Democrats were alarmed last spring and summer when polling suggested that voters ages 18 to 29 were softening in their longtime commitment to the Democratic Party. After the November election, when exit polls indicated that Kamala Harris had won the young adult vote by only a slim margin (if that), it seemed that the ground had shifted. A post-inauguration cover story in New York magazine on young Trump supporters partying it up in Washington captured a widespread impression that this was a generational realignment: the rise of a cadre of MAGA youth.
After examining new survey data and interviewing more than 100 young adults for a book I’m writing on how politics is reshaping the college experience, I’m doubtful. Young MAGA types may feel newly energized and empowered, but empowerment is different from numerical growth. The data suggest that the swing in young adults voting for Donald Trump did not reflect a major shift in ideology. Rather, the swing seems to have resulted from moderate-to-somewhat-liberal young voters deciding to bet on Mr. Trump out of concern about the state of the economy — and from young moderates and progressives who chose to stay home because they thought Ms. Harris was either too progressive or not progressive enough. This is a point with implications for Democrats and Republicans alike.
The most striking feature of the young adult Trump swing is that it occurred even though there has been no significant recent increase in the proportion of young adults who identify as conservative. Data from the Cooperative Election Study, a national survey with more than 50,000 respondents during election years, show that between 2006 and 2023, about 23 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 identified as either “conservative” or “very conservative” on average, a number that fluctuated only modestly year to year. The 2024 numbers, which the study’s researchers have shared with me, show no meaningful departure from this pattern. (Despite fears of the influence of a misogynistic online “manosphere,” the ratio of young men to young women who identify as conservative did not change appreciably, either.)
Likewise, the survey registered only modest changes in the political party affiliations of young adults over the past two decades. Young people have been softening in their commitment to the Democrats, but they’ve been softening in their commitment to the Republicans as well. In place of these loyalties a growing number say they are independents.
I heard this dissatisfaction with party affiliation in my interviews. A Black woman from an immigrant family who had recently graduated from a flagship public university in the South told me she’d been frustrated by the political polarization she’d witnessed at her school, where “you’re either Democrat or you’re Republican,” she said. “It’s like hippies versus veterans.”
She took pride in not being attached to a party. Recently she’d been reading through Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint for Mr. Trump’s second presidency. She’d found some elements she disliked and others she liked — a nonpartisan reaction that she suggested ought to be more common. (As with most social science research, participants in my study remain anonymous.)
There is also not much evidence that young adults hold increasingly conservative opinions — quite the contrary. A recent study by the sociologists Kyle Dodson and Clem Brooks found that from 2012 to 2020, public opinion in the United States toward racial minorities, immigrants, people who are gay or lesbian and other groups grew more socially accepting, with young adults at the leading edge of that change. Young Republicans became more socially accepting, too, if not on every issue.
This is part of a longer-term trend. Sociologists such as Mike Hout and Ethan Fosse have demonstrated that on a wide array of social matters, including the division of household labor between men and women, the morality of homosexuality, views of corporal punishment and feelings about prayer in school, the general trend across the past century is for Americans born each successive year to express slightly more tolerant, egalitarian and secular attitudes than the one before. Although these studies don’t go all the way up to 2024, research from Gallup indicates that this development hasn’t changed course in the last few years, no matter how much chatter there is about a vibe shift.
By contrast, the evidence is strong that economic considerations mattered greatly to young Americans in the 2024 election. While voters of all age groups cited the economy as a pressing concern, this was especially true for voters under 30, with 40 percent reporting that inflation had been the single most important factor in their vote for president, and 46 percent more saying that it had been an important factor. A substantial number of young people apparently believed that Ms. Harris would continue the Biden-era policies they held responsible for high prices and hoped that Mr. Trump would bring relief.
But voting for Mr. Trump did not necessarily mean that these young people had become MAGA faithful. Responding to a survey I conducted last summer, one young woman from the West Coast, a Latina commuter student with a lot of financial aid at a large, nonselective public university, reported that though she was somewhat liberal and concerned about the environment, she was planning to cast her ballot for Mr. Trump. Her vote would be about the economy, she said — about how, under the Biden administration, people were “not able to afford basic needs.”
Immigration was also an important issue for some young Trump voters — but not, it seems, in the strongly partisan way it was important for older voters. Polling in September by Harvard’s Institute of Politics found that more than a third of Americans ages 18 to 29 supported mass deportation of immigrants who were in the country illegally — yet the Pew Research Center reported in December that only 10 percent of young adults said that levels of legal immigration should be reduced. This suggests that young people tended to be motivated more by economic concerns associated with large-scale, unregulated immigration than by nationalist or xenophobic appeals, pockets of far-right support notwithstanding.
Then there is the matter of young people who might otherwise have voted for Ms. Harris abstaining from voting. Many young moderates saw her as too progressive or “woke.” Many young progressives saw her as not progressive enough, especially in light of the Biden administration’s military aid to Israel. Insofar as these people stayed home on Election Day, they led to an increase in the share of the young adult vote for Mr. Trump — but not an increase in the number of young people who supported him.
I’m a sociologist, not a political strategist, but I believe there are lessons here for both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats, thinking they have the wind of history at their backs, have often taken the support of young adults for granted, focusing their efforts more on getting them to the polls than earning their vote. Yet long-term social change doesn’t automatically translate into electoral success. While young people are becoming more socially progressive, more are pocketbook voters than Democrats have realized.
Republicans, for their part, should heed the limits of their mandate from young Americans, such as it is. The G.O.P.’s core base remains older white people who say they no longer recognize the country that young people are ushering into being. The more the Trump administration caters to these voters by doubling down on prayer in public schools, for example, or pursuing a national abortion ban or imposing restrictions on L.G.B.T.Q.+ rights, the more it risks alienating younger, more socially accepting voters who swung toward Mr. Trump for bigger paychecks and less expensive housing — especially if the economy falters.
Perhaps today’s young voters will more fully embrace partisan identities as they grow older. But it is also possible that dissatisfaction with both parties is so great that we are witnessing the emergence of a cohort of swing voters who are open to persuasion each political cycle. If this has the effect of tempering our polarized and dysfunctional politics, we will owe today’s young people our gratitude.
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