Young People Are Fascinating—Just Don't Expect Them to Decide the 2026 Election

“Young Voters Vehemently Oppose Trump, ICE” reported the Yale Youth Poll this week, drawing on a national survey conducted in March that revealed substantial erosion of the president’s job approval since last year among respondents under the age of 30. Two years ago, the Trump-led Republican ticket had performed surprisingly well among this age group—especially men—compared to 2020 and 2016. But the Yale analysis, in concert with other recent polling, suggests that the 2024 results reflected a temporary shift in the preferences of young adults rather than a more enduring realignment. Looking ahead to the 2026 midterms, Democrats once again far outpace Republicans in the voting intentions of 18-to-29-year-olds.

The political views of the young dependably receive special attention among media analysts, for understandable reasons. Older people tend to find young people fascinating, and young people find themselves fascinating. Generation gaps and conflicts are familiar dramatic tropes upon which to hang stories, whether the young are portrayed sympathetically as idealists longing to transcend the hypocrisies of their elders or critically as naive narcissists who haven’t yet experienced the hard knocks of life. And, in a political world that places great value on the power of prediction, the youth politics of the moment can seem (sometimes misleadingly) to provide a vision of the nation’s future.

But anyone interested in the factors likely to foreshadow or affect the outcome of the midterm elections in November shouldn’t spend too much time obsessing over the preferences and priorities of the youngest cohort of citizens. Voter turnout is strongly and reliably correlated with age, and young adults are always much less likely than older generations to participate in elections—especially non-presidential contests. According to data compiled by the political scientist Michael McDonald, the turnout rate among eligible citizens between the ages of 18 and 29 was 49 percent in the 2024 election, compared to 76 percent among citizens aged 60 and over—a gap of 27 percentage points. In 2022, the gap in turnout between the 18–29 age cohort (26 percent) and the 60+ cohort (64 percent) was even larger, reaching 38 percentage points.

In the last midterm election four years ago, citizens under the age of 30 constituted just 12 percent of the national electorate, according to the Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Bureau of the Census. That equalled the share of the electorate aged 75 and above. More voters had passed their 65th birthday (30 percent) than had yet to reach their 42nd (29 percent). The median age in the 2022 midterms was 54.

In a very close election, of course, shifts in a single slice of the voting public might be important. But many of the key races this year are being held in constituencies that are even older than the nation as a whole. Among the potentially competitive Senate seats up for election in 2026, only three (Georgia, Alaska, and Texas) are being held in states where the median age is below the national figure, while six (Maine, New Hampshire, Michigan, Ohio, North Carolina, and Iowa) are located in states with disproportionately elderly populations.

Over the past week or so, a debate has arisen in a few corners of the political media over whether or not Democratic candidates would be well-served by pursuing opportunities to reach young citizens by engaging social media personalities with youthful followings, such as the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who hold controversial opinions on certain political issues. But a new poll of Democratic voters in Michigan released by the left-of-center group Data for Progress found that 80 percent of all respondents, and 89 percent of those over the age of 45, were either indifferent to Piker or hadn’t even heard of him. It’s common for political analysts to praise candidates and parties for courting teenagers and 20-somethings, or to suggest that they would reap an electoral benefit from doing so. But even successful attempts to bolster support among young social media users are likely to harvest fewer raw votes than more modest shifts in sentiment among older citizens who represent a much larger proportion of the overall electorate.

Because so much of our popular and media culture is dominated by content targeted to, and trends led by, young people, it’s only natural to assume that these generations must also hold the potential to be unusually influential in the realm of politics. But while Taylor Swift may be the biggest pop star in America, even she couldn’t lead Kamala Harris to the White House in 2024. As the full results of the Yale polling indicate, the GOP’s chief problem right now isn’t that young people are souring on the party—it’s that their parents and grandparents are too.

Republican Governing Mistakes Are the Great Partisan Equalizer

The Democratic Party faces a set of serious challenges. It has lost its former popularity among white voters without college degrees, a significant share of the national electorate that has shifted since the 1990s from mostly voting Democratic to supporting Republicans by a 2-to-1 ratio. The results of the 2024 election suggested that this trend could extend to other ethnic groups as well, especially Hispanics, and that younger men of all races might have become alienated from the party. While Democrats have made partially offsetting gains among college-educated voters, this countervailing trend has not been sufficent to maintain the party’s traditional numerical advantage among the American public or to counteract an increasingly pro-Republican structural tilt in Senate elections. Like other center-left parties around the world, Democrats must contend with the growing tension between the demands of their culturally progressive activist population and the more moderate preferences of the casual supporters they need to win national power.

But there is an important factor that has so far prevented the Democratic Party from losing its ability to contest elections on an equal footing: the perennial Republican struggle to govern. In a strict two-party system where electoral competition is a zero-sum game, that’s turned out to be an important asset.

President Trump’s job approval rating now sits at about 40 percent on average, a historically low figure for this point in a presidential administration. Trump is being weighed down by negative evaluations of the national economy, with Americans expressing particular dissatisfaction with high inflation and declining affordability on his watch. Unsurprisingly, given how midterm elections tend to serve as a referendum on the performance of the president, Democrats have moved into a steady lead in congressional polling even as the party itself remains fairly unpopular.

It’s not always fair to blame—or credit—the president for the nation’s economic health. But Trump has implemented well-publicized policy changes that are not only opposed by most citizens, but were also predicted by experts to increase inflation and reduce growth. Just as economists could explain in advance that Trump’s tariffs would be much more likely to produce higher prices than employment benefits, specialists in the politics of the Middle East easily foresaw that attacking Iran would lead to immediately noticeable spikes in fuel prices and indirect effects on other consumer costs. Many voters may not fully understand exactly how the Iran war leads to rising prices on goods other than gasoline—it requires rare knowledge, for example, to be aware that the Hormuz blockade will also make food more expensive by constricting the worldwide supply of crop fertilizer—but since they reliably hold the president responsible for managing the national economy, he is likely to be punished anyway. Trump is also aggressively pressuring the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates, which could also have the effect of compounding the inflation problem.

When a president’s poll numbers start to slide, much of the Washington commentariat diagnoses a public relations crisis and dispenses the traditional remedy: better messaging. It’s true that Trump probably would be well-advised to express more sympathy for Americans’ concerns about affordability and to develop a potentially persuasive rationale for the conflict with Iran. But the real problem he faces is the consequence of his policy decisions, not a lack of clever spin. Political scientists can sometimes express cynicism about the capacity of voters to keep political leaders properly accountable for their governing choices, yet history is full of policy failures that became political disasters. At least some of the time, it’s in the interests of politicians to get the substance right.

Republicans have realized major electoral benefits over the years from subjecting policy technocrats and other intellectuals to rhetorical attack and budgetary defunding, which have become more frequent as the party has harnessed populist resentments among voters without college degrees. Conservatives characterize the community of credentialed subject-matter specialists as skewed to the ideological left, prone to arrogance and condescension, and not as reliably correct about the world as they claim. These are all valid criticisms.

That doesn’t mean, however, that refusing to develop substantive knowledge about complex issues, or to listen to those who have it, will produce a record of successful governance. Yes, the experts are wrong sometimes, but not as often as those who dismiss everything the experts say. The George W. Bush administration, the Tea Party Congress, and the first Trump term all suffered from political weaknesses that stemmed from policy failures, handing electoral gifts to the Democratic opposition. Recent events suggest that Republican leaders haven’t been studying this history—and thus may be doomed to repeat it this November.

Five Lessons from the 2025 Election Results

1. “Unless the president is unusually popular, the party holding the White House will suffer significant losses in off-year elections” is a very well-established pattern, so nothing about the Democratic electoral victories in New Jersey, Virginia, and other states yesterday should be treated as shocking or even unusual. But it’s always valuable to confirm that some of the old rules of politics still apply, even as other aspects of our political world have changed. And for all its normal predictability, this thermostatic backlash effect still seems to catch media commentators and other political professionals by surprise. In part, this is because so much attention during the first year of a presidential term is focused on the failure and subsequent internal dissension of the opposition party, making what should in fact be a fully expected rebound of its electoral fortunes seem like a dramatic plot twist.

2. One of the reasons why Trump has been treated as politically stronger, and the Democrats politically weaker, in his second term than in his first has been that we haven’t seen as visible a popular oppositional movement emerge in 2025 as we did in 2017. Yes, there have been anti-Trump protests, marches, and hashtags, but nothing to the scale of what happened eight years ago, and major institutions like universities and corporations have taken a more accommodationist tack to conservative populism than they did in the peak “Resistance” era. But yesterday’s results demonstrate that 2025’s less prominent expressive opposition on the left does not necessarily indicate, or produce, less successful electoral performance for Democratic candidates—or even lower levels of voter participation. This raises the fascinating, and I think quite unresolved, question of how much self-styled “movements” actually affect the outcomes of general elections for top political offices.

3. Based on exit polls and results in particular localities, it’s clear that both Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia performed much better than Kamala Harris in 2024 among Hispanic and Asian-American voters, either matching or exceeding Joe Biden’s performance in 2020. There are three plausible interpretations of this change: (a) minority voters’ growing support for Trump does not—at least yet—apply to other Republican candidates when he isn’t on the ballot; (b) many have become “nature-of-the-times” swing voters who punished Democrats for disappointing stewardship of the national economy in 2024 and are now punishing Republicans for the same thing; (c) Republican gains among socially conservative racial minorities between 2016 and 2024 are now being reversed, perhaps because of the more aggressive immigration enforcement policies and rhetoric of the second Trump term. We’ll need more data and more elections to better understand the causal factors behind this trend (assuming it continues).

4. Zohran Mamdani is poised to become a well-known national figure, in part because both supporters and critics will have a strong incentive to provide him with generous publicity. For various reasons, however, the mayoralty of major cities is normally a political ticket to nowhere—even for politicians who aren’t constitutionally ineligible to run for president. Mamdani is the latest in a number of economically and socially progressive candidates to win election in big northern cities, which is an important development in its own right but a long way from indicating what the “future of the Democratic Party” might be. Mamdani has undeniable political talent, but was also blessed with competing against several unusually unappealing opponents—beginning with an incumbent mayor whose four years of flagrant blundering opened the door to his candidacy. The governing choices he makes will be fascinating to watch.

5. Perceptions matter in politics whether or not they match reality, and the perception that yesterday’s results constituted a “blue wave” (in part because expectations were set by polling that underestimated Democrats’ performance) is likely to have important consequences for a range of topics from the resolution of the government shutdown to candidate recruitment in the 2026 midterms. But it’s as easy to overstate the magnitude of Democratic victories this year as the Republican victories of last year, and indulgence in the former is not the ideal response to indulgence in the latter. The best evidence indicates that we remain in an era of polarized and closely matched parties, meaning that the emotional response of attentive partisans on both sides rises and falls much more dramatically than the actual strength of the parties themselves. And no election is ever the final word on anything; in this country, there’s always another one right around the corner.

Honest Graft Podcasting with Chris Hayes and FiveThirtyEight

Along with Matt Grossmann, the co-author of my new book Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics, I've recently appeared on two major podcasts devoted to American politics. You can hear our discussion with MSNBC's Chris Hayes on his podcast Why Is This Happening? here, and our talk with Galen Druke of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast here. Both episodes are also widely available on popular podcast apps.

In the 2024 Elections, It's a Man's Man's Man's Republican Party

One of the most important consequences of Donald Trump's political ascendance in 2016 was the effect it had on the political engagement of women. They played a leading role in the "Resistance" movement of anti-Trump activism in the 2018 and 2020 elections, which often portrayed Trump as uniquely threatening to women's interests in both his substantive policies and personal behavior. The number of female candidates in the Democratic Party made a noticeable jump in 2018, the first election after Trump became president, and Democratic primary voters seemed especially motivated to express their aversion to Trump by nominating women for Congress and other major offices. The Democratic House majority elected that year contained a record number of women, and in 2020 a majority of non-incumbent Democratic nominees were female for the first time in American history.

Less predictably, the proportion of women nominated by the Republican Party also increased during Trump's presidency. Women rose from 13 percent to 22 percent of all Republican House nominees between 2018 and 2020, and jumped from 18 percent to 33 percent of all non-incumbent nominees. Media reports revealed that Republican officials and interest groups, worried about stereotypes of a male-dominated party, had invested in efforts to recruit more women to run for office. The representation of women in the GOP still lagged well behind the Democrats, but seemed to be on a similar trajectory.

However, the parties have since diverged. The picture for Democrats is of relative stability. Since 2018, the proportion of Democratic House nominees who are women has remained between 42 and 48 percent, as depicted in the figure below. But Republicans proved unable to sustain the growth of female nominees achieved in the 2020 election. This year, 84 percent of Republican House nominees, and 83 percent of non-incumbent nominees, are men.

In Senate and governors' races, both parties have produced a fairly steady pattern of increased female representation since the 2000s, but the Republicans experienced a decline in female Senate and gubernatorial nominees from 21 percent in 2022 to 16 percent in 2024—the lowest proportion of women nominated by the party since 2016:

The 2024 election has exhibited especially overt "gendered" elements that are hard to ignore. Trump, facing a female opponent for the second time in his political career, made his entrance to the Republican National Convention this summer to the accompaniment of James Brown's "It's a Man's Man's Man's World," while Harris prefers a soundtrack of Beyoncé and Taylor Swift—both of whom have endorsed her campaign. Commentators and analysts discuss the possibility of a record gender gap and the possibly central role of abortion and trans rights in shaping voters' preferences. Even the candidates' media outreach strategies reflect gender differences, with Harris appearing on podcasts hosted by Alex Cooper and Brene Brown that are especially popular with women while Trump targets the mostly male audiences of Joe Rogan and Logan Paul.

But even a historically unprecedented partisan divide between male and female voters in 2024 is unlikely to match the dramatic contemporary gap in gender representation separating Democratic from Republican politicians. For the Democratic Party, a future of relative gender parity among its elected leadership is realistically within sight. But for Republican politicians, it's still very much a man's world.

Post-Debate Wrap Up: Not Much to Learn, But a Clear Story Forms

 1. Most debates, whatever their other (dubious) merits, are not good vehicles for determining how candidates differ on substantive policy questions. This debate was no different. The policy discussions, when they occurred, often stayed at a superficial level or departed from reality, and the moderators did not consistently follow up when candidates dodged their questions (which both Trump and Harris did repeatedly). The assumption that these events are essential elements of the democratic process continues to be thoroughly unconvincing.

2. Harris is often compared to Barack Obama for obvious reasons, but her debate style is actually much closer to that of Joe Biden (at least, the pre-2024 Biden). She's not really a facts-and-figures memorizer or someone who shows off command of policy detail; she prefers to state more general themes and present her personal biography as an adequate answer to questions about what she would do to solve this or that specific problem. In another context, an opposing candidate would be able to repeatedly push her out of this comfort zone.

3. Luckily for Harris, (a) she's not running against another candidate, and (b) there's nothing the political media appreciates more than strategic cleverness. Harris's transparently intentional attempts to distract and infuriate Trump by talking about people leaving his rallies in boredom or Wharton School economists trashing his economic plan will be widely hailed as a stroke of political genius, ensuring—in combination with Trump's behavior—that the press will declare her the winner by a wide margin. Add "they're eating the dogs" to the mix, and you have the formula for a solidified conventional wisdom that the debate was disastrous for Trump. But we'll see if it actually registers in the polls.

4. We can also expect considerable media coverage of Taylor Swift's post-debate endorsement of Harris. That's surely welcomed by the Harris campaign, and any positive story is valuable in a very close election. But if high-wattage celebrity support actually moved millions of votes, the Democrats would never lose.

5. A very confident Harris campaign immediately challenged Trump to another debate, and Trump may well accept the offer in order to try for a comeback in Round 2. But, really, what's the point of having another one of these?

Democratic Convention Wrap-Up: 16 Years Later, It's Still Obama's Party

A few notes on the week the Democrats just had in Chicago:

1. 20 years after his national emergence as a keynote speaker at the 2004 convention, and 16 years after he won his first presidential nomination, Barack Obama remains the defining face of the contemporary Democratic Party. The 2024 convention demonstrated the potency of Obama's legacy in three major respects.

• On policy: the convention presented Harris as a center-left candidate in the Obama mold, consistently liberal on both economic and cultural issues but not doctrinaire in manner and maintaining a quiet distance from the Sanders/Warren "progressive revolution" platform that some observers have viewed as a harbinger of the party's future. The convention programming consistently emphasized practical incrementalism over ideological transformation. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's speech on Monday night did not take a distinct ideological tack from the rest of the party, and nobody was in the mood to stir up factional conflict.

• On representation: Obama's demonstration that white voters in swing states could support a person of another race for high political office (not at all an obvious assumption when he first ran for president in 2008) has, in the years since his election, unlocked the door to a steadily widening stream of non-white candidates who have sharply increased the demographic diversity of the Democratic Party's, and the nation's, leadership. Harris is, of course, a beneficiary of this trailblazing, but the convention stage this week was occupied at various points by many other Obama legatees: Cory Booker, Raphael Warnock, Wes Moore, Angela Alsobrooks, Ruben Gallego, Hakeem Jeffries, Catherine Cortez Masto, Andy Kim, and so on. But like Obama, Harris prefers not to invoke her race (and gender) explicitly in a cry for historical justice, but instead assumes that voters will notice it anyway and hopes that they view it as a symbol of positive change.

• On tone: Obama has made it unmistakably clear over the years that he doesn't like self-righteous, scolding, negative-affect political rhetoric, and he thinks it's politically counterproductive when it comes from the left. His address on Tuesday night echoed this point, albeit indirectly enough to ensure that "Obama trashes wokeness" wouldn't be the big media story of the evening. Harris obviously agrees. Her acceptance speech last night, as well as the bulk of the speeches over the four nights of the convention, were welcoming to non-progressives and explicitly presented a positive and patriotic view of the country, complete with repeated "USA" chants and signs in the crowd. This is not "1619 Project" progressivism, portraying the country as enduringly shamed by its history of injustice; this is instead a reaffirmation of Obama's preferred framing of the United States as a nation that can be proud of the racial progress that it has made and of the example that its multicultural democracy can now offer the world.

2. Harris is clearly a fan of short speeches. Since starting her campaign, she's tended to speak at her public rallies for only about 20 minutes ot so. Last night's speech was 37 minutes long, which turns out to be the shortest acceptance address since Walter Mondale's in 1984 (not counting Biden's in 2020, which had no in-person audience due to the pandemic and hence no breaks for applause). This offers a contrast with her opponent, who has delivered the three longest acceptance speeches in history. In a digital age of shrinking attention spans, perhaps Harris sees strategic value in relative brevity.

3. Of course, a shorter speech means leaving some things out. Harris's autobiographical narrative emphasized her experience as a prosecutor and attorney general but skipped over her tenure as vice president almost entirely. The reason is clear—with Biden's approval ratings hovering around 40 percent, she needs to win over some Biden critics and has decided to present herself as a new face in politics, unburdened by what has been. But this isn't a risk-free strategy. She also needs voters to view her as qualified for the presidency, and discussing her vice presidential experience could be helpful in passing that test.

4. In general, journalists don't like conventions all that much. For them, being stuck in a crowded arena while a parade of politicians deliver partisan boilerplate for hour after hour is boring and annoying; the excitement among the press corps provoked by the (false) rumor that Beyonce might made a surprise appearance at last night's session partially reflected media members' lack of interest in the people who were actually on the schedule. But for citizens who aren't already saturated in politics every day, the conventions can serve as a useful window into the political world. A non-expert who spends an hour or so watching both parties' conventions will usually get a pretty good picture of each side's main messages and how they differ. Conventions are also important for the internal operations of the parties as complex political organizations—a quadrennial national gathering of top leaders and activists where information can be shared, relationships can be built, and party business can be settled. Conventions, much more than debates, are truly essential milestone events during every presidential campaign, and they shouldn't be judged only by the superficial entertainment value of every speaker at the podium.