This summer, a young South Florida man named Camron Drummond stood in line at a job fair in Amerant Bank Arena, clutching a red folder of resumes. The employers present were mostly the Army, the Navy, and police departments. He was looking for IT work—anything, he told the Miami Herald.
Since graduating, he had applied to hundreds of jobs. Six employers responded—three with rejections. The closest he got was the final round of a customer service interview with a budget airline, after which the company went silent. Meanwhile, he drove for DoorDash seven hours a day, earning about $300 a week, crashing at his brother's place, and facing the start of repayment on $20,000 in student loans.
The numbers paint a grim picture. According to the New York Fed, unemployment for Americans aged 22 to 27 with bachelor's degrees hit 5.6 percent in the second quarter of this year. For those aged 20 to 24, it spiked to 9.7 percent in July—a post-pandemic high—before easing to 7.8 percent last month. A Stanford study found that employment among early-career workers in AI-exposed fields like IT has dropped nearly 20 percent. For someone who studied computer science to build a stable career, that is a brutal reversal.
Drummond's words capture the feeling: “When I stepped into the real world, it hit me like a truck.” These young people borrowed money on a promise. Now the payments are due, and the promise is turning up empty.
Both parties are courting these voters, but with different messages. Democrats frame the young as victims of a broken system. Republicans insist the economy is strong and that many are doing better than they think. “You think you're poor? You've never had it so good!” But neither message answers Drummond's question: how does a graduate turn the degree he borrowed for into work that uses it?
Drummond did eventually find work—a customer service job at a car rental company, paying just over $18 an hour, eleven days after the job fair. Low unemployment means jobs exist, but not the kind he wants. He is working, but he still hopes to return to technology. The real problem is not that jobs in the field are scarce. The problem is that the path from a degree to a career is no longer certain. It has become slow, uneven, and too dependent on luck.
College degrees still hold value. Unemployment among graduates over 25 was just 2.5 percent last month, far below the 4.4 percent for high school graduates without college. But too many young people are paying a lot and taking on debt for a route to a career that no longer reliably exists. A 22-year-old laden with debt cannot afford to take the same job a debt-free high school graduate can work without worry.
The 2024 election showed that Republicans understood where young men were listening. Trump went on podcasts and YouTube shows like Theo Von, Logan Paul, and the Nelk Boys, and later sat down with Joe Rogan, whose audience is about 80 percent male and over half aged 18 to 35. The campaign treated these appearances as a way to reach men who were skeptical of politics and had no interest in cable news. Democrats had the same opening but didn't take it. Harris's team discussed a Rogan appearance but never followed through. Andrew Yang said before Election Day that the Harris campaign mishandled the Rogan interview. Harris did appear on other shows, but the contrast was clear: Republicans went to where young men were; Democrats waited for them to come.
Democrats seem to have learned their lesson for 2026, while Republicans appear to have forgotten theirs. The lesson for 2028 will not be to copy the format. The next candidate who wins this audience will need to do more than book a famous podcast host. Some hosts who backed Trump in 2024 have since turned against him. Voters who feel talked down to will notice candidates who only perform and don't actually care. The candidate who wins will need a message that answers the economic anger in Drummond's story and shows up consistently—before, during, and after the campaign.
What does that mean? Simply, it means taking the young man's frustration seriously. A podcast appearance can get a candidate in the door, but it cannot get a graduate a job. The candidate who can speak plainly about the cost of the degree, the shrinking entry-level market, and the debt that follows—and who offers a concrete plan to fix it—will have a real advantage. The 2024 podcast strategy showed that young men can be reached. The 2028 question is whether anyone can give them a reason to stay.
