Young people are anti-Trump

Voters under 30 are highly exposed to economic downturns and don't want Trump's agenda

If it's Friday, it's time for the Chart of the Week! I was going to write about Trump's sinking approval ratings on economics and immigration, and about the stock market, but I already wrote about that this week so I decided to do something new instead.

This piece starts pulling on a thread about young people and malleable party loyalty that I've been thinking about for a while now, using new data on how voters under 30 feel towards Trump.

Young people have moved right, but maybe not as much as you think

Young Americans have been left-leaning for nearly every election in the last three generations. Since 2004, Democratic presidential candidates have won voters under the age of 30 handily according to the exit poll, and since 1980 that group has voted more for Republican than Democratic candidates only twice. Young people are more progressive than the average person, favoring policies such as wealth redistribution and social spending more often than the median voter. They are a key group for Democrats across time.

Not to rehash history too much here, but the progressiveness of young people made it notable that the group lurched to the right in 2024. Donald Trump's gains with the group were so large, according to the political savant David Shor, that the average white and non-white male voter under 30 actually voted for Trump in 2024, and the only reliable Democratic young group was non-white women. Some estimates have young people going to Trump by 4 points. Recently, Elon Musk and the conservative commentator Charlie Kirk elevated a somewhat dubious finding from a poll conducted at Yale that voters ages 18 through 21 identify as Republican more often than Democrats, by a 12-point margin. Kirk even did a whole show about the poll on his YouTube channel!

Other surveys, however, disagree with this analysis. The Cooperative Election Survey — an academic political poll run out of Tufts University — finds Kamala Harris winning all racial subgroups of young people, and the exit polls from CNN and the Associated Press/VoteCast project to have youth voters going Harris, There has been some debate online about who is right here. But, honestly, I'm not too interested in figuring out a precise answer for you today. For one thing, there is no way to know who is right in this debate, since survey estimates are not dispositive. Polls are not the ground truth, and we cannot validate subgroup estimates with aggregate vote totals. One potential explanation from the CES is that young voters who tend to overreport voting also tend to support Trump at higher rates.

We do know that Trump made gains with young people in 2024, even if they were smaller than the popular media narrative would lead you to believe. It just doesn’t matter that much to me for the narrow purposes of this newsletter whether the shift was 20 points or just 15.

Instead, what I'm interested in is what young voters are telling pollsters about Trump today — and what this new data might be able to tell us about their previous and future vote choices.

Trump has lost the most ground with young people

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.

Pew's poll also finds Black and Hispanic voters are more anti-Trump now than they were in 2024, so there's some amount of overall shifting going on here. As you'd expect with a topline 60% disapproval and 40% approval.

But it's not just Pew finding Trump doing poorly with the youths. I took all the polls conducted in April and averaged their age-level crosstabs together. That average for adults and voters under 30 is still Disapprove +27, though the other age crosstabs differ from Pew's findings.

In the graph below, I show Trump's average approval by age group now compared to his 2024 result with each bloc:

According to these polls, Trump is now about as unpopular as he was in 2020. According to the exit polls, Biden won young people by 25 points.

And young people are not particularly fond of Trump’s policies, either. Below, the latest Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll shows support for key proposals among 18-30 year olds adults:

These two charts certainly put things into perspective... But they’re confusing at the same time. The swing chart shows quite an enormous shift in public opinion in a very short period of time. Did young voters just dislike Harris that much? Are they souring on Trump now for any particular reason? Were they ever even that right-leaning to begin with? Or maybe voting Trump was a manifestation of something else?

Young voters are particularly economically sensitive and anti-incumbent

I think the answer is a little 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. Under this paradigm, the right way to look at vote choice among young people in 2024, and at Trump's approval rating now, is two compatible votes against the status quo.

And imagine what it's like to be a young person in America today. If you're younger than 27, odds are you spent much of your high school or college career socially isolated from your peers due to restrictions from COVID-19. You have experienced politics in large part through the hyper-polarized prism of social media networks, especially TikTok and Instagram Reels. In your formative years, housing prices hit an all-time high of nearly $450,000 for a starter 3-bedroom home, and consumer inflation hit a 50-year high. Economic future looks out of reach, and it seems like the government isn't doing much here at home to help you, in particular. And hey, the average U.S. federal legislator is 60 years old, so it's not like they look, talk, or act like you, either.

Young people tell the Harvard Youth Poll that "barely getting by" financially, with just 16% of adults under 30 saying they are doing well financially. Just 15% believe the country is heading in the "right direction," versus 51% who say it is off on the wrong track. And they are isolated; only 17% report deep social connection, and young people report higher rates of depression and anxiety, according to Harvard's poll. Young people say they don't have a deep connection to a community, and to a political party.

And, crucially, this is mostly the same state of affairs as revealed by Harvard's Youth Poll in Spring 2024.

Given all this persistent anxiety, disaffection, and borderline resentment, we can wager that young people are particularly likely to see politics as a transaction, rather than a contest between ideas. And take it from a young person: Lots of us are constantly wondering, "what have you done for me lately?"

Young people are elastic voters, not partisans

The big thing you need to know about young people is that they are not yet wedded to any partisan labels. They have not been politically aware for long enough to reliably ally themselves with one side of the aisle. And, more than that, they can even view the parties as having a malign influence on politics. This results in young people having very low rates of strong attachment to either party. Political science says their political identities will harden as they get older.

Operating in this scarcity, anti-system, anti-party mindset, it's easy to see how an otherwise left-leaning group could vote out the party in power, even when that party was left-leaning. It's also easy to see, then, how they wouldn't give Trump a pass in 2025.

According to the Harvard Youth Poll, 41% of adults under 30 believed America was better off under Biden. And a slim majority, 51%, think Trump’s policies will hurt their finances over the next few years, while only 18% think they will help. And with Trump publicly taking the blame for tariff and trade policies that are wreaking havoc on the global financial system, who can blame them? The polling data show that young people are uniquely exposed to economic stressors.

For Democrats, the concern is that they need to win the trust of these young people back. 18- to 30- year olds tell Harvard they have an even worse impression of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. That will matter in the next election, when the question will not be "do you like Trump?" but "who do you want to vote for?"

But equally, it's easy to see how 4 more years of disastrous policy for young people could see the Republicans suffer the same fate Harris did in 2024. If young people are mostly just elastic, anti-system voters, then the young Trump converts in 2024 aren't really MAGA Republicans so much as stressed-out, ideologically unaware, alienated young adults, in want of a party.

And again, nothing of this is to deny that young voters didn't move to the right in 2024, or to deny the Republicans any ideological momentum with young people. But I think the evidence is strong for muted ideological realignment and a strong role for the airing of grievances against the incumbent party.

In summary, young people did not move towards Trump in 2024 because they're more MAGA, they moved towards Trump because they're sensitive to economics and don't trust "the system." And that's ultimately why Trump has lost them, too.