US Election 2024: How Trump won over young Americans / Why Trump Won

US Election 2024: How Trump won over young Americans




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The story behind the rightward shift of young men

The idea that MAGA-enthused bros swung the young male vote doesn’t really capture what happened.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/02/27/trump-popularity-young-americans/

Donald Trump’s victory in November’s election provided Democrats with an opportunity to engage in a favorite pastime: blaming their ideological opponents within the party for the loss. A number of targets emerged. Maybe the party had gotten too liberal. Maybe it had become too “woke,” whatever that happened to mean in context.

Among the more popular explanations, though, was that the party had done a poor job leveraging the modern media environment to reach out to voters. There was no “liberal Joe Rogan,” we heard over and over, referring to the popular, beefy podcast host. This, by extension, was why young men in particular turned against Democrats and Vice President Kamala Harris. Every news photo of a young White guy in a MAGA hat — and there were many — was an evocation of the idea that the party had over time squandered its long-standing advantage with young people to conspiratorial streamers and friends of Barron Trump.

A review of data from a number of different sources suggests that this story is incomplete, if it’s accurate at all. Younger voters as a whole were more supportive of Trump in 2024 than they had been in prior elections — though since we’re tracking age over time, the pool of young voters in the 2016 election was not the same as the one in 2024. That said, the shift among young voters from 2020 to 2024 was similar between men and women; the sharper divide was between White and non-White voters. It’s a pattern that occurs repeatedly elsewhere in polling, too.

Let’s start by looking at presidential vote margins by age, gender and race. We have two (admittedly imperfect) mechanisms for this: traditional exit polling conducted by Edison Research and AP VoteCast, a measurement of the electorate that began in 2020.

The trends from both surveys is broadly similar, showing bigger gains for Trump relative to 2020 among younger voters. Edison’s data shows that the Democratic candidate lost six points of support among voters under the age of 30 between 2020 and 2024 — the same drop as seen in Edison’s results from 2012 to 2024. VoteCast showed a 10-point drop.

But VoteCast also shows that, for voters under the age of 45, there was no difference between men and women. There was a six-point drop since 2020 for the Democratic candidate among men under the age of 45; the drop was the same among women in that age group. Both Edison and VoteCast show that the drop-off among young non-White voters was much steeper than it was among young White voters.

VoteCast shows a drop since 2020 of three points for the Democrats among White voters under 45. Among non-White voters in that age group, the drop was 12 points. Edison’s data shows a gain for the Democratic candidate among White voters under 30 since 2020, while support among Black and Hispanic voters in that age group fell sharply.

As is often the case with exit polls, we should be mindful of the increase in margins of error as pools of voters gets smaller (as when we look at a racial group by age and by gender). So let’s look at a different metric: how Americans have viewed Trump.

YouGov has been tracking Trump’s favorability since early 2016 as part of the work it does for the Economist. The polling firm shared quarterly averages of the president’s numbers since then. What we see is that there has been an upward trend of support among younger U.S. citizens, while the views of older Americans have remained fairly flat. The increase since early 2021 has been higher among young men than women (18 points vs. 11 points) but that is again a function of race. White men under 30 have gotten three points more favorable to Trump than White women in that age range. Non-White men now view Trump 29 points more favorably, a jump that’s more than 20 points bigger than the increase among non-White women.

It’s important to remember that young Americans are much less likely to be White than older Americans. The central reason for this is that immigration laws were loosened after the baby boom, allowing more people from Latin America and Asia to come to the United States.

The result of this is that shifts among younger non-White U.S. residents have a much larger effect on the overall population of younger Americans than do shifts among older non-White Americans.

What we’ve looked at so far is views of Trump. If we look more broadly at partisanship, our understanding of the gender gap shifts a bit more.

Gallup shared data on party identity over time by race and gender. If we look at the percentage of self-identified Republicans (and Republican-leaning independents, because independents often tend to vote with one party or the other), and subtract the percentage of self-identified Democrats (and leaners), we get a sense for how the relative partisanship of different groups has evolved.

Since 2016, White men under the age of 30 have gotten 17 points more Republican on net while young White women have stayed about the same. The gap in partisan identity among young White men peaked in 2021 and has since declined, landing just above where it was in 2003.

The shift among young non-White men has been much larger — more than 30 points since 2016. That’s true of both those under 30 and those aged 30 to 44. The shift among younger non-White women has been 25 points on net in favor of the Republican Party since 2016.

Younger non-White Americans, though, remain much less Republican than younger White Americans. We’re describing the change, not the end point. In the 2024 Gallup data, about 58 percent of young White men said they were Republican or Republican-leaning. Among young non-White men, 39 percent did. Among young non-White women, that figure fell to 28 percent.

Partisanship overlaps with views of Trump, obviously, particularly in this era. It’s also true that Americans under the age of 30 have spent at least one-third of their lives in a political era during which Trump was the standard-bearer for one of the two major political parties. Some of his improved numbers among younger Americans, regardless of racial identity, is probably a function of his approach to politics seeming less exceptional or abnormal.

If we look at policy views — rather than ones centered on politics — the argument that there’s been a significant divergence on gender erodes further.

I reached out to Brian Schaffner, principal investigator for the biannual Cooperative Election Study, to get his assessment of the trend in the gender gap. He pointed me to a tool that uses CES data to track views of policy issues over time.

“The bottom line is we don’t see a ton of evidence of a rightward shift among 18-29 year olds in this data,” Schaffner said in an email. “Perhaps that’s occurring on other issues that we aren’t capturing here, but even when you look at questions about racial attitudes and sexism there still isn’t anything too dramatic.”

The same holds for recent polling from The Post. On a question about Trump’s efforts to exceed his authority since returning to office, young men are less likely than men overall to say that he was acting within his authority, and the gap between men and women under the age of 30 was lower than any group of respondents aged 40 or over.

Finally, we can look at actual (as opposed to self-reported) voter registration. Using data from our partners at L2, we can see that 2o20 was a recent high-water mark in Democratic Party registration. (The figures below are annual averages that include some estimates of racial identity in states that don’t collect that data.) Among younger White men, the percentage of registered Democrats dropped 2.2 points since 2020. Among younger White women? A similar drop of 1.9 points. Among non-White men and women, the drops were larger still.

That non-White Americans (and, as the VoteCast and Edison exit polls suggest, Hispanics in particular) shifted to the right in the Trump era is not new. What the data presented above suggests is that the decline in racial polarization explains more of the shift among younger people than does gender.

The problem for Democrats, then, was probably less that White dudes have been listening to Joe Rogan than it was Black and Hispanic voters have not been voting like their parents.