The Bethlehem Project: Being young in Trump’s America

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0:40All right, we're walking up to Liberty High School in Besselham. It's one of the city's two high schools.

0:47Sonja Hutson: Recently, my colleague Ian Hodgson and I went back to high school. It's these sort of like beautiful beige bricks. I mean, it's really ornate, like Corinthian columns out front. It was kind of ridiculously nice for a public school building. But inside, in a lot of ways, it looks like a classic American high school.

1:12Sonja Hutson: Hordes of students streaming through the hallways, a kind of cacophony of people talking to their friends, joking around. Being there really reminded me of my time in high school. You're on the precipice of this massive change in your life, becoming an adult and going out into the world. But a lot has also changed since I was a teenager in the early 2010s. The U.S. is more polarized. There's a lot of economic anxiety. And teens are far more plugged into social media than ever before. That's why Ian and I came to Liberty High School in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to get a sense of what it's like growing up in Donald Trump's America.

1:54Sonja Hutson: We spoke to four students in a conference room off the principal's office, and they had a lot to say. I don't know many girls that are particularly right-wing. It's more of less open conversations and more of like very, very tense times, I feel. And then all of a sudden, like my feed was kind of full with more right-leaning things. Post-college, like finding a job, like just from what I see on social media a lot, It just seems so difficult.

2:24Sonja Hutson: In Pennsylvania, young voters are shifting to the right. 18 to 29-year-olds there had the biggest swing towards U.S. President Donald Trump in the last election. I'm Sonia Hudson, and this is Swamp Notes, The Bethlehem Project, the series where we look at the biggest U.S. political and economic issues through the lens of one city. Ian Hodgson is here with me now to talk more about our trip. He's a data reporter for the FT. Hey, Ian. Hi, how's it going? Good. So these four students that we spoke to came from different backgrounds and had a variety of political leanings. But there were a few common threads that we heard from them, which I mentioned earlier.

3:12Sonja Hutson: Let's talk first about political polarization and social media, because I think we really heard how intertwined they are. Who does that bring to mind for you? One of them who stood out was Brady Carvajal, who's a 17-year-old senior. Hey, how are you? My name's Ian. Brady. Brady, nice to meet you. And he gets a lot of his information from conservative podcasts. I actually discovered him through my brother. So I started probably four or five years back listening to Ben Shapiro. Democrats are going to continue to label the American people racist and sexist and all the rest. And the Matt Wall Show.

3:49So this country was founded on the principle that human rights come from their creator, not from the government. And I really connected with them. He also likes Charlie Kirk, who is the founder of Turning Point USA. Here he is with a drag queen during Pride Month, which is goodness gracious coming up. Kirk was shot dead in Utah in September. Kirk was really an on-ramp for a young generation of conservatives and young men in particular.

4:13Sonja Hutson: Charlie Kirk was also a really divisive figure politically, and Brady definitely talked about seeing some of that larger political division coming into play in his classrooms, among his classmates, and hurting relationships. The lines have been a little easier to draw now. It's not as more people aren't as moderate. Now more people are choosing sides. There is such a clear difference when you're talking to people in their opinions. You can definitely just tell who started to lean more right, who started to lean more left. And gender is definitely a big thing I notice. And he says things can get really tense when he and his classmates start talking about politics.

4:52Especially in these last few years when you're trying to talk about especially political issues. It's more of less open conversations and more of like very, very tense times, I feel.

5:00Sonja Hutson: How do you feel about that change? It's definitely for the worse. I mean, it's so much harder to have just an open conversation where two parties can bring two ideas and come out with one unified idea. Now it's – I feel as if it's more like it's either my idea or it's your idea and there's no other way. It's just been – it's become harder to agree and that just raises the tension for the worse. So, yeah, there's two really important themes that I think Brady brought up with us that I want to talk about. One of them is social media, and then the other is the political division among the students, kind of along gender lines.

5:37Sonja Hutson: Let's start first with social media. Something that really struck me about talking to these students is that a lot of them were really aware of the ways in which social media was deepening political divisions. Right. And one of the more politically moderate students that we met really shined an interesting light on how this can look in practice. Nick Shankle. I'm a senior and I'm 18. I'm part of the student government. Yeah, sports are the biggest things. I play left tackle in football and I'm going to college to play offensive tackle. Up until recently, Nick's parents really shaped his political opinions.

6:14He told us that his dad is more politically moderate and his mom is more liberal. She's really active in the Bethlehem community. She's definitely impacted the way I view the world. But I think as I've gotten older and I've become kind of my own, started to form my own opinions. I think that I've definitely gone from being very left to starting to kind of become more centrist, more moderate. I mean, still with the social aspect, I'm still very left. But again, with like some of the fiscal policies and stuff like that, I've started to kind of lean more to the right and kind of agree with my dad a little bit more on that.

6:49Sonja Hutson: And one of the things that impacted his change in political decisions the most with social media, specifically Twitter or now X. What kind of happens is like I'll scroll and I'll see something interesting. And even if I don't like it or anything, if I just click on it, just the way the algorithm works, more and more stuff like that will kind of pop up on my feed. And it just so happened that I would be scrolling through it and I'd see some right-leaning thing and I click on that. And then all of a sudden, like my feed was kind of full with more right-leaning things. So I think what you can hear Nick saying here is that he's very aware of the exact way in which the algorithm has changed his political views.

7:26Sonja Hutson: You know, he's a young man. He is being fed right-wing content. And so you can see how this kind of contributes to this gender divide that we're seeing. And when we asked Nick and the others how they handled that, they definitely talked about things like fact-checking, but I didn't really hear any desire to move away from these social media sites that they know are creating more polarization. Right. And I mean, like one of the things too that we talked about is like there's no division between, you know, being on your phone, seeking entertainment and then seeking politics. I mean, it's in the same feed of, you know, you see a cat video followed up by a video explaining how the tariffs are going to lead to more inflation.

8:12So these political issues are in some ways sort of rammed down the throats of the students who are growing up in this digital landscape.

8:21Sonja Hutson: Yeah, and I think that's why it feels overwhelming. Like, you just can't escape it. Yeah.

8:31Sonja Hutson: Let's talk about another aspect of this, which is the political division along gender lines. So that split was really seen in last year's election. Time Siena poll conducted in six battleground states, including Pennsylvania, found that young men aged 18 to 29 preferred Trump over Democratic candidate Kamala Harris by 13 percentage points, while young women favored Harris over Trump by a 38 percentage point. And that's the largest gap by any age group. Wow, that is a really, really massive gap. Yeah, and another example of this is Polina Dorman. She's a junior. She's 16 years old. Politically, she says she's pretty liberal, but she said she's really seen this gender divide at her school.

9:12I don't know many girls that are particularly right wing or would say that they would have, if they had the chance to vote, that they would have voted for Trump or something like that.

9:28Sonja Hutson: And, you know, Polina told us that she is mostly friends with other girls. And so her social group doesn't usually disagree a lot when they talk about politics. A lot of my friends and I have similar views. I guess people tend to stick with the people they agree with. And we found this a lot, that students have sort of siloed themselves into social groups where politically they're fairly homogenous. And where political differences do come up, students shy away from those conversations or feel like it's getting tense very quickly. Ian, something I found so interesting about this topic when we brought it up is that when we asked people why this gender bifurcation is happening, they all kind of said the same thing regardless of where they fell politically.

10:14Women are much more focused on things such as abortion rights, which seem to be a very important part of the left. Maybe not disrespect, but more like a sense of women are inferior to men. They really want to feed their ego and they go for shutting the women out. They believe that women are inferior. The LGBTQ stuff, certain groups of young teenage boys, they'll see that and laugh about it and joke about it.

10:41Sonja Hutson: Because there's a big problem with the left is like sexual identity, trans, like gender, stuff like that. And I think women are just more prone to be more emotional almost maybe. I mean, it illustrates a few trends. I mean, one of them is a Democratic Party that's not been particularly good at speaking to the anxieties of young men. We also talked about the issue of abortion that is very divided along gender lines, young men leaning towards a more Christian conservative view of being anti-abortion, young women being more pro-choice, being really disturbed by the overturn of Roe versus Wade. We also talked about the economic side of this gender divide.

11:23One student told us about how everyone in Bethlehem has at least one relative who worked a blue-collar job and seeing immigration as a threat to those, you know, once stable, steady forms of employment. Whereas in Bethlehem, the rising industries are healthcare, education, fields that have been historically predominantly women-held, whereas manufacturing trade fields that are predominantly male-held have been on the decline.

11:50Sonja Hutson: Okay, so abortion is a major dividing issue along gender lines, and there's also kind of a sense that traditionally male-dominated blue-collar fields in Bethlehem are on the decline, and female-dominated industries like nursing are growing. Yeah. All right, we're going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about that very subject, how economics plays into the anxieties of young people in a city that's undergone a major economic transformation.

12:29Right now, someone is asking AI a question about your industry. They're looking for the perfect recommendation or an accurate solution, and they're ready to act on it. When AI gives an answer, is your brand a part of it or not? Most companies have no idea which. GIST changes that. We show you where you're visible, where you're not, and give you the tools to do something about it. It's time to make AI work for your brand with GIST. Learn more at gist.ai.

13:02Sonja Hutson: And we're back. Young people in Bethlehem aren't just nervous about political dynamics today and the way they're dividing men and women. They're also worried about what the state of the economy means for their future. So Bethlehem's in an interesting position. It used to be this industrial powerhouse. It's the home of Bethlehem Steel. I mean, the legacy is impossible to miss. Yeah, and when we went to the steel mill itself, I mean, the just sheer scale of it is so overwhelming. And it really got me thinking about how big industrial plants like this used to be a massive part of the U.S. economy.

13:40Sonja Hutson: But the connection to the U.S. economy was a little too on the nose when we went there. There's a bald eagle. Is that a bald eagle? There's a bald eagle flying overhead. This could not get more America. The shuttered steel mill and the bald eagle. As cool as that moment was, like, it's definitely a symbol of like America's past, right? I mean, this closed steel mill and this local economy that's really pivoted to other industries like, you know, tech logistics, especially like health care and education. Yeah. And, you know, back in the day, if you were a young person growing up in Bethlehem, you could pursue a job at the steel mill and, you know, it would be a reliable job and it would be probably a union job as well.

14:18But now a lot of people we talk to express a lot of uncertainty about what was even viable for a career path that would keep them financially stable.

14:27Sonja Hutson: One of the people this makes me think of is Giada Watts, one of the students that we talked to at Liberty High. She's a senior, and as she's kind of preparing to head out into the world, she brought up a lot of different things that she's anxious about. I'm kind of worried for like the way that the world is going, what my life's going to look like when I'm in like my 20s and how I'm going to be able to navigate that. What kind of things do you worry about? Jobs. I worry about the climate. I worry about like if the earth is even going to be like a factor. I worry about like if the system we have in place now is even going to like continue to stand and if it's going to be done in like the right way.

15:06It's just all kind of like scary sometimes because then, I don't know, when you interact with things on your feet and everything's just popping up, it's like, wow. Yeah. So there's a lot there. I mean, she's talking about the job market, about climate change, about democratic backsliding. And as you might be able to guess from what she said, Jetta identifies as politically left. And this current administration has felt really dystopian for her.

15:29Sonja Hutson: Yeah, and she talked a lot about watching all of this happen through her social media feeds, which, like we mentioned earlier, has a huge impact on how these students interact with the world. Let's talk a little bit about the job market, which is something that Giada also brought up. I was actually just with a friend last night, and we were just talking about how, like, post-college, like, finding a job. Just from what I see on social media a lot, it just seems so difficult. There was actually a report from the St. Louis Fed in August that put some numbers behind those fears that Giada has. It found that recent college grads had a much bigger increase in unemployment since 2019 than non-college educated workers their age, as well as older college grads.

16:16Like it just seems incredibly hard to be able to find something that like not only you like, but that will just support you like in the way you need. And then like it sounds corny, but like with AI, like that's obviously a big deal, too, as to like if you're even going to need people to do things anymore.

16:31Sonja Hutson: Giada told us that she doesn't know what she wants to do for a career yet. She was thinking about maybe biology, maybe marketing, event planning, but she's not totally sure yet. But the other thing that Giada mentioned that I think we should talk about is affordability. I mean, there is this sense, and there's some data to back this up, that being in the U.S. has just become less and less affordable over the last several decades. I just want to rattle off some numbers really quickly that I pulled together from the Atlanta Fed before we started talking. The median home price in the U.S. right now is about$400 ,000.

17:09Sonja Hutson: And in order for that to be considered affordable, you need to earn over$120 ,000. And that is significantly more than the median household income in the U.S., which is just$83 ,000. One thing even on the affordability stats, though, like one of the things that really stood out to me is, according to a Harvard poll, less than half of young people expect to be economically secure in the future. less than half expect to own a home or even have a family. Wow. That definitely puts a lot of pressure on you when you're 17 years old, like Giada, trying to figure out what you're going to do with your life.

17:51Sonja Hutson: I want to tie everything together that we've been talking about. Political division, social media, economics, the job market, higher education. How do you see these issues impacting the politics of young people going forward? I think we're at a really interesting pivot point. I mean, the sort of economic dislocation of younger adults, you know, at least for young men, led to this swing to the right leading up to the 2024 election. But as Trump's first year as president has evolved, we're not seeing much movement on affordability, on the cost of education, on the things that really were on the minds of the young people that we talked to.

18:35And you can see that in the polling data, that young people who swung towards Trump, young Republican voters, are now starting to swing back.

18:43Sonja Hutson: Yeah, and I think we saw that swing to the left in some ways in the results of the most recent elections in November of this year. You know, Democrats won the governorship in Virginia and in New Jersey. We saw a very liberal candidate when the mayorship in New York City, his campaign was really boosted by the energy of young people. So we'll see. It's early data and we'll probably get a lot more information in the midterms next year. Yeah. And we'll be looking at what young folks like Polina, like Brady are thinking about over the next few years as they age up and become a larger and larger share of the electorate.

19:20I want my friends to be knowledgeable so that when we are of age to vote, that we're not bringing down Pennsylvania. Like, it's a swing state. We have to take it, we have to be, hold it with importance because it's our decision, ultimately. So I want us to be educated about it.

19:41Sonja Hutson: Ian Hodgson is a data reporter for the FT. Thanks for going to Bethlehem with me. Thanks for going with me. It was a fun trip. It was.

19:52Sonja Hutson: This was Swamp Notes, the Bethlehem Project, the series where we explore the biggest U.S. economic and political issues through the lens of one city. Our show was edited by Mark Filipino, and it was mixed by Breen Turner. I'm your host, Sonia Hudson. The FT's acting co-head of audio is Topher Forges. We'll see you again soon for another trip to Bethlehem.

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