They feel frustrated by the status quo, and they’re fed up with the system. They don’t trust politicians, and they want revolutionary change.

They are men, many of them younger, who are looking for a champion. Once, they liked Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., as a presidential candidate. This election, they voted for Donald Trump.

The number of Sanders supporters who have gone MAGA is most likely a sliver of the electorate. But they illustrate an important pattern in American politics, political scientists say, one that might help explain Trump’s success with young men in particular. For certain voters, political preferences are defined not by party, but by their attitudes about the ruling class — whether they trust people in power, or think they’ve rigged the system against ordinary people.

In the final New York Times/Siena College national poll in late October, nearly two-thirds of voters said the government was “mostly working to benefit itself and the elites,” rather than “the people and the country.” Eighty-two percent of Trump voters said so, twice as many as Kamala Harris voters.

The idea resonated in particular with men and younger voters, the poll found — groups that Trump especially courted in this election and that Sanders did well with in his Democratic primary campaigns in 2016 and 2020.

“The connective tissue from Trump to Sanders is something akin to populism — the ruling class sucks — and that rhetoric plays well among a certain class of people who don’t feel the government works for them,” said Joshua Dyck, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell.

“The politics of anti-elite grievance is not just popular in the United States and it’s not just popular on the right,” he said. “It is the story of politics right now.”

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Joe Rogan Has Endorsed Sanders in 2020

Perhaps the highest-profile Sanders-to-Trump supporter is Joe Rogan, the popular podcaster, especially among young men. He endorsed Sanders in 2020, and while he once disavowed Trump, this year he had him on his show and endorsed him.

In interviews, young men who once supported Sanders and voted for Trump this election said they wanted drastic change. They didn’t necessarily consider themselves to be very conservative — they had voted for Democrats in the past, identified as independents or were liberal on social issues.

But they distrusted politicians and wanted candidates who could relate to ordinary people. They wished the United States spent more money helping working Americans, and less on helping other countries fight wars or supporting immigrants.

“A lot of the established political class has kind of forgotten what it’s like to be a regular person,” said Matthew Michels, 24, a mechanical engineer in Hancock, Michigan.

Michels said he liked economic policy ideas Trump had mentioned, like using tariffs to bring more manufacturing back to the United States and eliminating income taxes. But mostly, he appreciated that Trump and Sanders, along with Vice President-elect JD Vance, “understood what it’s like to not be in that sort of upper crust of society position,” he said.

“Trump obviously didn’t start life as a regular person, he was wealthy from the start, but everything I heard him say, he got the sense of what it’s like to be an average person a lot more,” he said.

“If Democrats had somebody like Bernie, who was very focused on working people, with a track record,” he said, “they could probably win me back.”

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Trump, Sanders Speak Similarly About Issues

For all their differences in policy and personality, Trump and Sanders sound very similar when they speak to these concerns.

Trump, at a rally in June, said President Joe Biden was “fighting for all of the corrupt interests that get rich off the suffering of the middle class,” while he was “fighting for the working people.”

Sanders, on “The Daily” podcast last month, said Americans living paycheck to paycheck are rightfully angry, while “the very wealthiest people in this country have never ever had it so good.”

They disagree on whom to blame for voters’ anger — Sanders largely blames billionaires, while Trump focuses on immigrants who are in the country illegally — but both politicians provide an enemy.

In some cases, they also differ on how to help these voters. “Medicare for All,” abortion rights and taxes on the rich, for example, are all liberal policies Sanders supports and Trump doesn’t.

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But in other areas, like their opposition to free trade and to intervention in foreign conflicts, they sound similar. Trump’s populist streak has led to a blurring of traditional party lines.

He unnerved some Republicans when he picked a pro-union secretary of labor. When he spoke earlier this year about expanding the child tax credit, a traditionally Democratic goal, he said, “I do things that aren’t necessarily Republican.”

Tim Chapman is the president of Advancing American Freedom, a political advocacy group started by former Vice President Mike Pence that hews to traditional Republican priorities of limited government and free markets. “I think Donald Trump is far closer to Bernie Sanders than a lot of Republicans might be comfortable admitting, especially on economic policy,” he said.

Still, he and other analysts said, the young men who have supported both candidates may have been motivated less by specific policies and more by a feeling of being left behind. Economic changes, like the falling relative income of men without college degrees, and cultural forces, like cancel culture, have made it seem harder to be a man. They might also have been motivated by sexism, said Brian Schaffner, a political scientist at Tufts, given that both candidates ran against women.

These voters may not be aligned with a party as much as an anti-establishment ethos — one that is fostered online, sometimes in a conspiratorial vein, on social media, gaming platforms and podcasts.

“Right now I don’t even think young men are clamoring for policy,” Chapman said. “Young men feel the world closing in. They’re looking for recognition. And they get recognition from the Joe Rogans of the world, they get recognition from Trump, they get recognition from Bernie Sanders.”

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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

By Claire Cain Miller/Doug Mills
c. 2024 The New York Times Company