For Remi Martinez, it’s the deportations. For Michael Johnson, it’s the economy. For Suzanna Bridges, it’s the Epstein files and what she sees as misogyny embedded in the culture of the Trump administration.
All three youthful Americans voted for President Trump two years ago. All three regret it. All say they will vote Democratic this year, or not at all.
“I can’t go red, not this time — no,” said Mr. Johnson, 26, a sales representative for a plastics company in Des Moines.
In 2024, more than half of young men — 55 percent — supported Mr. Trump, according to an analysis of New York Times/Siena University polling, a dramatic departure from past elections when young Americans largely supported Democrats. Young women swung right as well, though not in such striking numbers.
Now, Democrats hold a slim, one-percentage-point advantage with young men, a group that is politically up for grabs. Around 10 percent of young men remain undecided. Among young women, 31 percent of whom supported Mr. Trump in 2024, the analysis found that support for the Republican Party had been cut to just 13 percent.
“Trump’s focus is not good,” said Marcos Jimenez, a 21-year-old studying to be a math teacher in Oakville, Calif. He voted for Mr. Trump on his economic promises, he said, only to get a war and spiraling costs.
“He’s focusing on things outside of the country like wars,” Mr. Jimenez said. “I wish he would focus more here.”
He will be supporting Democrats in the fall, he said: “They’re more for people.”
Young voters — nearly half of whom are people of color — chose Mr. Trump two years ago for many different reasons. Mr. Johnson, an immigrant from Liberia who came to Iowa at 15 and became a citizen soon after, said he had “started seeing the rise in biological males in women’s sports.”
Mr. Johnson was not alone in saying that “threw” him off. In Times/Siena polling, half of young men said they thought the Democratic Party was too far to the left.
And Mr. Johnson was passionate about the election; he said he had persuaded 15 members of his extended family to vote for Mr. Trump, too.
Now he sees bigger problems — the price of gas and housing. Seven of his friends have taken second jobs. So has he, with a day job at the plastics company and a night job at Whole Foods. The rent on his mother’s African goods store is going up, he said, and gas prices are biting.
“Trump’s becoming an old, crazy man,” he said. “He doesn’t care anymore.”
Beyond the youngest voters, the next age group — voters between the ages of 30 and 44 — has also bolted, from a 17-point advantage for Mr. Trump among men of that age to a six-point advantage for Democrats.
“All the woke stuff happening” in the Democratic Party had pushed Remi Martinez, 44, to Mr. Trump, he said. Now Mr. Martinez, a dispatcher for a trucking company in western Kansas, regrets it.
Mr. Martinez is Hispanic and said people should not assume voters like him are opposed to deportations: “I don’t want rapists in my neighborhood either,” he said.
But, he added, Mr. Trump has swept up “hard-working people who have been here for years.”
So many people have been taken from his town of Garden City, a meatpacking area with large Hispanic population, that the town seems “shut down,” he said.
“They were just after everybody,” he said, “pulling over everybody.”
He plans to vote for Adam Hamilton, the Democrat, in the Kansas Senate race and is encouraging his daughter, who’s in her twenties, to support James Talarico in Texas, he said.
“The government needs to have checks and balances,” he said.
Though the movement among young women was smaller, Republicans did get an uptick of support in 2024. Today, Democrats’ lead with the group is vast at nearly 70 percentage points.
Ms. Bridges, 22, grew up in rural central Texas, and as a Catholic, she was put off by Democrats’ positions on transgender youth issues. Two years ago, she cast her first ballot — for Mr. Trump.
Now starting graduate school in international affairs at Texas A&M University, she does not like how Mr. Trump is treating American allies. She was angry when foreign aid was slashed — her faith calls for helping those in need — and when Mr. Trump barred news outlets from the White House.
She said that she found Mr. Trump’s dismissive treatment of the Epstein files appalling, and that his administration was going in reverse on women.
“I’m sure you know who Andrew Tate is,” she said, referring to the online influencer known for his chauvinistic views and who was arrested on charges of rape and sex trafficking. “This administration is pushing for that kind of man right now — hyper, hypermasculine.”
“I’m a Catholic conservative, not a Christian nationalist,” she added. “We have respect for women.”
Ms. Bridges said she did not find the Democratic Party appealing either; she did not trust Mr. Talarico, in part because of his change in position on transgender athletes, and in part because she didn’t like his mixing of faith and politics. She said she did not plan to vote in this election.
That would not be unusual. In 2022 — the last midterm election — only about 30 percent of voters under 30 showed up at the ballot box, compared with close to 70 percent of voters over the age of 65.
Unlike older voters, who tend to be more set in their partisan ways at the ballot box, young voters are still trying ideas on for size.
Liam Howard, 26, grew up in a politically conservative family in New Hampshire that regularly watched Fox News and listened to Glenn Beck, the conservative talk show host. In his early voting years, he said he considered himself a libertarian and voted for Republicans in 2018, his first election.
Then he went to college and “realized that liberals aren’t actually weird,” he said.
Mr. Howard now makes emergency lights for vehicles and lives with his parents because housing in southern New Hampshire has risen out of his reach.
“I can’t even afford a crappy studio apartment working 40 hours a week in a factory,” he said. “Thirty years ago, my job would have bought a house. It’s insane.”
That economic reality has drawn him to politicians like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, and Senator Bernie Sanders, the independent socialist in neighboring Vermont. About 30 percent of younger voters said that they would prefer a democratic socialist, more so than any other age group, according to Times/Siena polling.
Mr. Howard is one of them, and as a democratic socialist, he said he did not vote for president in 2024. Kamala Harris lacked ideas, he said, and he didn’t like her position on Israel. But he is excited by the crop of democratic socialists who have won primaries around the country this season and said he felt motivated to vote.
Despite the broad turn away from the Republican Party, about 44 percent of young men still prefer Republicans in this fall’s elections. Conner Fredrickson, a 28-year-old who owns an I.T. business and lives in Phoenix, said the president was “trying to build America back, make us stronger, make us more independent.”
He added: “Is he doing everything right? No. But nobody does everything right.”
Many younger voters said they were looking for anyone — regardless of party — who could help make life affordable. That has brought a new fluidity to the electorate.
Ryan Gellings, 25, a grocery marketer in Kansas City, Kan., considers himself a Republican. He is Catholic, likes small government and supported Mr. Trump in 2016, though he was too young to vote for him. He still likes what he calls Republican values, but he thinks Republican politicians are mostly yes-men for Mr. Trump. To his regret, he said, he voted for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. for president in 2024.
Now he is drawn to candidates like Mr. Sanders, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York and Representative Thomas Massie, the maverick Republican in Kentucky, because, he said, they seem deeply committed to doing something about the cost of living, no matter which way the political winds are blowing.
“I love that Mamdani is taking care of his people,” he said. “If money is going to be wasted, it may as well be for the people,” Mr. Gellings added.
One-third of voters age 18 to 29 say neither party is focused on the right things, the highest share of any age group.
Mr. Gellings said he was planning to vote for Mr. Hamilton. But mostly, he is frustrated with both parties.
“We’re confused and ready to move — anywhere at this point,” he said. “We are tired of the current conversation.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed reporting.
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