Young people can’t save democracy by themselves: A new vision is required

Right-wing thought leaders and strategists have long understood that their radical revolutionary project is multigenerational. They must win the “hearts and minds” of young people in the present (and control how young people conceptualize the past) for their revolutionary project to succeed in the long term.

Under the guise of “patriotic education” and countering the supposedly pernicious influence of “DEI,” the Trump administration and its allies are working to impose a thought-crime regime targeting the country’s schools, including its leading universities and colleges. As part of this thought-crime regime, the Trump administration and its forces are also reshaping public memory by literally Whitewashing the country’s museums such as the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The ultimate goal of this campaign to control public memory is to normalize the dominance of white men over all aspects of American society. 

On this distorted and grossly inaccurate version of history and reality, historian Heather Cox Richardson writes: “The erasure of Indigenous, Black, Hispanic, and female veterans from our military history is an attempt to elevate white men as the sole actors in our history. It is also an attempt to erase a vision of a nation in which Americans of all backgrounds come together to work—and fight—for the common good.” In a separate essay, Richardson neatly explains the goal of Donald Trump’s political vision as “Trump is demonstrating that he intends to create a country dominated by the right-wing, white men who supported him.”

Meanwhile, mainstream liberals and progressives almost obsessively look to young people as their hope for the future. After their defeat in the 2024 Election, many still assume that younger voters will lead an inevitable triumph over Donald Trump’s MAGA movement and the larger authoritarian right. This logic seems sensible, at first: Young people are naturally more liberal, open-minded, and receptive to change. More specifically, liberal or progressive policies broadly associated with the Democratic Party — whether on race, gender and sexuality or on education, environmental issues and economic inequality — are generally more attractive to young people than the retrograde policies offered by today’s Republicans.

This is related to the Democrats’ longtime faith in the presumed effects of the “browning of America”: Demographics are believed to be destiny, and generational replacement — as older, predominantly white cohorts are replaced by increasingly diverse and tolerant younger generations — is sure to defeat the authoritarian MAGA upsurge. Democrats, in this reading, may not have a compelling message or brand but do not need one. They earnestly believe that the actuarial tables will act as a force multiplier for their side.

Time to think again. This model of political change rests on underlying assumptions that are being fundamentally challenged, if not disproved, by the Age of Trump and the rise of authoritarian populism, both in the U.S. and around the world.

In the 2024 presidential election, young people as a group moved noticeably to the right; far more than expected, they supported Donald Trump and his brand of authoritarian populism. Young men aged 30 or below, both white and nonwhite, supported Trump over Kamala Harris, while Black and brown young women, the most Democratic of all demographic groups, overwhelmingly supported Harris. For the second election in a row, a majority of white women voted for Trump. (Trump also carried white women against Hillary Clinton in 2016, if only by a narrow plurality.)

A new poll from Yale University provides more evidence that the iron grip that Democrats believe they have on younger voters may actually not be that strong. The Yale Youth Poll is an undergraduate-led research project that compares a group of voters under 30 to the general population. It sampled 4,100 registered voters, just under half of them aged 18 to 29.

One of its more striking findings is that the youngest group of voters, aged 18 to 21, supported the Republicans by 11.7 percentage points in the 2026 election. Among slightly older voters, aged 22 to 29, the Democrats led by 6.4 points.

Many of these younger GOP voters appear to be true believers: The Yale Youth Poll reports that when asked “what is most important for Republicans in the next election,” just over 51 percent, across age groups favored “energizing and turning out the base, by running on conservative, America-first policies” rather than trying to “appeal to the swing voters and independents.”

Intriguingly, a similar split emerged among Democrats, with a large majority of both younger voters and all Democrats saying the party should run on be “progressive policies that give their voters something to vote for” rather than “moving to the middle to appeal to swing voters.”

I emailed Yale political science professor Josh Kalla, faculty adviser to the Yale Youth Poll, who offered additional context. Younger people as a whole, he said, “tend to hold many pro-democracy views.” While a strong two-thirds of voters in the poll supported “checks and balances where courts can constrain unilateral presidential action,” 76 percent of young voters support this. On some issues, younger voters indeed appear more progressive, Kalla continued, while on others there isn’t much difference. He sees “evidence of a divide within younger voters” which has been described as “the theory of two Gen Z’s”:

The student researchers … are finding that different experiences with COVID-19 and technology might be leading the youngest voters to lean more conservative than older Gen Z voters.

Consistent with evidence from Yair Ghitza and Andrew Gelman, young voters have not always leaned Democratic. Driven by political events in young people’s formative years (ages 14-24), sometimes young people lean Democratic, but other times they lean Republican. For example, young people born in the 1940s and 1970s tended to vote Republican, even when they were 20 years old. Differential experiences with COVID-19, the first Trump and Biden Administrations, and technology could explain why the student-researchers behind the Yale Youth Poll find this gap within Gen Z.

I also asked Milan Singh, founder and director of the Yale Youth Poll and a current Yale undergraduate, why he believes younger voters may be drifting toward Trump and the right. He also responded by email, identifying “several possible reasons”: 

One is ideological polarization, particularly among younger nonwhite voters. If you look at the data from 2024, Kamala Harris won a large majority of Black voters over 65 who self-identified as conservative. But she lost self-identified Black conservatives under 28. Similarly, Harris did worse with younger Black moderates than older Black moderates, and with younger Hispanic moderates/conservatives than older Hispanic moderates/conservatives. Older nonwhite voters tend to vote heavily Democratic regardless of ideology; younger nonwhite voters are increasingly voting in line with their ideological views. Generational churn means that the net effect is that Democrats are losing ground with nonwhite voters. 

Another well-attested factor is continuing gender polarization. College-educated women between 22 and 29 leaned strongly Democratic in a generic ballot, Singh said, while non-college women did so only slightly less. In that same age group, however, college-educated men were only slightly Democratic, while non-college men leaned strongly Republican.

But among the youngest quadrant, voters 18 to 21, came the surprise: Both men and women favored Republicans, although young men did so to a much greater degree. “Among men 18 to 21, Donald Trump’s net favorability was +7,” Singh said, while “Kamala Harris’ was -48. Young men are much more right-leaning than young women are left-leaning, so the net effect drags young people overall to the right. … [T]he youngest women are also more right-leaning than older Gen Z women.” He continued: 

It’s not quite clear what is driving this level of gender polarization. If I had to guess, I would say social media. Social media platforms like Instagram or TikTok increasingly create gender-segregated media spaces. If you’re a man under 25, you’ve probably heard of Andrew Huberman; none of my female friends have. Online environments that are this gender-segregated can easily become echo chambers where young men are exposed to extreme views; there is some evidence that the youngest cohort of men is more likely to believe things like “gender equality has gone too far.”

As to why young women are more right-wing than older Gen Z women, I think the best explanation is that COVID-19 was a uniquely disruptive event, which made people who were teenagers during it much less trusting of government and institutions. In particular, many of the excesses of the pandemic era — lockdown orders, mask and vaccine mandates, inflation, “wokeness” — were attributed to the left (fairly or not). It probably also did not help that a visibly aged and elderly man was the public face of the party. 

Public opinion polls are a snapshot in time and do not predict the future. They should be interpreted in the context of other polls, data, research and evidence. In a new essay, data journalist G. Elliott Morris offers these observations about young people’s purported levels of support for Trump and the MAGA project. He cites the Cooperative Election Survey’s finding that Kamala Haris actually won “all subgroups of young people”:

There has been some debate online about who is right here…. Let’s start with the newsy data. According to a new poll published by the Pew Research Center on April 23, 2025, only 36% of adults between the ages of 18-29 approve of the job Trump is doing as president today, vs 63% who disapprove. That’s a net gap of 27 points against Trump, compared to an exit poll estimate in 2024 of Harris +4.

Comparing Trump’s approval directly to the results of the 2024 election, that’s a pretty huge (23-point!) shift. This means there’s a large group of young people out there who do not like Trump, but voted for him last year because either (a) they did like him then or (b) they liked Trump more than Harris. There are also a lot of young people who didn’t vote at all.

Morris concludes that his answer is simpler: “My theory is that young people weren’t very ‘Trumpy’ to begin with, and they’re not particularly pro-Democratic now. Instead, they’re anti-incumbent.” The logical conclusion to draw from “vote choice among young people in 2024” and Trump’s declining approval ratings now is to see them as “two compatible votes against the status quo.”

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I asked sociologist Randolph Hohle, an expert on race, culture and political economy, for his thoughts on the Yale Youth Poll and the conundrum of young people’s shape-shifting politics in this era of crisis. By email, Hohle responded that “Any reaction to polls indicating that 18 to 21-year-olds favor Republicans is an overreaction. Generation is a marketing slogan, not a meaningful social group”:

We have to remember that the young adults sampled in the Yale poll are the first to come of age politically after the Great Recession and during the pandemic. They don’t know what a functioning and fully-funded social institution is. Those in the 18-21 category were teenagers when the pandemic started. The most meaningful institution in their life, education, has been a mess. If we disaggregate the education data a bit, boys are suspended from schools way more than girls are. Black boys are suspended the most, prompting critics to point out a racialized school-to-prison pipeline. Fourteen percent of 25-year-old men are not in the labor force, a statistic that has been on the rise for decades. The 22 to 29-year-olds who are still “liberal” entered college after the recession. Basically, every state took advantage of the Great Recession to reduce public funding to state schools while increasing tuition, fees and housing costs.

Between increased student debt and failures in K-12 education, Hohle continued, “A majority of the nation’s 36 million workers ages 25 to 34 have not completed a four-year college degree. The media’s unhealthy obsession with the Ivy League … has young people conflating status with success and happiness. Broken institutions make broken people, and the Republican Party excels in telling stories about reclaiming an imaginary greatness that will fix them.”

I asked Eric Schnurer, an expert on public policy and government effectiveness, for his thoughts about the Democratic Party and its relationship to young Americans, a group that is clearly foundational to the party’s base and essential to its electoral fortunes:

It’s a mistake to conceive of politics in one era as simply an extension of that in another. Tropes about younger Americans being liberal, or the future belonging to Democrats because that’s who today’s youth are, start turning upside down: What it means to be liberal or conservative is changing, and Republicans are simply doing a better job of recognizing and adapting to that than are Democrats. Over the last two or three decades, the Democratic Party and progressivism have become the domain of more highly educated, higher-income Americans; they no longer speak to the needs and interests of most working Americans, and they rather determinedly don’t want to do so. More importantly, Democrats represent the status quo in an era when just about everyone thinks the status quo is failing and they want dramatic change — and this is even more true amongst younger voters.

Trump has done a good job of articulating “a populist economic agenda … that unites large numbers across current party lines,” Schnurer said, even if he has no intention of enacting it.

“I’m not particularly optimistic about the ability of the Democratic Party leadership to reorient itself and seize those possibilities,” he continued, “because it’s too wedded to the inherited status quo in an age that craves a dramatic break with the past — especially amongst the young who will inherit the future. Trump gives them that, if a dystopian version of it: Where’s the completely innovative liberal version?”

Social theorist Henry Giroux is a leading expert on the relationship between young people, culture, education and politics. He highlighted the troubling implications of the Yale Youth Poll and what the potential right-wing drift of the youngest Americans may mean for the future of the country’s democracy and civic life.

“The Yale Youth Poll confirms what some of us have long insisted: Youth alone will not rescue a democracy hollowed out by gangster capitalism and ruled by demagogues who traffic in white Christian nationalism, white supremacy, cruelty and corruption….The fantasy that generational replacement will automatically yield justice is a dangerous illusion — one that absolves adults of their moral and political responsibilities while rooted in an essentialist notion of politics.”

Giroux continued:

The deeper truth is this: education is not the handmaiden of politics — it is its lifeblood. In an age where culture is the primary battlefield, authoritarianism thrives on ignorance, historical amnesia and the brutal aesthetics of cruelty normalized as common sense. Reclaiming education and public space is no longer optional — it is the condition of survival. We must cultivate a critical consciousness rooted in attentiveness: to history, to the structures of power, to the unseen and the silenced. This means connecting ideas to action in ways that dismantle forms of ideological and economic domination and nourish an ethical imagination bold enough to think what the present declares impossible.

Young people need more than slogans; they need a political vocabulary shaped by the lessons of history, alert to how fascism masquerades as freedom while delivering repression, how it weaponizes the rhetoric of order to erase the memory of resistance.

It took many decades for the Age of Trump and American neofascism to become a reality. It may well take decades of political struggle and hard work to unmake or escape resurgent American fascism and remedy the deep institutional and cultural failings that allowed and nurtured such political formations to take hold so quickly.

Younger people will of course play a central role in any such project of democratic renewal. On the other hand, that cohort could may also play an equally important role in cementing the Age of Trump and locking down authoritarian populism as the governing mode of American society.

Trumpism, authoritarianism and other forms of extremism are offering too many alienated younger people apparent answers and a compelling narrative, along with community and a sense of meaning. In the end, all that will prove toxic, but so far the Democratic Party and other mainstream elites and opinion leaders who believe in “the system” and ‘the institutions” are not offering an equally compelling narrative. The future must be won in the present. Unfortunately for the future of American democracy and freedom, the current Democratic Party is still looking backward to a vanished status quo and an obsolete understanding of politics.