The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. It will be updated.

Ryan Johnson:

On November 3rd, Democrats secured a historic landslide victory over the Republican Party, securing 54 Senate seats and over 250 House seats. Five governor seats were also flipped, including in historically red states like Texas, Kansas, Iowa, and Georgia. According to a New York Times estimate, Americans aged 18 to 29 voted overwhelmingly Democrat during the midterms. 70% of voters in the 18 to 29 age group voted for Democratic candidates for the US House of Representatives, a 33 point increase from 2024. Americans aged 18 to 29 also came out in droves to support Democratic Senate nominees with over 30 point differences in every competitive Senate race, including 44 point increases in Mississippi and North Carolina and a whopping 49 point increase in Texas. In order to understand how this vote shift happened and why it was so significant, I sat down with Jason Stanley, the Bissell Hyde chair in American Studies and the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto and author of Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future, to talk about the issues that swayed young people to vote for Democrats, the global anti-fascist wave, and a lasting change in American public opinion on Israel.

Truly for me as a young person, a shocking election result. Seats have flipped that have not been flipped in my lifetime, four times my lifetime. It is one of the most shocking political moments for me. And were you expecting a blowout this big by the Democrats? And what do you think were the biggest impacts on voters this election cycle?

Jason Stanley:

No one could have predicted the massive scale of this blowout. It reminds me a

Ryan Johnson:

Bit

Jason Stanley:

Of what my friends in Brazil were saying before the second round of the Brazilian elections. My friend Patricia Campos Mello, the journalist said, “Well, I mean Lula’s going to lose because no one ever wins who loses the first round of the election. But if you look at the streets and on social media, it really looks like Lula’s going to win.” And I think if we looked at the enthusiasm, at the content creation by young people on social media, at just the level of enthusiasm, look at the powerful image of the students at North Carolina AT&T marching to the polls far away after their own polls were shut down. I mean, the excitement and mobilization that can only come when you have youth mobilization, I think that should have told us that this was going to be massive. And we’ve seen now that the youth vote, the youth looks like they voted 70% Democrat, they showed up en masse, a massive shift from 2024.

And so I think that was just not predictable, that the youth have been really just brutalized by Democrats and Republicans alike. I don’t know really why young people would vote for Democrats given what happened to the encampments, what happened to student protestors in 2024, and that happened and was spearheaded by Democrats. So it was the mainstream media, it was the New York Times, it was the Atlantic who’s been smashing young people. And then these very same organizations are like, “Oh, go vote against Trump.” So young people chose to assert themselves as a voting block with their political priorities. And that’s the beginning of a change in America, and I hope that change really, I hope young people take a leadership role. I’m frankly sick of hearing from my parents’ generation and even my generation.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. It’s been really heartening to see. I think it was an over 30% shift to the left for young male voters. And do you think it was just the breadth of new candidates we had, new blood, and especially a more sort of progressive selection of candidates? I think we had candidates that focused on affordability, that focused on grassroots issues, that focused on data centers. Do you think that these kinds of issues had the biggest impacts on voters and especially young voters?

Jason Stanley:

Well, I think that for young voters, the Republican Party has completely sold out their future. The Republican Party is just obviously the party of billionaires. And the trick of saying people who read books are the elite and the billionaires are the ordinary people, is the ordinary unforgotten man. That trick just doesn’t work with young voters. I don’t think it really ever worked with young voters because I think the problem was that in 2020, the Democrats sold young voters out, young Americans out. And so they spearheaded smashing the encampments. They were pals with the attack elite.

They clearly were not from the working class. I do think, as you say, all the new working class candidates are vital. It’s really vital to get working class candidates. I also think it’s just a factor that you can’t blame Democrats right now for anything other than losing to this mess. So they’re not responsible for the massive cruelty in the United States and the concentration camps. They just enabled it by being such factless cowards. So I think not having to own the awfulness of what America has been doing was a big benefit. But I think also young voters were like, “We better control this stuff because no one else is without us, it’s just not going to happen.” These older people do not know what they’re doing. They do not know. They know how to organize other old people, but they do not know how to appeal to young people.

And so we young people are going to figure out ourselves. And this kind of understanding that young people I think have that this is to channel El Sayed right now, it’s the fourth quarter. The future is genuinely at stake and it’s very clear that the Republicans and the corporate Dems are allied with this future, but it also has to do with the authenticity of the candidates that were chosen and those factors I think are essential. And then of course we have to talk about Black organizing in the South.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. Yeah. And do you see this election as a decisive rejection by American voters of the shift toward Christian nationalism and fascism that we’ve seen in the last two years brought on by the Trump administration?

Jason Stanley:

Yeah, I mean, I think that that movement is not going to win as long as young people show up to vote. So if young people show up to vote, I don’t think they have a chance. But if you piss young people off and get them to feel uninvolved in the process and young people are choosing between corporate Democrats enabling a genocide and Christian fascism, they’re just going to stay home. So I feel like now that we have more young leaders, I mean AOC is in her mid – 30s. And now that we have younger leaders, I think that that’s the key. Authenticity is going to be the key and an understanding of the challenges facing my children, the youth generations. So I think Christian fascism has no answer here. It just says you’re going to give all your money to the billionaires. They’re going to build data centers everywhere.

AI is going to place your jobs and you can be Islamophobic then. We give you hate and you give us your children’s futures, your healthcare, and everything goes to billionaires and to weapons for Israel.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah. I mean, I personally am very excited about Malakiros in Colorado. People who are not far from age with me are now representing large bases that have been historically run by corporate Democrats. So it’s a very exciting moment.

Jason Stanley:

I think the concern we have is that we might get to a point, I think we’ve avoided that for now, where the vote doesn’t matter anymore. The United States is a competitive authoritarian country in the technical political science vocabulary of Lucan Way and Steve Levitsky, meaning that you can win elections still even though the civil society has been destroyed. But you need to win those elections by giant margins, and this was a giant margin. So we have to avoid getting near to a point again where elections might not matter. It turned out that Molly Crabapple said to me earlier today, she described Trump as an ADHD fascist. In a sense, we’re lucky that we have an ADHD fascist because a more effective fascist could have

Ryan Johnson:

Done

Jason Stanley:

A lot more to stop down to crack down on these elections. Steve Bannon said, “Of course ICE will be at the polls.” ICE wasn’t at the polls. So they did a lot to try to affect the elections, the Supreme Court. The big issue here really for the future of democracy in the United States is the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court is totally illegitimate. The majority of them were appointed by presidents who did not have win the popular vote. They are pro-authoritarian, anti-democracy, pro-billionaire that’s their only agenda is fascism and they have no other

Ryan Johnson:

Agenda

Jason Stanley:

Other than Christian fascism, and they have lifetime appointments. So as we saw with Biden, they did everything to make sure his presidency wouldn’t be successful. They declared student loan debt. They stopped his attempt to forgive student loan debt. They did everything to stop Biden from being a successful president, and they will do that with any Democratic president or any Democratic anything because they’re for the billionaires. They’re a corrupt, evil, authoritarian force in

Ryan Johnson:

American

Jason Stanley:

Society. And so that really needs to move up the agenda of Democrats doing something about the Supreme Court.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah. And then so I want to bring it back to what you’ve said about Brazil and international movements. How do these election results fit in with other global movements that we’re seeing right now? Movements that have ushered in left-wing victory in Brazil, ushered in protests run by students in Serbia and France?

Jason Stanley:

Absolutely. Well, I think we’re seeing a global anti-fascist wave, just like we saw a global fascist wave. So you could never predict these things. After all, I think the fascists in the United States celebrated too early. I mean, they were like, “We have this locked down. The vote doesn’t matter.” And they were wrong. So we have to see this as a beginning, but it is definitely global. It’s definitely… Brazil was

Ryan Johnson:

Huge

Jason Stanley:

Because Lula had a very successful third term. He cut down deforestation in the Amazon. He cut down extreme poverty by very large amounts. He’s a real authentically working class politician. He came from the working class and he governs for the working class. And so I think we are seeing that anti-fascist moment globally. I hope to see it in Europe. I hope to see it in Canada. I think Canada, unfortunately, there are some risks in Canada. The far right just won the elections in British Columbia last week, but this should really turn the tide. America’s Trump’s victory in 2024 gave a permission slip to Europe’s fascist parties, and they all were buoyed by massive popularity. Obviously, Trump supports those parties, the Trump regime supports those parties, but this victory by the Democrats, which obviously it’s the most significant of your young life, but it’s certainly the most significant of my entire adult life.

I mean, comparable to the kind of 2008 Obama victory, but its message, it’s enormous just in terms of the numbers, and its message for the

Ryan Johnson:

World

Jason Stanley:

Couldn’t be more welcome right now. I think that Trump… And also for the reputation of the United States, it was a last ditch moment because United States is pretty much trailing Iraq, trailing, I don’t know, the Taliban in international favorability. I don’t know if that’s quite true, but we’re really scraping the basement. So I think this has huge international consequences for global anti-fascism, for the global democracy movement.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah, absolutely. And then yeah, I want to bring it back to young people. As an educator, what do you want to say to young people about how to meet this moment as activists and organizers who can…

Jason Stanley:

I would say as an educator, I’m always learning from young people. The first time I realized that Minneapolis was going to be big, internationally big, is when a student in my class, in first class in University of Toronto came in with Minneapolis Twins, Minneapolis Sports Regalia. I’m like, “Do you follow the Twins or whatever?” And he was like, “No.” So I think young people know what they’re doing. We just need to get out of the way. Young people are doing the organizing, they’re social media savvy. They understand that even though these platforms are run by fascists, they still enable communication, democratic communication and democratic strategies. So just look for authenticity in politicians or look up a politician’s net worth.

Bernie’s not a rich man. You can see who’s going to be on your side. And the preachy lectures from old people in the media, anytime anyone is like, “Well, young people, I’m going to tell young people, given how badly older generations have screwed this world up, take everything with a massive grain of salt. Democracy is about agency. It’s about freedom. It’s about making up your own mind. You are not practicing democracy if you’re listening to what older people are telling you. You’re practicing democracy when you are making up your own mind and doing your own research. Listen to other young people, create your own structures. You’re going to be cut off. I can tell you this, you’re going to be cut off from large donations. You’re going to be cut off from the mechanisms of power that go to older organizers, older, and there’s going to be a desire to compromise in order to get that.

But that means you’re starting to get older when you do that.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah, totally. And then what are some of the biggest differences that you have seen between 2024, which was a contested and low year for young voter turnout versus 2026? What do you think shifted?

Jason Stanley:

What shifted is that young people were not associating Democrats with smashing protest movements. Young people were not associating Democrats with corporate power. Young people were… I definitely think the smashing of the Gaza protests, and remember it was Democrats who led smashing student protests. So if you looked at the op-ed page of the New York Times or the Atlantic, it was just attacking young people all the time, attacking protests. And it was literally under the Democrats, young people got the causes they cared about, those causes endangered their futures. They endangered them getting jobs, and it just seemed that there was a kind of out of touchness with the lack of a future.

So I think Democrats weren’t associated with attacking student protestors this time around. Democrats freed themselves from these authoritarian associations and freed themselves, and it just became very, very clear that Republicans are kind of the unabashed party for tech billionaires, for… Obviously, AI is a toxic force that is an existential threat to human meaning, to the whole reasons my kids are going to school and they spend all this time doing their homework and learning things and it’s really hard, but how is that going to help if there are no job, if all those things, those jobs get done by AI? Translators, that used to be such a noble… I mean, you can go down the line of the different professions that are threatened by AI. So association, the fact that the Republicans tied themselves so hard to Elon Musk, that Elon Musk basically is the force, Elon Musk and Republicans, that’s the same thing.

And Elon Musk so obviously just wants to destroy the future of the youth, and obviously it’s just, I mean, everyone else is a non-player character for him. So it was just so blatant, and I think young people in 2024 were trapped between fascism and this sort of meely-mouthed corporate authoritarianism of the Democrats. And I don’t blame anyone for voting, for staying at home in 2024, voting for Jill Stein. I felt that it was clear what Trump was going to become, but I understand after, I understand why you would be really turned off by certain parts of the Democratic Party. Of course, there was the Green New Deal, there were elements of the Inflation Reduction Act. There were things that were really, really positive and good, and they weren’t sold correctly, but it wasn’t just not selling things correctly. It was spearheading the authoritarianism crushing student movements.

I just think it was Trump and the Republicans, they just are Elon Musk, and I think young people see that Elon Musk is out to get them.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah, absolutely. And I absolutely, as somebody who is present for encampment protests at Cornell University in the city of Ithaca, I saw that exact thing. I saw protestors brutalized. I saw protestors suspended, expelled from the very schools that they’re paying to protect them.

Jason Stanley:

The corporate Democrats, that structure that is just always seeking donor money, always seeking corporate money, I see this problem everywhere. The people with massive money are able to fund things, but it isn’t the things… It doesn’t mean it’s the things that the younger generations are interested in. So there is a mismatch between what money is available, who has the largest pockets, and what the

Ryan Johnson:

Actual concerns

Jason Stanley:

Of people are. And so the Democrats fell prey to that again and again.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah, absolutely. And then yeah, that brings me to just, I believe, two more, three more questions, but campaigns that leaned on support for Israel, both from Republicans and from centrist Democrats in the primaries, largely failed to deliver this cycle, especially in Michigan where now one of the most progressive senators or were to be senators were now elected. Are we witnessing a lasting change in American public opinion on Israel?

Jason Stanley:

Exit polls show the majority of Michigan’s Jewish voters voted for Elsaya. So we are definitely witnessing that. We have witnessed that, and we’re also seeing it as an authenticity test because young people know more than anyone else that if you go to a protest in support of Palestine, you’re risking your future, you’re risking your connections, you’re risking… And so they can tell, they can look to politicians and say, “Who’s willing to make that risk for morality?” And so it’s both a moral challenge for our times because I’m now talking to you from Canada, which is not a country that sends billions of dollars, is tightly connected to the IDF and Israel’s military, like the United States military is tightly connected. Canada doesn’t send billions of dollars a year to Israel. Canada doesn’t sell massive weapon to massive weapon sales to Israel. But in the United States, it’s your moral obligation because that is the country.

You’re in a country where really your military is connected to Israel’s military. The whole structure, those two countries are deeply linked together, so you have a moral obligation to say something about it, and people don’t want that anymore. People don’t want… American Jews, I don’t think, don’t want anymore.

American Jewish institutions say to be Jewish is to support Israel, but increasingly that is certainly American Jews under 40 reject that, and we’re reacting. I think you see the biggest supporters of Israel are Christian nationalists because the vision of Israel that the Israeli right gives us is a Jewish nationalist vision. And so the Christian nationalists are supporting that just like they support Hindu nationalism or any other form of exclusionary nationalism. And I think Americans are increasingly seeing that they don’t want to be morally associated with those kind of nationalist projects. And when they think that through, I think many Americans will also turn against Christian nationalism.

Ryan Johnson:

Yeah, absolutely. So with Democrats now in control, what are the biggest changes you expect to see in 2027?

Jason Stanley:

I expect to see accountability for the corruption. So the kind of kleptocratic corruption that we’re seeing in the United States is like nothing. It’s so blatant, it’s so out there that there must be accountability, there must be investigations. I mean, there’s no rule of law in the United States. You can go for the presidency and you can massively enrich yourself. And I hope this doesn’t just stop at… I hope there’s an anti-corruption movement. The anti-corruption movement doesn’t just stop with Republicans. I think we need Democrats who want to live a middle-class life. They don’t want a yacht. They don’t want to hang out with billionaires. I don’t want to see my Democratic politicians on somebody’s yacht anymore. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in those politicians.

I’m hoping an anti-corruption, anti-kleptocracy, I’m hoping a reaction against wealth, and I’m hoping that the Democrats just really investigate the corruption and really investigate the cruelty, the massive cruelty that we’ve meted out against hardworking people in the United States who are living in concentration camps under some of the most brutal conditions imaginable. I want to see everything that didn’t happen after Muslim Americans were subjected to after nine eleven, plus the torture regime, et cetera, and the financial crisis. None of that got investigated. I want to see something different now. I want to see the Democrats investigate the cruelty to immigrants, investigate. I want to see them disband ICE. We don’t need ICE. We not need a military inside the US borders. I see that, and I want to see a movement to begin to dismantle the Supreme Court, to figure out what to do with the Supreme Court term limits on justices, expand the court, something like that.

I mean, I should also add, I don’t want to see a Democratic party that throws scapegoated groups under the bus. I don’t want to see our trans-American fellow citizens being vilified for political gain. I don’t want to see democratic politicians join in that toxic hatred. I really am very concerned about the way that trans-Americans have been otherized. I’m very concerned about the way that Muslim Americans have been otherized, and the otherization has to stop. We need to stop that other… There’s one group and one group alone that you can legitimately otherize because they can get out of that identity very easily. And that’s billionaires. We can otherize billionaires because they can just give their money away and they’re not billionaires anymore. But nobody else should be otherized. Once you otherize one group, that is an identity, a religion, an ethnicity, a gender identity, a sexual orientation, once you begin that process, it’s a little fascist permission slip to broaden it.