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.

New Interview at The Signal on the Generation Gap in American Politics

 I recently spoke to Michael Bluhm at The Signal about the uniquely pro-Democratic skew of millennial and Gen-Z voters, and how this trend fits within larger demographic changes within the American population. An edited transcript of our conversation is now available.

Today in Bloomberg Opinion: Republicans Blame the Schools For the Liberalism of the Young

The efforts of Republican politicians and conservative leaders to restrict material deemed ideologically unacceptable from public schools and libraries have attracted a great deal of attention recently. As I explain for Bloomberg Opinion, the idea that these institutions have become machines of liberal indoctrination allows conservatives to explain why younger Americans are mostly left-of-center politically without holding their own movement responsible for its lack of appeal among rising generations. This piece is also available via the Washington Post.

Today's Generation Gap Is Being Widened by the Conservative Media

Americans disagree much more about politics today across generational lines than they did in the well-chronicled era when youthful cultural icons announced to their parents that "your sons and your daughters are beyond your command" and "I hope I die before I get old." The partisan differences between the youngest and eldest cohorts of voters have not received the same public attention as other forms of contemporary political conflict, but they are now bigger in size than the more celebrated divisions between men and women, the college-educated and the non-college-educated, and the residents of red and blue states.

Younger people may be reliably more idealistic and less nostalgic than their elders, but that doesn't always make them more liberal. In the 1980s, for example, Ronald Reagan and other Republicans ran as well or better among the young as the old. Reagan-era conservatives appealed to younger Americans by portraying themselves as innovative and forward-thinking, while arguing that the Democratic Party had become a corrupted relic of bygone days.

But over time, the dominant tone of conservative rhetoric has become darker, more pessimistic or alarmist about the future, and more critical of ongoing social trends of which young people largely approve. Conservatives responded to the rise of Barack Obama, a personally popular figure among younger Americans, with eight years of relentless opposition. And as conservatism's messages have evolved, so too has the receptiveness of newer generations to conservative politicians and ideas. Voters under the age of 40 were evenly split between the parties as recently as the 2000 election; by the 2010s, the Democratic Party was reliably prevailing among this age group by margins of 20 points or more.

From time to time, Republican officials have expressed concern about this development and have proposed steps to increase their party's standing among younger voters. But power within the extended Republican network has been flowing away from politicians and toward the conservative media over the same period that the GOP's youth problem has emerged. It's media talking heads, not elected officials, who are now the primary spokespeople for American conservatism. Freed from political candidates' need to court a popular majority, the increasingly loud voices of Fox News and talk radio are free to appeal to their smaller core audience of right-leaning senior citizens by ignoring or even explicitly ridiculing the concerns and activities of younger Americans.

Contemporary conservative rhetoric is often characterized by exhibitions of bewildered discontentment directed at younger people and the cultural environment that envelops them. Mockery of millennials and college students as "snowflakes," "campus crazies," and "social justice warriors" has become commonplace in conservative media outlets over the last few years, intensifying when an issue arises that especially activates the generational divide. Last Thursday, for example, a 54-year-old conservative prime time host engaged in a public fight with a 33-year-old who is also perhaps the most popular professional athlete of his generation, insisting that his proper role in society is to "dribble" rather than express his views about race relations in the United States.

As high school students who survived the Parkland, Florida school shooting have mounted a public anti-gun campaign over the past week, several conservative media personalities have responded by suggesting that the young age of the activists renders their opinions on the subject illegitimate. (Meanwhile, the more conspiratorial corners of the conservative media ecosystem have reacted in their own unique fashion, dismissing the students as actors on the payroll of shadowy leftists.) President Trump, himself a conservative media figure before he ran for elective office, argued today that violent movies and video games help to encourage school shootings—placing responsibility for social violence on young people's own consumer choices.

All in all, the messages transmitted by conservative elites these days are doing little to redirect younger citizens' collective left-of-center political alignment. Even young adults who are skeptical of gun control or other liberal causes are unlikely to respond positively to the argument that they should automatically defer to the judgment of their elders on political matters, or that social ills can be cured by regulating their favorite pastimes.

It's possible that the current state of political conflict will lead today's younger citizens to form a lifelong preference for the Democratic Party, thus burdening Republicans with a long-term electoral disadvantage. Whether or not that happens, however, the more immediate consequences of stoking generational warfare are not necessarily unfavorable to conservatives. Seniors and near-seniors have become more pro-Republican over the past decade, and they participate in politics at much higher rates than their children and grandchildren.

So far, evidence of an incipient millennial-led liberal revolution is much more apparent in the youth-dominated pop culture world than in a political system led by conservative Republicans at every level of government. If conservative media rhetoric is partially at fault for alienating young people from the Republican Party, it may be equally responsible for attracting more older Americans to the ranks of the GOP during the same period. Fox News Channel recently retired its famous slogan "Fair and Balanced"; perhaps its next catchy motto will be "Don't Trust Anyone Under 30."

An Honest Graft Thanksgiving: The Generation Gap Keeps Growing

The term "generation gap" is most commonly associated with the 1960s and early 1970s, when the unusually large cohort of Americans born during the post-World War II baby boom reached adolescence and then adulthood. According to a widely-accepted perception, a society-wide gulf opened up during this period dividing the then-youthful baby boomers from their parents and grandparents over political issues such as civil rights, women’s rights, and the Vietnam War as well as cultural battles over music, art, fashion, sexual practices, and recreational drug use. A half-century later, the popular identification of "the sixties" with a burst of youth-led social change remains as familiar as ever in the collective American mind, even for the growing share of the national population born too late to have experienced the era themselves.

But a much bigger, though less well-promoted, generation gap is happening right now. The difference in political loyalties between younger and older Americans is both larger and more consistent today than it was during the golden age of boomer self-mythologization:

This growing gap in the partisan affections of the young and the old is caused by two parallel developments. One is that Americans under the age of 40, especially members of the "millennial generation" (born in 1982 and after), are distinctively more liberal and Democratic than their older counterparts. The other is that older generations have become more Republican-leaning over time—even the baby boomers who once symbolized sixties-style lefty politics:

Unsurprisingly, Gallup data find that job approval of President Trump is consistently correlated with age. Older Americans have collectively mixed feelings about Trump, while younger Americans overwhelmingly dislike him:

Trump Job Approval by Age, Jan–Nov 2017

The contemporary generation gap also extends to non-presidential elections. Both of the governor's races held earlier this month produced significant age differences in partisan support. In Virginia, voters aged 18-44 supported Democrat Ralph Northam for governor by a 30-point margin (64 percent to 34 percent), according to media exit polls, while voters 45 and older narrowly preferred his Republican opponent Ed Gillespie (51 percent to 49 percent). In New Jersey, Democratic candidate Phil Murphy and Republican nominee Kim Guadagno similarly split the over-45 vote (exit polls gave Murphy a 3-point edge) while Murphy swept the under-45 vote by a lopsided ratio (66 percent to 30 percent).

American politics today is shot through with intergenerational conflict, from cultural disagreements over transgender rights to economic proposals that raise tax rates on students while cutting them for wealthy investors and the estates of multimillionaires. If your Thanksgiving dinner table becomes the battleground for a political war between the generations this week, you will surely not be alone.

Forget the '60s—The Real Generation Gap Is Happening Right Now

Since the election last month, we have seen a parade of analyses examining how Clinton supporters differ from Trump supporters along the dividing lines of race, education, and geographic residence. The persistence of partisan differences by age in American elections, however, has received somewhat less attention. Younger voters, who first demonstrated a notable relative preference for the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, swung even further towards the Democrats in the two Obama elections; Obama carried the under-30 vote by 34 points in 2008 and by 23 points in 2012, according to the national exit polls. At the same time, voters over the age of 50 collectively preferred Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney to Obama in both of his successful national campaigns.

Hillary Clinton may have lacked Obama's (and Bernie Sanders's) personal appeal among younger voters, but she still carried the under-30 vote by an 18-point margin over Trump according to the 2016 exit polls, while voters over the age of 45 collectively opted for Trump by 9 points—confirming that the contemporary political generation gap will outlast the Obama era. This is a significant divide by historical standards. None of the 1960s-era elections produced a comparable partisan difference, despite the decade's prominent youth-led protest movements and memorable "don't trust anyone over 30" rhetoric. According to Gallup data, Hubert Humphrey led Richard Nixon in 1968 among voters under 30 by only 9 points, 47 percent to 38 percent, while voters over the age of 50 preferred Nixon by just 6 points (47 percent to 41 percent). So Trump performed about as well among young voters in a two-person contest as Nixon did in a three-way race.

Many of the most prominent political issues of our time include a generational dimension separating the left-leaning young from their more conservative elders. Social issues such as gay rights and drug legalization divide Americans sharply by age. The Affordable Care Act drew its fiercest opposition from the elderly—who already enjoyed Medicare benefits and thus perceived little collective interest in expanding health care access to younger citizens. Climate change is of greater concern to those who stand to inherit the planet than those who rule it today. Democratic candidates frequently tout their plans for enhancing college affordability and access to childcare; Republicans seldom discuss these topics. Conservative efforts to lower federal tax rates on high incomes also stand to primarily benefit older—and disproportionately wealthier—voters.

More broadly, the 2016 election exposed a key divide in the American electorate between nationalism and internationalism, between a preference for traditional social hierarchies and an attraction to new social norms. The themes of cultural nostalgia and alienation adopted by the Trump campaign were particularly primed to appeal to older generations feeling increasingly out of place in contemporary society and preferring a bygone past of perceived American "greatness" defined by a rejection of "political correctness" at home and an adherence to military/economic unilateralism abroad. Just as the Brexit referendum in the UK passed over the opposition of a younger generation of Britons much more at ease with European integration than their parents and grandparents, the oldest incoming president in American history assembled a narrow electoral coalition that is heavily weighted toward his own age cohort—and there's no particular reason to believe that he will govern in a manner that increases his appeal to those who did not support his candidacy. A Pew survey released this week found Trump with a favorable rating of just 24 percent among respondents aged 18-29 and 25 percent among those aged 30-49, compared to 47 percent among 50-to-64-year-olds and 54 percent among the 65-and-over population.

Ronald Reagan's famous "optimism" was to some degree an assured belief that the future belonged to conservatives. A more extensive elucidation of this view, complete with accompanying data, can be found in any number of the essays written by Michael Barone in the 1980s for the Almanac of American Politics. Barone viewed Reagan's electoral success as proof that a majority of American voters had come to recognize the fundamental flaws of liberalism and were acting together to push their country in a rightward direction. The Democrats, according to Barone, were the party of declining central cities, out-of-fashion hippie relics, and Rust Belt anachronism; the Republicans were the party of burgeoning suburbs, private-sector innovators, and Sun Belt futurism. Importantly, in Barone's view, conservatives were winning the hearts and minds of younger Americans, who could be expected to take up Reagan's torch and advance it still further through subsequent decades. As Barone and Grant Ujifusa wrote in the 1990 edition of the Almanac, “[t]he young voters of the 1980s, Republican strategists hope, and Democratic strategists fear, will carry their sunny Republicanism into the 2030s and 2040s.”

Young people may still be sunny these days, but Republicanism is decidedly not. The victories of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama damaged conservatives' confidence that they spoke for an enduring popular majority, and the main conservative objectives of shrinking the size and scope of government, establishing unquestioned American military supremacy abroad, and promoting morally traditionalist attitudes among the American public have all, to varying degrees and for varying reasons, remained unfulfilled in the years since Reagan departed the national stage. When combined with the continuing leftward evolution of American culture in the realms of race, gender, religion, and sexuality, these developments have left many conservatives—including the current president-elect—warning darkly of the imminent destruction of America as we know it, which in turn justifies increasingly aggressive challenges from the right to established political norms and institutions.

Now that it is the Democratic Party that is becoming more Sun Belt than Rust Belt, that is the favored party of revitalized urban metropolises and centers of innovation like the high-tech sector, and that is more attuned to the millennial-generation cultural zeitgeist, older conservatives exhibit a shaken faith in the wisdom of popular majorities. Barone himself has taken to explicitly arguing in favor of the electoral college precisely because it might act—as it did in 2016—to thwart the will of a national plurality that he finds ideologically and demographically uncongenial. Other Republicans have responded to social change by advocating restrictions on access to the ballot that disproportionately affect young and non-white citizens, in order to further tilt the electoral system away from their political opponents.

As the Republican victories of 2014 and 2016 confirm, there is no youth-led "permanent Democratic majority," in part because our electoral rules and institutions tend to provide Republicans with a built-in advantage in close elections. Plus, there are simply lots and lots of baby boomers and pre-boomers, and they vote more reliably than their children and grandchildren. But if the young will respond to Trump's ascendance by resenting the disproportionate political and economic power of the right-leaning old, the old will continue to resent the increasing cultural power of the left-leaning young. The power of the presidency simply does not extend to authority over the national culture, and the institutions that do exert substantial cultural influence—the news media, entertainment industry, educational system, and so forth—can be expected to serve as centers of resistance to Trump and Trumpism. Cultural backlash can be a powerful tool for winning elections, but it's very hard to actually deliver on promises to move an entire society back in time.