President Donald Trump often grossly exaggerates his 2024 performance among young voters, but there's no doubt that he's seriously improved over recent GOP presidential election showings. Polls leading up to the election kept previewing a problem for Democrats on this front, and the electoral results themselves confirmed Democratic strategists' nightmares. Beyond that, since the election, younger voters have played a key part in boosting the president's approval ratings, thus far. With the Resistance Machine -- very much including the 'news' media -- firing constant negative barrages at the new administration, most young Americans are generally liking what they're seeing from Trump and his team, certainly compared to the last term. This could all prove unsustainably fragile, and the unusual new coalition could crumble at some point -- but for now, there's certainly something going on. Matt noted this earlier in the week.
Writing at The Atlantic, Derek Thompson explores why voters under 30 may have shifted to the Right, and not just in the United States. His underlying theory is interesting, but his essay begins with some hard data demonstrating that this isn't just a figment of conservatives' imagination, or an unsupported social media narrative:
For decades, America’s young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren’t just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65...Young people’s apparent lurch right is not an American-only trend...“Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.”
I'd reiterate that in a number of recent public opinion surveys, younger voters are pushing Trump's approval stats into positive territory, basically for the first time in his political career. Some numbers show the opposite, but a flurry of these polls have Trump right-side up by mid-to-high single digit margins (some higher), with majorities of the youngest demographics tilting 'approve' over 'disapprove.' In this new data set from Survey USA, 18-34 years olds split (51/47) on the general approval question:
Recommended
📊 President Trump Job Approval
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) February 18, 2025
🟢 Approve: 51% (+6)
🔴 Disapprove: 45%
——
Job Approval
• Johnson: 37-35 (+2)
• Thune: 28-30 (-2)
• Musk: 42-49 (-7)
• Schumer: 32-42 (-10)
——@surveyusa | n=2,000 | 2/13-16https://t.co/4DeuBNnLoK pic.twitter.com/C20veAjpEQ
Here's another recent one, courtesy of the UK-based outfit that more or less nailed the 2024 election:
📊 President Trump job approval
— InteractivePolls (@IAPolls2022) February 10, 2025
🟢 Approve: 53% (+6)
🔴 Disapprove: 47%@J_L_Partners | @DailyMail | RVs | 2/9https://t.co/MCDzQV72f9 pic.twitter.com/rsAFpV09T5
In any case, why are younger voters at least open to Trump's priorities and governance this time around? And why might it be part of a wider phenomenon? Thompson checks down the obvious list: "Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first." But he also sees another major factor stirring this brew. Namely, the pandemic and various policy and cultural responses to it:
Close schools, cancel graduations, restrict access to church & synagogues, then unleash record inflation, high interest rates, open borders & institutionalize DEI and gender ideology, and you get ... https://t.co/V6a9OBJl6i
— Matthew Continetti (@continetti) February 18, 2025
Young people who cast their first ballot in 2024 were “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review. A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the “lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.” In the past decade alone, young Americans’ trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent. Another way that COVID may have accelerated young people’s Rechtsruck in America and around the world was by dramatically reducing their physical-world socializing. That led, in turn, to large increases in social-media time that boys and girls spent alone...New ideologies are messy to describe and messier still to name. But in a few years, what we’ve grown accustomed to calling Generation Z may reveal itself to contain a subgroup: Generation C, COVID-affected and, for now, strikingly conservative. For this micro-generation of young people in the United States and throughout the West, social media has served as a crucible where several trends have fused together: declining trust in political and scientific authorities, anger about the excesses of feminism and social justice, and a preference for rightward politics.
Destructive rules and phenomena were forced upon young people by adults in charge, with deliterious consequences -- developmentally, socially, educationally, and beyond. And we might now be seeing some of the political fallout from those impositions, in addition to other alienating excesses of left-liberal rule. Perhaps this is a very short-lived and tenuous alliance that will collapse. But I'll leave you with this counter-point from Thompson's piece: "These changes may not be durable. But many people’s political preferences solidify when they’re in their teens and 20s; so do other tastes and behaviors." We shall see. I'll leave you with this, out of infamously 'progressive' Scandinavia:
New survey shows young Swedes are quickly turning conservative.
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) February 16, 2025
The Youth Barometer Generation Report for 2025 is based on interviews with 17000 people aged 15 to 24.
- The share of people "who want to be perceived as open/tolerant" is down from 43% to 29% in 10 years.
-… pic.twitter.com/9CD6XJmK2u
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