’ve gambled—that at some point, maybe some near point, public perceptions might flip, and the harm that the shutdown was doing to Republicans and Trump in the polls would redound instead upon the Democrats, who, after all, were the real authors of the shutdown. So it was a good moment to call it quits.
But the people on the Democratic activist side, having seen it called quits, now wanna use the calling it quits as a weapon of power inside the Democratic Party to push the party in a more confrontational, more radical path—more like these insurgent candidates like [Zohran] Mamdani in New York and others elsewhere—and against the traditional Democratic consensus, which will have the effect of making them more powerful while making the party less electable in most places in the elections of 2026 and 2028. If there are free and fair elections in ’26, ’28—which is a big if; we’re worried about that—but if there are, that doesn’t give the Democrats a pass to abandon the process, to abandon the work of being competitive for the votes in the center and the broad middle of American society. Assuming the elections are free and fair, they still have to compete and win, and that means coming forward with consensus candidates, candidates who look more like all of America and not just the activist wing.
The Democratic activist wing has deceived itself for, now, a decade that America wants a Bernie Sanders–type government, and America does not. And the more they foist that kind of approach on their own party, the more they do harm to their own party. And look, I’m not a Democrat; I don’t have any stake in the Democratic Party as an institution. But at this juncture in history, if you’re worried about Donald Trump, the Democratic Party is the instrument by which Donald Trump can be opposed—the only effective instrument. So a lot of us who aren’t Democrats have an interest in the Democrats making wiser and better choices than that party has sometimes made. And making those wiser and better choices means not listening to people for whom the big prize is not winning elections and saving American democracy, but winning control of the Democratic Party and empowering themselves.
And now my dialogue with Sarah Longwell. But first, a quick break.
[Break]
Frum: Sarah Longwell is a graduate of Kenyon College. She built a career as a Washington, D.C., communications expert on the Republican side, working first for others and then for herself. She became the first woman to become chair of the board of the Log Cabin Republicans, the premier gay-rights group within the Republican Party. And in that position, she was active in an important factional fight in the 2016 election, where she led the resistance within the Log Cabin Republicans to an endorsement of Donald Trump.
Time passed, the factional fight only worsened, and Sarah found herself, in 2019, confronted with a majority of her colleagues who wanted to endorse the reelection of Donald Trump. And on that issue, she resigned from the Log Cabin Republicans and reinvented her life in a very brave way, signing up for a then-new project called The Bulwark, where she became publisher, and creating an army of Republican groups: Republicans [Voters] Against Trump, many similar organizations—you’ve seen their content. And she has discovered a role as one of the leaders of a new kind of media campaign in the Republican world, standing up for traditional Republican ideas about the rule of law, limited government, free trade while opposing the Trump presidency. And over that time, she has become a kind of central figure in the intellectual and community life of the small but proud group of anti-Trump Republicans, so it is a special pleasure to welcome Sarah to the show today.
Sarah, thank you for joining.
Sarah Longwell: Thanks, David. It’s great to see you. Thanks for having me.
Frum: Okay, so I wanna ask you about a very specific thing that happened in the 2025 elections in Virginia and New Jersey and the city of New York, and then a series of less-headline elections: the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and Georgia Public Service Commission.
Now, we have some exit-poll data on this, and I’m going to preface; I’m gonna take a minute—I know you have even deeper expertise on this—to warn listeners and viewers against exit-poll data that comes out immediately after an election. There are a lot of technical problems with early exit polls, but the core problem is this: Somebody approaches you with a clipboard after you voted. Who’s likely to linger and talk to them? Not someone with kids to pick up at day care. Not someone with a job demanding them. This is someone with a little time on their hands and maybe a little extra willingness to share their views. Is that person like the people who are picking kids up at day care, are hastening to a job, or just don’t wanna share their views with strangers? If the group willing to talk to exit pollsters is a different kind of group from the kind of people who don’t wanna talk to exit polls, well, there’s your problem right there.
Then you have the problem of making sure, well, how many, for example—we’re going to be talking about this group—women should be in the sample. Women are 52 percent of the adult population. But you don’t know, on voting day, that women were 52 percent of the voting population, so you have to make a guess about how many women to include in your sample. And that goes for people over 65, people under 30, Blacks, whites, Latinos, Asians, people with certain income levels. You have to start with an implicit model of what the electorate looks like, which you don’t know, and then build your sample accordingly.
So, with all of those caveats, something enormous seems to have happened with the votes of women—and especially women under 30—on this voting day. And, Sarah, you are here to explain what happened, with all the caveats that we don’t have numbers that are as exact as some of the reporting suggests.
Longwell: Yeah, your caveats are real and good, but I think that, even if there was a miss in some way with the exit polling, it would be difficult for it to erase what is still a seismic overperformance of all of these Democratic candidates with women under 30. They all overperformed with men under 30 as well.
But just to take the three key races that we focused on last Tuesday, which is the Virginia gubernatorial race, the New Jersey gubernatorial race, and then the New York City mayoral race: In Virginia, where it was Abigail Spanberger up against Winsome Earle-Sears, who was the Republican, Abigail Spanberger was +17 with men under 30, but she was +64 with women under 30. And then it is similar in New Jersey—and this is another thing that’s interesting about this, is that the results are so similar to each other that you do have to think, at least trend-wise, they’ve got it right. And so in New Jersey, for men under 30, [Mikie] Sherrill was +17, but for women under 30, Sherrill was +62. That means that 81 percent of young women under 30, 81 percent, voted for Mikie Sherrill. Eighty-two percent of young women under 30 voted for Abigail Spanberger. And then you get to Mamdani, where men under 30 went 65 percent for Mamdani—and actually, New York is the one place where men slightly went more for Mamdani than in the other two races, where women overall went more for Sherrill and Spanberger. But still, women under 30 were 82 percent for Mamdani.
So those three races taken together, you have women under 30 where 81, 82 percent of them are voting for the Democratic candidate. That is a massive margin and really different from the gender breakdown, the gender split, for their older cohorts. So among men and women who are 65-plus, the gender divide is almost nonexistent. But as you get younger, the gender divide opens up into a chasm, and I think Democrats are feeling pretty good about the fact that they still overperformed with men relative to how they did in 2024, but with women, it’s just not even close. It’s like a total ownership by the Democratic Party of this young cohort of women.
Frum: Okay, before we go to the why, one more question about what: Do we have any information about Pennsylvania and Georgia?
Longwell: We don’t, or at least I don’t, in part because those races—so here’s the thing: In the other three races, the reason that you can get pretty good exit polling is because they had enormous turnout relative to a presidential year. These were really big races. And so the relative turnout compared to 2024, in New Jersey, I believe they got about 77 percent of the way there; it was a little more in Virginia. And so those are big numbers, where you can draw pretty big conclusions from them. The turnout in these states where the races were not so big was nothing compared to what it is in a presidential year, and so it’s tough to draw too many conclusions.
And I will say, one of the overarching things to understand—and I think that people do understand this more now; people get it. But just to put it all in context if this is something that does sound new to you—you’re like, Man, why this explosive difference in these off-year elections?—well, a large part of it is that there’s a trade that’s been going on over the last 10 or so years where a lot of college-educated, suburban voters who might have been Mitt Romney and John McCain voters have moved from the Republican Party into the Democratic Party. And that is good for Democrats in off-year elections because those are highly engaged, highly likely voters, and so they will vote in off-year elections, whereas Donald Trump got in the trade and Republicans got in the trade a lot more low-propensity voters.
And so one of the things that I do think people are still coming to terms with is, for a long time, for Democrats, the higher the turnout, the better Democrats did because they had these low-propensity voters who didn’t turn out in off years, didn’t pay much attention to politics, but when it came time for a big national election, they would show up and say, I’m voting for the Democrat. Donald Trump has brought those people into the Republican Party, to the point where, in 2024, if there had been far more people voting, the likelihood of Donald Trump winning by a larger margin [might increase], which is just not how politics used to work, but that is the reality of the way that Donald Trump has reshaped the Republican Party. Many more of these low-propensity voters are now part of the Republican Party. And many of them are men, which is another key piece of this story because women, like these Democratic voters, are much more likely to be hyper-engaged and to show up and be responsible about voting, including in off-year elections, where a lot of these younger men, who have kind of been red-pilled into the Republican Party, they are much more marginal voters. They are not the people you can rely on in an off-year election to the same degree. I think that’s a big part of what we’re seeing coming out of last Tuesday.
Frum: I wanna pin that and double back to it, but before we double back to it—and I really do wanna double back to that point, very much—this is a problem of relativity. When you see two groups drifting apart, the question is: Are they both moving? Is one staying still and the other moving, or vice versa? So as we see this increasing gap between the way women under 30 and men under 30 vote, who’s changing more?
Longwell: I think, well, society—all of us—all around us, there are big changes taking place. I do think that it is—women are changing more in the sense that, over time, women have become more educated. They tend to be statistically more—have more higher education than their male counterparts. They are, like I said, more sort of hyper-engaged in politics, whereas men, I think, are a little more red-pilled, a little more in the—
Frum: What do you mean? Explain what you mean by “red-pilled.”
Longwell: Yeah, so “red-pilled” is sort of two things. One is a rejection of kind of Democratic elite culture. So I think that men have been moving increasingly away from—
Frum: Let me pause you. “Red pill” is a reference to the movie The Matrix.
Longwell: Yes, sorry. You gotta go really far back to understand what “red-pilled,” “black-pilled” [comes from], but it’s essentially the idea that you get—well, actually, I don’t even explain it in the context of The Matrix; I explain it in the context of politics, which is a rejection of “woke,” DEI, and Democratic politics in general.
Frum: In The Matrix, there’s an offer of two pills, one which allows you to live in the world of comforting illusions, which is blue, and one of which is red, which allows you to see the horrible truth. And so when Alex Jones wants you to know that aliens are real and killed [John F. Kennedy], and Nancy Pelosi has been covering it up all this time because she’s a face-eating pedophile who drinks blood, that is called “red-pilling” because as lunatic and crazy and false in every particular, big and small, as it is, the people who absorb that red pill believe it’s true: The aliens did kill JFK, and Nancy Pelosi has been covering it up. And people, but especially men, who subscribe to these crazy things you hear on the internet don’t say, I’m a lunatic—which is true—or I trust and listen to lunatics and give them my money and buy their supplements. No, no, I have taken Morpheus’s red pill, and now I see the truth about the aliens killing JFK.
Longwell: That’s a way better explanation of what the actual act of taking a red pill is in the world. It is more like men saying, Man, I don’t think that there’s anything in what the Democrats are offering that resonates with me, and I reject it actively. In fact, it makes me angry. And this, I think, goes to the central point of the why about younger men and women. They live in algorithmically different universes, and that is pushing them to both not really understand each other, not be able to talk to each other.
There’s a whole bunch of other things going on. Some of it is just COVID, right? Part of the red-pill culture is about the idea that the way that elites approached COVID and demanded that they live inside and wear masks—and that they were wrong about that, and it destroyed people’s lives, and so Democrats are to blame. And so you’ve got this sort of young-man culture that is both angry at elites, angry at woke culture, and also, in many ways, hostile to women.
Frum: Because to go back to your other comparison, the people over 65, mostly, they’re men and women living together and, especially with nonnational elections, they’re talking to each other over breakfast. Like, “Well, this candidate for governor wants to widen the highway.” “Well, gee, that means we can get to work faster.” “Yes, but it’ll be more traffic on our road.” “Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. But getting to work faster, that would be good.” “Okay, so let’s vote for the candidate who’s going to widen the road, not the one—” and they converge because they’re talking to each other, especially about those bread-and-butter issues that are so prominent in local elections. You want the bars downtown to stay open from two to four—more revenue from merchants, a livelier street life. On the other hand, more mess, more risk of crime. The husband and wife over 65, they talk about those things. Whereas when you have young men and young women who not only don’t live together, but don’t consume the same media, don’t get the same algorithmic feeds, as you say, they’re not talking and therefore not converging.
Longwell: That’s a hundred percent the case. I did this episode on The Focus Group podcast, which is the weekly podcast I do where we listen to voters, but this week, we listened to young voters, and I had a sort of a Gen Z qualitative analyst on who was talking to me about what was going on with men and women. And one of the things she said to me that makes a ton of sense is not only are young people growing up very native to screens, to social media, and to these algorithmic impulses that push them into completely different worlds—’cause instead of saying, Okay, men and women, they might gravitate toward different things, but there’s also all this monoculture stuff that sort of brings them together, that they like to do together or where they have similar points of reference, and so they talk about it together, that much of that is disappearing, number one. And number two, COVID did a massive disruption for this younger generation that actually created for them an inability to even talk to each other in the normal ways, like flirting or figuring out how you just be together, like finding third spaces that aren’t in school or in a job where men and women come together and hang out.
And one of the things we did for this group is we listened to a young group of progressive women, and it was interesting to hear them say, essentially, I don’t really need men. They are off doing this stupid video-game stuff, and they’re sort of emotionally immature or stunted in these ways. I get a great deal of my sort of nutrition, like emotional sustenance, from other women, and so I don’t need men. And they’re acting like big babies. And then you listen to the men, who say, Well, I wanna get married. I wanna have kids. Those are my priorities. And of course, them feeling like women don’t feel the same way or reject them then cause them to sort of turn inward and find community in these bro-y podcasting spaces, gaming spaces, many places that actually could be either actively hostile to women or where just sort of a rejection of women to create that camaraderie becomes [prevalent]. And so they’re getting actively pulled apart in this way that doesn’t just have political consequences, but I feel like it’s gonna have lasting cultural consequences if we kind of don’t figure out what’s happening with the kids.
Frum: I’m interested by a word you haven’t said. ’Cause if we’re having this conversation about gender gaps, which began to show up in the 1980s. Before 1980, men and women voted almost exactly like each other and were defined by their group, so Black men and Black women;white men, white women; blue-collar men, blue-collar women; white-collar men, white-collar women. The sex divide was not an important divide before 1980. It begins to become an important divide in the 1980s, but especially among the young. Over the 45 years where we’ve been talking about this, the word that is always invoked first is the word abortion.
Longwell: Abortion. Yeah, true—
Frum: And you have not said that word at all.
Longwell: Yeah. That is because I think that that matters, it’s in there, and in fact, when we were listening to the young women in the groups, that was something they brought up pretty quickly. They did. They are scared about the repeal of Roe v. Wade. They are in that age group where their friends are actively grappling with pregnancies—wanted, unwanted—reproductive health in general, thinking about IVF. All of the things that kind of run the gamut there, that’s the age where not only do you have to contend with it biologically and all of the scary things that come with it, but everybody in your orbit is dealing with this stuff.
So it certainly came up and mattered to them, but it was in with a bunch of other things too. They were much more likely, and this is where the algorithm—and algorithms are difficult. And actually, this is where you get back to sort of the red-pill/blue-pill-type situation is, like, “What does a person see? What world do they live in?” And one of the big differences between people who are older and people who are younger is not just what types of media they consume, but how they consume it.
So older people are what we would call news seekers, right? Even people my age, people your age, we would watch the news. (Laughs.) It was an act. We would go sit down with our cup of coffee in the morning; we’d watch the news. Or we’d pick up the newspaper; we’d read the news. And obviously, that’s been shifting for a while. But we still have a news-seeker mentality: I’m gonna get on; I’m gonna look at what’s going on in the news.
Young people are news receivers almost exclusively. The algorithm just gives them their news; it washes over them. And so the algorithm is saying, Oh, young women, I’m gonna push more pro-Palestinian stuff your way. I’m gonna push more reproductive-rights stuff your way. I’m gonna push more affordability things your way, whatever it is—young women are just living in a different information environment than the men that they’re around. And so, yes, it’s abortion. I think that that really does matter. I think something bigger is happening than just reproductive rights.
Frum: How much of this is just behavioral? So Mitt Romney faced a gender gap because many women disagreed with his views not just on personal autonomy, reproductive health, things like that, but also Mitt Romney, you were going to get lower taxes for fewer services. But I venture that, if you’d ask the typical American middle-aged woman, you said, “If your daughter brought home a man like the young Mitt Romney, would you wanna see her marry him?” “Oh, yeah.” (Laughs.) “Yeah, he’d be a great husband. I may not vote for him for president, but, yeah, my daughter brought him home? Yeah.”
Okay, so Donald Trump, you’d call the cops, right? I mean, this guy… (Laughs.) You’d get a restraining order. And, well, I was about to say, “He’s the biggest jerk in the world.” Actually, you know what, maybe he was in 2016, but he has been so far overtaken by bigger and bigger jerks who have been licensed by him, and we live in, like, the golden age of jerks. And so much of the world that we have seen since 2020, the informational world, is one in which the content produced for men teaches, invites, validates the worst kind of behavior. And I wonder if that’s kind of—that women just say, I want no part of this.
Longwell: Well, so I actually don’t quite know the answer to this, but I’m gonna venture something. Because one of the things that’s been so interesting to me as I’ve listened to focus groups now for eight years around Trump, I went back recently and looked at some of my 2018 focus groups among women—I’m talking about, like, 50-year-old women, 60-year-old women—and they have this sort of strong/weak frame they’re grappling with. They have been dealing with Donald Trump in their lives for forever, right? He was around, he was a playboy, he’s on Page Six, and then he was on The Apprentice, this carefully curated businessman. And I would say, older women, the locker-room talk landed with them. They kind of understood that. And obviously, there has been a disparity with women, but overall, he does okay. The bottom hasn’t completely dropped out with women.
For younger women, it is not just Trump, but it is the forces Trump has unleashed on the young men around them that they have to deal with, that they have to listen [to]. Imagine not just having Trump’s sort of “Grab her by the” stuff in the ether, but now Andrew Tate and Matt Walsh and the tradwives and all this stuff you see permeating the culture among young men, and you have the ability—in ways that, I think, women many, many decades older than you might not have, right, because they were conditioned more to, like, deal with it. Young women are like, I don’t need to deal with this. Listening to the progressive women, they were just like, Getting married, having kids is not my No. 1 priority, and if these guys are gonna act like this, I don’t have to hang with that.
Frum: I don’t have to imagine it, because I have a daughter in the relevant dating pool. And I hear—her mother hears more, obviously, but… (Laughs.) But I hear some, and it does seem like—I don’t know what’s going on in the entire universe, but in the universe of college-educated, career-minded young men, the behavior seems to be a lot worse than it was when I was in that group.
Longwell: Well, I think part of it is: How do you behave if your incentives are to come together, right, if the cultural incentives are to find a way to—men need women; women need men. We are finding ways to take the fact that there’s these real differences, but there’s things that pull them together and make them wanna cohabitate and live in the world together, in a way where those incentives are just sort of falling away. And it’s the reason that—part of the rise of the tradwife and men talking about repealing the Nineteenth Amendment, it comes from a sense of, Women are not as reliant on us anymore. That freaks us out, and also, I do think, is genuinely displacing, right? This idea of, I don’t know what my role in society is if women’s role in society is this, and so I’m gonna be angry about it.
And I don’t wanna overstate it. And the young woman that I was interviewing from Gen Z also was sort of careful to be like, And, hey, look, we’re still out here dating. We’re still out here living our lives. But just in terms of big, macro cultural forces, I do think the things that divide the sexes and the incentives have shifted quite a bit and are pushing people apart more than they’re pushing them together.
Frum: Yeah. Now, I pinned something a little while ago, and I wanna come back to this, about what is happening. And maybe a way back into this thing we wanted to pin was to talk about what happened in New York City, because Mamdani did do well with young men. I have my own private theory about that, but I’d be interested to know, is the difference here—and this goes back to the thing we wanted to talk about before—is that women are voting for women? Because, remember, the places where we saw these huge gender gaps were female candidates—although, in Virginia, it was a female candidate against another female candidate. In New Jersey, female candidate against a male candidate. In New York, the candidate was male. Is that why young men were more attracted to Mamdani, or was it that Mamdani did come more from a very male-oriented media subculture? And he also—I’m gonna try to put this as neutrally as I can—but he had engaged in and celebrated a lot of norm-defying behavior.
Longwell: Yeah, I think that, partly, it’s tough to extrapolate. You can extrapolate a lot more about national politics out of New Jersey and Virginia than you can out of New York City. New York City is really its own kind of beast with its own kind of—like, the people who voted for Cuomo, it’s hard to know whether they’re kind of Trumpy Republicans, all the way over to sort of normie Democrats, to Jews who didn’t like Mamdani. It’s actually a very difficult thing to tease apart or extrapolate from New York City what’s going on in national politics.
Just in terms of men versus women, the women-under-30 margin was basically exactly the same as it was in the other two races, which was that it was 82 percent women under 30 went for Mamdani, but 65 percent of men under 30 went for Mamdani, which is higher than the other two races. And it was a very high turnout. The thing is, turnout is such an important part of trying to carve up how many people did what in an election, and there’s just a ton of New York Democrats. But I do think that Mamdani appealed to men in part because he is a man, in part because he did more—he was very much in the sort of, yeah, male algorithmic ecosystem. But I do think some of it just has to do with, yeah, him being a guy.
This is a difficult thing to tease out in focus groups ’cause people don’t like admitting it, but people do talk about the fact that they don’t wanna vote for women.
Frum: Yeah. No, really, they do. Yeah, they will say that.
Longwell: They do, much more for president than for these local elections. And people will articulate this, women too, where they’ll say, I’m happy to vote for a woman for Senate, whatever, but when it comes to—and a lot of it has to do with dealing with world leaders. But people, often, in focus groups—and not just often, almost dominantly—they put things in strong-and-weak framing. And one of the things they say about Donald Trump is that he’s strong, and Kamala Harris seemed weak, but also, Joe Biden seemed weak.
And I think that there’s something about Mamdani—young, handsome, lots of energy—that lends itself to the strong framing that does allow, it’s not everyone, but does allow some men to just tag on in ways that they feel funny about voting for women. I think it does make up a little bit of margin.
Frum: You think people are more willing to say in a focus group, I wouldn’t vote for a woman, than they were 15 years ago?
Longwell: I do. Hundred percent. The thing is, I wasn’t doing focus groups back then, but I gotta say, in my life—and I was a Republican, so I was around lots of people with Republican ideas—I never heard anybody say, I wouldn’t vote for a woman—
Frum: They might think it.
Longwell: They might think it, sure. But honestly, people—especially for Republicans, there was always a sense of, It would be great to have more women candidates. For such a long time, it was a real sense of, We need to get more women in because that’s how we’re competitive. Women vote at these higher numbers. Everybody sort of knew that.
Donald Trump came along, and now both men and women are much more willing, and a lot of them older, to just say—I’ve had people, men—I remember it vividly, so it can’t happen so much that it doesn’t leave an impression. But he was like, Well, what if they’re on their period? Who knows what kind of decision they might make? And so you do hear more of that kind of stuff.
Frum: I think, with men voters of a certain age, there was also the [Margaret] Thatcher example. So the first female leader of a G7 country was someone who was unquestionably strong and on the right. And so I think that led a lot of people in the Republican world in the ’80s and ’90s to assume the first female president will probably be a Republican in the Thatcher model because that may answer the strong—I mean, no one would ever say—
Longwell: I thought that. That was always my thinking, that the first female president would be a Republican. I think if Condoleezza Rice had run—and this is where people are like, Well, no, America’s never gonna vote for a Black woman. I’m convinced that if Condoleezza Rice had run—also, I’m convinced that if Michelle Obama had run this last time—I think she would’ve won. I think that Republicans would’ve voted for her. I think that some Democrats would’ve voted for her. But there aren’t a lot of women now in the Thatcher model. (Laughs.)
Donald Trump is actually—he’s managed to, in a weird way—there are a lot of women, a lot of high-profile women, in the Republican Party. There’s Marjorie Taylor Greene. There’s Elise Stefanik. There’s Kristi Noem. He surrounds himself with lots of women—Pam Bondi. So in some ways, and people don’t really write this story that much, but he has lots of women in his orbit, maybe more than any president I can remember. The problem is, is that they’re all deeply subservient to Donald Trump, right? They’re all in his image. And so he likes that. He likes that there’s all these women who are willing to kind of just subsume themselves into Donald Trump’s image. Even that was part of the problem for Winsome Earle-Sears, right? They’re all these, like, MAGA weirdo candidates, and none of them are in the Thatcher model at all, right? They sort of don’t stand alone.
And to the extent that Nikki Haley—she could never recover from the way in which she had allowed herself to be totally sort of humiliated over and over by Donald Trump and made to look a fool. She actually was on the trajectory of that Thatcherite model: somebody who was deeply invested in foreign policy or had high level of expertise in that. But nobody sees her as strong, the way they don’t see a lot of these women as strong, because they’re just Trump-lite, so everybody can see that they’re this simulacrum of Donald Trump.
Frum: I wanna go back now to something—a point I, again, I bracketed a little while ago. Are we looking at sort of an education gap because women are so much more successful at getting university and post-university education than men, that that’s another thing that is going on here?
Longwell: Yeah, the diploma divide is essential to understand. If there’s two things in politics—and I wouldn’t even put the gender divide as the top one; I would put the diploma divide at the top because I think it’s driving a big part of the gender divide. And then it would be the political realignment that has happened with Donald Trump, to the extent where—and, again, meaning that there’s been this trade, the trade of noncollege, working-class voters have moved to the Republican Party. The average voter in this country is a 50-year-old white person without a college degree. But in places where there is a high concentration of college degrees, they tend to be more liberal. And most importantly, and this is what really matters for 2026, is that it is the off-year elections where Democrats now have the advantage because they have more college-educated voters, and many of them are like me—they are people who used to vote for Republicans—and Republicans used to benefit from having people like me in the off year. In the off years, we would show up, and so Republicans had the chance to do really well in off years. That is no longer true. This is the biggest flip in politics, structurally, which is that, in off years, Democrats now have the opportunity to do better because they have more college-educated voters.
And I would hazard to take that a step further, then, and say, to your point, to bring it back: Because young women—and women in general—are now much more likely to have a B.A., to be college educated, and to be tapped in on these political issues in off years, they are now becoming enormous driving forces in who wins in off-year elections, which is why you’re seeing these extremely enormous margins, right? Because in the makeup of who voted, young women are making up quite a large percentage of who is turning out to vote, so they are gonna become a key constituency, and that young men—much like noncollege, working-class voters—are people who maybe just turn out in big national elections and just pay attention to big national vibes, but aren’t as keyed in on all this other stuff that young women seem to be very keyed in on.
Frum: If you were to give each party some advice about how it can overcome its deficiencies, not grand strategic advice, but just say, okay, if you’re a Republican running for senator, governor in ’26, and you’re worried about how you do with women, what should you do? And if you’re a Democrat worried about how you’re doing with men in ’26, what should you do?
Longwell: Well, if you wanna do better with women, you should reject Donald Trump. The extent to which Trump is driving—a rejection of Trump—and that shouldn’t be underestimated in these numbers, either. Just the way that young men have gravitated more toward Donald Trump, young women are repelled by him.
And this is a bigger question. Trump’s lame-duckness really came into focus after these first off-year elections. They’re going to come further into focus after the 2026 elections, where people will start saying, Okay, who is gonna be the Republican nominee in 2028? And I think that, going into ’26, the extent to which Trump is still, though—rejection of him—is a driving force in Democratic politics, I think that that’s the No. 1 thing: Young women don’t wanna have anything to do with Donald Trump.
If you were gonna bring young men in, if you wanna do more with young men, go on all the podcasts. This is what Trump did. This is what [J. D.] Vance is doing. Vance’s job is basically to go on bro podcasts and keep the Trump agenda top of mind for them.
Frum: Yeah. That’s one of his vulnerabilities when you say, Who succeeds Donald Trump? I bet it’s pretty unlikely that J. D. Vance ever said, Let’s repeal the Nineteenth Amendment, the amendment that gives women the vote, but I bet there’s a clip of him chuckling when somebody else said it.
Longwell: Yeah, well, there’s definitely clips of him talking about “childless cat ladies” being the biggest problem. J. D. Vance is a very good archetype of the kind of low-level hostility to women and, especially, sort of memeification of jokes about progressive women. And so the intensity of the rejection of J. D. Vance from young women will be hard, and that will further accelerate that gender divide because I do think that Vance has something that a lot of young men—I know this for a fact; I listen to young men talk about it—they like him. They find him to be a more intellectual version of Donald Trump, somebody slightly more serious, and also somebody who is young like them, just like Mamdani is a young man like them.
Frum: Yeah. So you think that that works? Because he’s awfully eggheady.
Longwell: I don’t think it works the way Trump works. I think the reason that you see them cosplaying around the Trump 2028 is that they recognize this phenomenon that I have now discussed at length of: Trump draws out low-propensity voters in a way Republicans have never seen for their party. And they do not know if that continues to happen with J. D. Vance, because Donald Trump is such a unique figure, and if, suddenly, without Trump’s general election ability to put up Saddam Hussein–like numbers in a lot of rural areas and other places, if that’s left to J. D. Vance and they can’t get that, but these college-educated, suburban voters have now shifted to the Democrats, that spells long-term trouble for Republicans.
Frum: Last thought on this, for what it means for the shape of local politics. Because one of the [things] you have left behind, there’s a big question mark about 2028, but your suggestion is that, if it’s about propensity, that state government should become more and more—what is the word I’m looking for—more and more aligned with the interests of younger women. I don’t wanna use the word liberal or progressive, because I’m not sure that that’s exactly what’s going on. But the way that those people who are, today, under 30 and very soon will be under 40 think, it should drive more and more of the way the local government behaves.
Local government, since the elections of 2010, has moved so far to the right. Republicans had a big year in 2010; there were the redistrictings. And we’ve had very conservative local governments almost everywhere from 2010, and with the consequence, effects of the way state maps are drawn, when you have a very conservative Wisconsin state legislature, you’ve got a very gerrymandered Wisconsin congressional delegation, same thing in North Carolina. But if it becomes harder for Republicans to win in Wisconsin and North Carolina at the state level, how does that ramify through the whole federal political system?
Longwell: Look, I’ve always thought that the only way to get our politics to return to normal is for Republicans to endure sustained electoral defeats—which is not what’s been happening, right? We keep having “change” elections, swinging back and forth. Republicans have more confidence that they can continue in this Trumpy direction and compete electorally.
Part of me doesn’t wanna overemphasize sort of the demographic of young people growing up and then our politics staying the same, because I think the Democrats thought that that would happen because of demographics and because of young people, and that didn’t happen. I do think what might happen long term is that the parties start to become really gender divided, that Republicans basically say, I don’t think we can compete—which is what they’re doing right now. They’re saying, I can’t and won’t even try to compete with young women. Instead, we’re gonna focus on competing more with young men, and that includes margins of Black men and Hispanic men that help us sort of recover those numbers. And because, like I said, the average voter is a 50-year-old noncollege white voter, and there’s a lot of them, they can still do really well, but they have to start losing in places like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.
And in fact, I’ll tell you something else that worries me, is that there’s gonna be a census in 2030 that I think is gonna tilt things even further in favor of Republicans. It is getting very hard because these concentrations of young, college-educated women, they’re not as concentrated in Ohio; they’re not as concentrated in Florida, in places where Democrats used to be competitive and no longer are. And so the Senate map is increasingly hostile to Democrats, and Democrats are gonna have to figure out how to compete in places that they used to be able to compete in, right, when Heidi Heitkamp was around or lots of people who—they could compete in Iowa. And they’re gonna have to do that again.
Frum: Sarah, thank you so much for your time today. It’s such a pleasure to talk to you always. I always learn from you.
Longwell: Oh, thanks for having me, David.
Frum: Bye-bye.
[Music]
Frum: Thanks so much to Sarah Longwell for joining me today on The David Frum Show. As I mentioned at the top, my book this week is a new novel, The Emergency, by my Atlantic colleague George Packer. Now, some of you who listen to or watch this podcast may remember a dialogue that George Packer and I shared together about his very incisive profile of J. D. Vance earlier this year.
George Packer is the author of important works of nonfiction: a 2005 study of the war in Iraq, The Assassins’ Gate, based on his really empathetic and very courageous war reporting from the Iraq front. He wrote, in 2013, a stylistically original study of the Great Recession called The Unwinding, which mixed broad economic reporting with a series of very elegant and interior profiles of people, both famous and not, who had been caught up in the drama and tragedy of the events of the Great Recession. He is the author, in 2019, of a biography of Richard Holbrooke, the great American diplomat, called Our Man.
But George, through his career, has been ambidextrous—fiction and nonfiction—and this new novel of his, The Emergency, marks a return to his career as a writer of fiction. I read it in an earlier form. It made an enormous impression on me; it’s one of those novels I found myself dreaming about. And as I thought about why it had made such an impact on me, it led me to a thought that George wants to invite, a thought he contributed a recent article to The Atlantic about, which is: What is fiction for, exactly?
Now, I am mostly a writer of nonfiction. I’ve tried my hand at fiction; it was not of the level of artistic excellence of George’s work. When you write nonfiction, you’re constantly trying to explain to people both how the world is and to prove that you have a right to talk about it. You have devices to substantiate your claims to credibility—facts and figures, quotes, public-opinion polling—that you’re trying to persuade people, Look, I’m going to tell you what the world is like, and here’s how you can know that I am right about what the world is like, and this is why you should believe me.
With fiction, you jettison that apparatus. What you do in the work of fiction is say to the reader, I’m going to show you something. I believe it’s true. You don’t have to believe it. We’re saying it’s mostly made up, or it’s imagined. But I’m gonna show you something, and you tell me if you agree that I have shown you a truth that you recognize, even though there are no facts and figures to back it up.
And that, I think, is what George has done in The Emergency. Here, he conjures up a world that is like and unlike our own. It is a world in which an old order has collapsed, in which young people are imposing new structures of identity and conformity on the old, in which the old feel left out, and in which many people are turning to devices that substitute for reality, that offer them a more attractive experience than reality. So that sounds like a world we know. But in many respects, it’s not the world we know. It doesn’t take place in the United States of America. It doesn’t take place in any country that actually exists. It takes place in a fictional fallen empire. It doesn’t take place exactly in our time. The world of The Emergency‚ well, they do have cars. They have firearms. They have surgical suites. But it doesn’t feel quite modern. It feels like the world of the 1970s or maybe the 1960s. It doesn’t have an economy that works quite like ours. It doesn’t have groups that conform to our idea of what the groups in society are. It’s like and unlike.And one thing that is also very important is, although it is a world that doesn’t exist, it’s a world that doesn’t have fantastic elements of magic or technology. There are no spaceships, and there are no wizards and warlocks, no magic spells, no incantations. The laws of physics in George Packer’s universe are exactly the same as the laws of physics in our universe—no abracadabras. And the people are very like people you know, and they operate and talk in ways that feel very familiar, even if they do so in a context that is—well, that’s the big question mark, is, in some ways, the context is familiar. Many of us have a feeling that we live in a world that is not the world we expected to live in, a world that is somehow falling away from a better world that existed until quite recently, a world that disappoints many of our expectations and hopes, and a world in which we have to make the best of things that we thought we would never encounter in the first place.
So in that sense, it’s strange, but it’s not so strange. And in fact, one of the things that I think George is doing in this book is he’s making our present-day world more intelligible by making it more strange, by abstracting. There’s no Donald Trump. There’s no Congress of the United States. There are no midterm elections. TIt’s not even clear that there’s no internet in the novel. It’s not even clear that this is a world in which the people involved are really speaking English; although the novel is recorded in English, it’s quite possible this is some other kind of language entirely, which just happens to be reported to us in English. But it’s a world in which we’re going to feel that a lot of our fears and doubts are reflected in ways that make them easier to grasp and easier to understand, but with no claims made that this is how reality is. If you don’t wanna believe it, you don’t have to. There are no opinion polls here, no surveys, no facts and figures.
As I said, it is the kind of book that I found myself literally dreaming about. I woke up one night, and I felt I had been living for that evening in the world of The Emergency, a world in which sometimes it seems that we are living among fragments of a ruined society. And that the challenge for each of us is to figure out: How do we reconnect with people who have been estranged from us by the ruin of the old society and make something new that maybe won’t be quite as good as what went before, maybe represents a degree of loss, but doesn’t have to be as bad as it otherwise might be?
It’s a novel, in many ways, of grief and disappearance and decline. But that kind of experience can also summon us to awareness of new possibilities—maybe not for everybody, but for ourselves—and new challenges to us to do right things under difficult circumstances rather than slide into the temptation to do wrong things.
I highly recommend the book. I am so pleased to have been one of the early readers of it, and I think you will find it as moving and as disturbing as I did.
That’s it for The David Frum Show this week. Thank you so much for joining me. I hope you will consider subscribing to The Atlantic. That is the best way to support the work of this podcast and of all my colleagues. You can also subscribe to an alert for my particular articles when they post; you will be the first to know. I hope you will share news of this podcast on whatever platforms you use to listen to or watch online content. Thank you for joining, and I hope to see you again next week here on The David Frum Show.
[Music]
Frum: This episode of The David Frum Show was produced by Nathaniel Frum and edited by Andrea Valdez. It was engineered by Dave Grein. Our theme is by Andrew M. Edwards. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m David Frum. Thank you for listening.
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