This Is Why Young People Really Voted for Trump [View all]

[Demovictory9]

The data suggest that the swing in young adults voting for Donald Trump did not reflect a major shift in ideology. Rather, the swing seems to have resulted from moderate-to-somewhat-liberal young voters deciding to bet on Mr. Trump out of concern about the state of the economy — and from young moderates and progressives who chose to stay home because they thought Ms. Harris was either too progressive or not progressive enough. This is a point with implications for Democrats and Republicans alike.

The most striking feature of the young adult Trump swing is that it occurred even though there has been no significant recent increase in the proportion of young adults who identify as conservative.

There is also not much evidence that young adults hold increasingly conservative opinions — quite the contrary. A recent study by the sociologists Kyle Dodson and Clem Brooks found that from 2012 to 2020, public opinion in the United States toward racial minorities, immigrants, people who are gay or lesbian and other groups grew more socially accepting, with young adults at the leading edge of that change. Young Republicans became more socially accepting, too, if not on every issue.

This is part of a longer-term trend. Sociologists such as Mike Hout and Ethan Fosse have demonstrated that on a wide array of social matters, including the division of household labor between men and women, the morality of homosexuality, views of corporal punishment and feelings about prayer in school, the general trend across the past century is for Americans born each successive year to express slightly more tolerant, egalitarian and secular attitudes than the one before. Although these studies don’t go all the way up to 2024, research from Gallup indicates that this development hasn’t changed course in the last few years, no matter how much chatter there is about a vibe shift.

By contrast, the evidence is strong that economic considerations mattered greatly to young Americans in the 2024 election. While voters of all age groups cited the economy as a pressing concern, this was especially true for voters under 30, with 40 percent reporting that inflation had been the single most important factor in their vote for president, and 46 percent more saying that it had been an important factor. A substantial number of young people apparently believed that Ms. Harris would continue the Biden-era policies they held responsible for high prices and hoped that Mr. Trump would bring relief.



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