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As more definitive data about the 2024 election results (particularly the new Catalist analysis based on voter files and Census information) has emerged, many of the trends identified by exit polls and other polling around Election Day are being confirmed. The big development was a Republican trend among younger voters and nonwhite voters, along with an intensified gender gap, all in the context of a high-turnout presidential election (not as high as 2020, but high by historic standards). It’s also increasingly clear that while Republicans may have enjoyed a small turnout advantage in their base demographic groups, Trump ultimately won by increasing his share of persuadable voters.
While our understanding of why Trump lost in 2020 and won in 2024 has become significantly stronger, future trend lines remain hazy. That’s one reason it makes sense to focus on one of the most surprising developments of the 2024 election: a sharp rightward shift among the very youngest voters, particularly men. This reversed a powerful leftward trend among under-30 voters that gained steam after the Great Recession, and which gave Democrats considerable confidence that the future belonged to them. Now? Not so much. But just as the Obama coalition of young, nonwhite, and “knowledge-worker” voters proved ephemeral, it’s unclear if the Young Fogie trend of 2024 is a blip or an actual trend.
To begin with, it’s definitely real, as Vox’s Christian Paz explains:
The data we have from the last election suggests, broadly, at least two types of young voters: “Old Gen Z” — more Democratic, more progressive — and “Young Gen Z” — more Trump-curious and more skeptical of the status quo.
That internal split, roughly between those aged 18 to 24 in the latter camp and 25 to 29 in the former, hasn’t dissipated post-election; it is still showing up in polling and surveys. No cohort is monolithic, but a combination of factors — the pandemic, the rise of smartphones and newer social media, inflation, Trump — seems to be driving a wedge within Gen Z.
The case that it’s a blip mostly revolves around the unique circumstances facing under-25 voters (many of them eligible to vote for the first time) in 2024. It was certainly a traumatic time to come of age, with a horrific pandemic that disrupted education and vitiated social cohesion to an extraordinary degree, followed by levels of price inflation higher than any experienced by Americans since the 1970s. The immediate experiences of these youngest voters were exceptionally negative, undermining any natural affiliation with a Democratic Party whose incumbent president was an octogenarian. The youngest voters also had limited personal memories of the less savory aspects of life during the first Trump administration. Now they are experiencing the second Trump administration just like everyone else.
A Tufts study of young voters in 2024 found that those who voted for Trump over Harris were significantly less conservative on a broad range of issues than older Trump voters, indicating their attachment to the MAGA cause and the Republican Party is less than firm.
A more mechanical reason the rightward trend in youth voting in 2024 may not carry over to the next election is simple: Young voters have always been less active in non-presidential elections and thus will represent a smaller share of the 2026 midterm electorate. So it’s the 2028 election that will likely resolve questions about the durability of the rightward youth-vote trend.
There are some data points that suggest something more fundamental is going on among the youngest voters. As Vox’s Paz observes, Gen Z is pausing, if not necessarily reversing, a long-term trend away from the Christian religiosity that is so closely correlated to Republican voting habits:
As I’ve reported, the rapid decline of religiosity within the United States has been slowing down over recent years. Particularly since the pandemic, data shows Gen Z is no longer continuing the rapid decline in religious affiliation, particularly Christianity, that started with previous generations. If anything, religious belief has seen a small revival with that youngest cohort.
That shift suggests a curious dynamic at play among America’s youth. As Gen Z has been getting more politically polarized along gendered lines, so too has their religious affiliation. Those trends suggest that modern politics and religious beliefs may be having a bit of self-reinforcing effect on each other: As young men find faith and religious belonging, their politics are drifting to the right too, in turn reinforcing their existing beliefs.
Media-consumption patterns and the emergence of the “manosphere” also suggests that while a semi-permanent rightward trend within Gen Z remains unclear, there’s a lot more evidence it will persist among the youngest men. As Ezra Klein recently noted in a discussion with Blue Rose Research’s David Shor:
It seems plausible to me that social media and online culture are splitting the media that young men and women get. If you’re a 23-year-old man interested in the Ultimate Fighting Championship and online, you’re being driven into a very intensely male online world.
Whereas, if you’re a 23-year-old female and your interests align with what the YouTube algorithm codes, you are not entering that world. You’re actually entering the opposite world. You’re seeing Brené Brown and all these other things.
Swings in youth voting are hardly a new thing. In 1972, George McGovern narrowly won first-time voters despite losing 49 states. But by 1984, young voters were trending notably Republican as Ronald Reagan (at that point the oldest president and arguably the most conservative) performed exceptionally well in that demographic. And as noted above, the pre-2024 Democratic trend among young voters didn’t exist until Barack Obama’s election in 2008. In 2000, for example, Bush and Gore nearly tied among under-30 voters. In 2008, Obama won them by more than a two-to-one margin. Unpredictability, not some universal leftward tilt, is the chief characteristic of young voters over time. But if Democrats want to reset Gen Z in a more favorable direction, they should focus on the quality-of-life issues that appear to have pushed the youngest voters away from them on 2024 and find a way to communicate with young men that doesn’t treat them as inherently “deplorable.”
