The kids are alright

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Of all the ways the 2024 election has decimated the Democratic Party’s political identity, the movement of young voters towards Donald Trump might be the most painful.

The exit polls were undeniable: The Associated Press VoteCast found Kamala Harris carried 18-29 year olds by just 4 points, a 21-point erosion from Joe Biden in 2020 and the worst performance for a Democrat in twenty years. The shift was across the board, among both men and women, and especially acute among young Asian, Black, and Latino voters, who swung to the right by 19, 27, and 32 points respectively.

What happened? One popular theory in recent months attributes the shift to the COVID pandemic, zeroing in on the divergence between 25-29 year olds, who moved just 3 points towards Trump, and 18-24 year olds, who swung more than 20. It argues the younger cohort, who were in college or high school, were harder hit by shutdowns and social isolation, causing radicalization and an eventual backlash to lockdown policies. In this theory, the shift in November was less a realignment and more a freak aberration. There may be something to that. “It’s clear that [COVID] was a formative experience and an inherently negative one,” said Daniel Cox, the Director of the Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute. “It may be that that’s a sort of a blip.”

But the rightward drift of America’s youngest voters may not have been an isolated event — data suggests that Democrats, still held together by a defense of institutions and modernity, could face a long-term competitive challenge. On many key indicators of sociopolitical identity, America's youngest voters increasingly resemble conservatives: distrustful of institutions and mainstream consensus, prone to conspiratorial thinking and social disconnection, and nostalgic for the past.

Skepticism of establishment authorities and institutions, once a cross-partisan trait, has become a prime marker of conservative identity in the Trump era. It’s also a centerpiece of young voters’ political outlook. An August 2023 survey by the Public Religion Research Institute found Gen Z adults were by far the generation with the least confidence in four major institutions: the criminal justice system, the federal government, police, and the news media. Gallup echoed that result last October, finding that 18-29 year olds now have less confidence in the news media than registered Republicans did for most of Barack Obama’s presidency. 

The lack of trust in the establishment may help explain polls showing young Americans’ partiality towards conspiracy theories, a trait that also now skews Republican. A December 2023 YouGov poll found 18-29 year olds nearly twice as likely to buy a range of conspiracy theories as registered Democrats, from whether vaccines lead to autism to whether there exists a “group of people who secretly control events and rule the world together.” More than a third of those under thirty bought the theories that both top Democrats and top Republicans are participating in secret child sex trafficking rings, and they were the age group most likely to believe that the moon landing was fake, that 9/11 was an inside job, and that mass shootings have been faked “to promote stricter gun control laws.”

The propensity to conspiracy theories even extends to the realm of pop culture. In February 2024, Monmouth found 18-34 year olds were the age group most likely to believe in the existence of “a covert government effort for Taylor Swift to help Joe Biden win the presidential election.”

This trend is somewhat understandable. The youngest Americans have witnessed epic failures of elite consensus and are able to instantly access unprecedented amounts of evidence of past “conspiracy theories” proven right. At the same time, it’s hard to disconnect from the indiscriminately conspiratorial content that now floods platforms like TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter — which young voters depend on for news more than anyone else. Both Pew Research Center and the American Press Institute have found that adults aged 18-29 are the least likely to read newspapers and the most likely to get news from social media. Again, that tracks with indicators of Republican voting: In 2024, polling and studies consistently found that news consumption correlated to voting intention. Those who consumed traditional news outlets leaned Democratic, while those who relied on social media leaned Republican.

Even the structure of younger Americans’ social networks aligns more with the right than the left. In recent years, a number of studies have found that social connection is now a direct predictor of voting patterns: Those with smaller personal networks lean conservative, those with more social ties lean liberal. The same research shows that young people have “substantially smaller” social networks than any other age group. While COVID may have exacerbated the trend, the overall decline of social connections, like that of social media use and traditional news consumption, precedes the pandemic. “It does seem that there’s a fairly linear trend going on in terms of experiences and socializing and dating and just time spent with other people,” said Cox.

That cultural nostalgia is a central part of Trump’s political magnetism has been obvious for nearly a decade — his slogan literally advocates a return to past greatness. It’s notable, then, that nostalgia is also the defining feature of Gen Z pop culture, and it’s worth at least questioning how a generation pining for the past may be primed for politicians promising its restoration. “They hate the policies of the 80s and 90s, but they yearn for what they view as the material comforts of that period,” said Charles McElwee, a contributing writer at CityJournal.

Despite all these indicators, the question of Trump’s individual appeal can’t be ignored. The president is uniquely both more culturally liberal and anti-establishment than the median Republican, giving Trumpism credibility with young people as a “rejection of both the Democratic and Republican Party,” according to McElwee.

To an ascendant younger generation of Democrats, there are still concrete solutions. David Hogg, the gun control activist recently elected a vice chair of the Democratic National Convention, said he expressed concerns about the party’s standing with young voters at a Democratic gathering last year only for party leaders present to call his comments “ridiculous.” Now, Hogg argues for a change in tactics more than a broader reset. “I think part of it is a brand problem, but I think if it was truly a massive one, we would see far worse results in midterms, in special elections, than we’re hitting right now,” he said. “Something that we really need to improve on as a party is making sure that our candidates are much more fluent in talking like normal human beings on social media about what’s going on.”

Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), the only Gen Z member of Congress, attributes Democrats’ problems in part to an asymmetry in resources. He pointed to the efforts of Turning Point USA, the conservative youth group. “Every single Republican running in the primary will stop by the Turning Point conference to speak to the young people of the Republican Party,” Frost said. “Is there a Democratic young conference where every single person running for president comes to prove themselves to young people? There isn’t.”

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