Younger voters who swung toward Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential race shifted dramatically back to the left in House races Tuesday, helping hand Democrats control of Congress in a strong repudiation of Trump’s leadership.
The younger voters chose Democrats by more than 30 percentage points, polling shows, with those under 25 selecting Democrats by more than a 2-to- 1 margin.
The data suggests a reversal of the results of the 2024 presidential race, when Republicans made major gains among young voters, long seen as a left-leaning cohort. Trump won some 43 percent of voters under 30 that year — his party’s best showing with that demographic in decades. Fifty-four percent voted for his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris. In the midterms, 66 percent of that age group voted for Democrats.
Democratic strategists and party officials made a concerted effort to win those younger voters back this year by making their digital strategy more reactive and focusing their messaging on the cost of living. Pre-election polls showed high levels of economic anxiety among young voters.
The election results were “a generational statement,” said John Della Volpe, a pollster and expert on young voters. “It was a near complete rebuke of all things Trump, all things Washington.”
Della Volpe attributed the backlash to young people’s sense of “betrayal” by Trump and other politicians who once promised to lower costs and said they would keep the United States out of wars. But he also cautioned against concluding that young people will be solidly Democratic going forward.
“The lesson is that they’re not Republicans, they’re not Democrats — they’re available,” Della Volpe said.
Roughly 50 million Gen Z Americans were eligible to vote in the midterms, a group that is more racially and ethnically diverse than older generations. Asian, Black and Hispanic young people gave Democrats the most support in House races.
In battleground House districts, Democrats won 71 percent of voters under 25 and 59 percent of those ages 25 to 29.
Young people also moved toward Democrats in toss-up Senate races. In Michigan, Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed won voters aged 24 and under by 37 points — a 43-point swing from the 2024 presidential race, when Harris lost that demographic by six points.
Students at the University of Michigan on Tuesday waited in a receiving line to greet El-Sayed, at one point blocking traffic. One young man hugged him and said “Oh my god, oh my god” as he bounced away; another young woman said, “I am losing my mind.”
After a decade away from the ballot box, Matt Palumbo, a 28-year-old Detroit city worker who last voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, returned to the polls Tuesday to vote for El-Sayed. He compared Republicans’ rhetoric accusing El-Sayed of being a socialist to McCarthyism and the Red Scare of the 1950s, when accusations of communist sympathies were used to discredit political opponents. (El-Sayed has said he is not a socialist.)
“Why is socialism so bad when the goal of it is just trying to feed people or give us health care?” Palumbo said.
In Texas, Democrat James Talarico flipped a Senate seat and swung the youngest counties in his state 30 points to the left.
Chloe Wilkinson, a 28-year-old assistant campaign manager for local Democrats, celebrated at Talarico’s victory party late Tuesday.
“Here in Texas and across the country, Republicans were running these anti-trans ads because they didn’t have anything economic to run on,” said Wilkinson, who is transgender. “Some Democrats were scared of that. But this showed that didn’t work.”
Young voters also swung sharply left in Kansas, where Democratic Senate candidate Adam Hamilton won the counties with the highest percentages of young residents by 23 points.
Scott Walker, president of the Young America’s Foundation, a group that promotes conservative ideology on college and high school campuses, said his organization was not surprised by the shift among young voters, based on what they heard from them before Election Day.
“On the issue of cost of living, they were completely dissatisfied with everyone in power,” Walker said, adding that Republicans need to do a better job of taking into account younger voters’ concerns. “You can’t just criticize. You’ve got to offer a solution. You’ve got to offer something that shows you hear them.”
Arianna Jones, executive director of NextGen America, a progressive advocacy nonprofit and political action committee, said young voters “treated this election as a referendum on Trump, and they gave neither party a long-term commitment. When you show up with an ad in October, you rent them. Whoever does the off-year organizing and listening will win them over for the long term.”
Jones said in late 2025, focus groups with young swing voters revealed that they held low opinions of the economy and felt it was nearly impossible to get ahead.
This year, NextGen America texted over a million young people to ask what they cared about, Jones said. The economy came first, democracy second, and foreign policy third, with foreign policy continuing to rise over the past year, she said. Young men, in particular, mentioned the war in Iran unprompted.
When it comes to which party they vote for, Jones said, young swing voters will ultimately “move toward whoever can prove that they understand their lives.”
Maegan Vazquez and Violet Jira in Washington, Hannah Knowles in Los Angeles, Deona Easterson in Detroit, Erin Cox in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Molly Hennessy-Fiske in Austin contributed to this report.
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