Where Have All the Young Democrats Gone?

Since the 2008 election, Democrats have been counting on young voters as an essential part of what they called a "new American majority." But the 2024 election may have spelled the end of the youth vote as a dependable part of the Democrats' coalition. Parts of it should endure—in particular, young college-educated women—but other parts may fall by the wayside unless Democrats find a way to win them back.

The Democrats' large-scale support among young voters goes back to the early 2000s. In the Reagan-Bush years, young people had backed Republicans. Clinton won a plurality and then a majority of young voters in 1992 and 1996, but George W. Bush and Al Gore each got 47 percent of the 18-to-24-year-old vote in 2000. The shift to the Democrats begins in the 2004 election when Democrat John Kerry won the youth vote against Bush 56 to 43 percent. In 2008, Barack Obama won the 18–29-year-old vote by an even wider margin, 60 to 32 percent. That trend continued through the 2020 election when Biden won the youth vote 60 to 36 percent.

These young voters increasingly identified themselves as "liberal." According to Gallup, in 1994, 33 percent of 18-29 year olds described themselves as "liberal" or "very liberal." In 2021, it was 63 percent combined. The percentage of young people identifying themselves as "very liberal" also rose, particularly in the 2010s, from about six percent in 2010 to about 20 percent in 2020. In the 2016 presidential primaries, 18-29 year olds gave more votes to Bernie Sanders, who ran as a "democratic socialist," than to the combined total of Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Donald Trump. Similarly, in a 2022 Pew poll, 44 percent of young adults had a positive view of socialism and only 40 percent of capitalism.

The Democrats' success with young people depended in part on the quality of their candidates. Bill Clinton and Obama were charismatic candidates who faced older, stodgier opponents. But the fact that the trend started in 2004 and 2006—continuing through Hillary Clinton's and then Joe Biden's candidacies—and reflects a rising sympathy toward liberalism plus a hostility toward capitalism suggests that there were broader underlying factors. These included young people's response to the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina (which awakened fear of climate change), the Great Recession, and the COVID-19 pandemic.

In a 2008 post-election Pew poll, voters 18-29 overwhelmingly opposed the war in Iraq by a 77 to 22 percent margin and were the most supportive of all age groups of the idea that "government should do more to solve problems." These two stances put them at odds with conservative Republican positions on the economy and the war. Young people's anxiety about their future also went well beyond the formal end of the Great Recession and was aggravated by the global coronavirus pandemic. That contributed to their growing skepticism about capitalism itself.

But in the 2024 election, there were signs that youth allegiance to the Democrats and their identification as liberals were abating. According to the AP-NORC VoteCast study conducted this cycle, young voters preferred Kamala Harris by only a 51 to 47 percent margin over Trump—a twenty-percentage point drop from 2020. Young people still identified as Democrats, 42 to 39 percent, but that was a 14-percentage point drop from 2020. There was also a seven-point shift away from identifying as liberal rather than conservative.

The result may partly reflect a lack of enthusiasm for Harris and a diminished disapproval of Trump, as memories of his erratic response to the pandemic and his attempt to overturn the November 2020 elections have faded. But the turn away from the Democrats and liberalism also reflects the degree to which the current group of twenty-somethings came of age after the seminal events that shaped the earlier young voters. Their reference point was not George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq or the Great Recession, but what occurred during the Trump and especially the Biden years. In the case of the latter, many of the young voiced the same concerns about inflation and immigration that fueled Trump's margin among older voters.

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As analysts survey the wreckage of the 2024 election, there is one group of young voters that have remained fiercely loyal to the Democratic Party: young college-educated women. Democratic support from college-educated black women goes back, of course, to the 1960’s and civil rights legislation. But young white college-educated women only began enthusiastically backing Democrats during the Clinton campaign in 1992 with the party’s fulsome support for women's rights and the cluster of issues around it that includes access to healthcare and childcare and gun control. Their support hasn't wavered since then. It was reinforced recently by the Republican-dominated Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade. In 2024, white college-educated women backed Harris over Trump by a 60 to 37 percent margin, and non-white college-educated women backed her 75 to 22 percent.

There are two overlapping groups of young voters that defected from the Democrats in 2024. The first was young men. Young men, who had preferred Biden over Trump by a 56 to 41 percent margin in 2020, preferred Trump over Harris in 2024 by a 56 to 42 percent margin—a huge 29-point shift. Young white men, who had backed Biden by six points in 2020, favored Trump this time 60 to 39 percent, but Trump also did better than he had in 2024 among young male minority voters. According to AP-NORC VoteCast, Trump "doubled his share of young black men" from 16 to 32 percent.

The second defection involved class standing, measured by whether a young person had or had not acquired a four-year college degree. During the Obama years, Democrats could count on voters with and without college degrees, but in 2024, the same class differences that emerged earlier among older voters emerged among young voters. It was particularly striking among young white voters. College-educated white males backed Trump 56 to 42 percent while those without college degrees backed Trump by an even greater 67 to 32 percent margin. Even more telling, white women with a college degree backed Harris 60 to 39 percent, while those without a degree backed Trump 55 to 43 percent—a 33-percentage point difference.

The general defection among men was driven, as noted, by the absence of those factors had earlier sustained Democratic support among men as well as women. Unlike young women, men were not likely to base their vote on Republicans' opposition to abortion or to "childless cat ladies," as vice-presidential nominee JD Vance famously quipped. The Trump campaign recognized that many young men had picked up on a disdain from liberal women for their supposed "toxic masculinity" and welcomed Trump's celebration of outsider voices like Joe Rogan and other sports and culture podcasters. Some young men may also resent what they see as affirmative action boosting women at their expense. According to a Brookings study, 45 percent of the men ages 18 to 29 believe they "face discrimination as men."

The support for Republicans among the young without college degrees puts them in line with their older counterparts. Like them, they blamed the Biden administration for inflation and rising illegal immigration. Likewise, as social psychologist Jean Twenge has noted about young men, "The Republicans have become the party of the disadvantaged man—and, apparently, even those who merely expect to be disadvantaged." Young voters who live outside the great metro centers may have also associated the Democrats with "woke" stands on gender and crime and with the snobbery exhibited toward middle Americans by coastal elites. When the Trump campaign declared in its most effective ad, "Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you,” it clearly spoke to many of these younger voters without college degrees along with other Americans.

It will take a few more elections to see whether the trends among young voters that surfaced in November 2024 hold up. But if they do, I expect they will have broader implications for the rivalry between the two parties and for the fate of American liberalism and conservatism. Young and soon to be middle-aged, college-educated women and their political outlook will continue to take a leading role in the Democratic Party. This century has seen the rise within the party of college-educated women and blacks. Two of the last three presidential nominees were college-educated women. Many of the activist groups, like Black Lives Matter and the Sunrise Movement, are chaired by young women. They have not only filled leadership positions, but also helped to redefine what liberalism means, putting more stress on social than purely economic justice, on gender and race rather than class.

In contrast, I would expect young men to begin to play leading roles and to become a key constituency of Trump's new Republican Party. In Europe, young men already occupy important leadership positions and constitute important voting blocs for right-wing populist groups like the Alternative for Germany (AfD) or the National Rally (RN) in France. But in the United States, Trump's brand of right-wing populism initially drew more support from older rather than younger men. That has begun to change and is reflected in recent voting results and in the rise of groups like Turning Point USA.

These are trends that clearly will not benefit Democrats. There are more young men without college degrees that may hearken to the siren song of right-wing populism than there are young college-educated women who find themselves in line with Alexandra Ocasio Cortez's progressivism and democratic socialism. If the Democrats want to become a majority party again, they need to find a way to win back these younger male voters, and their female counterparts without college degrees, who exited the party or stayed home during the last election.

John B. Judis is author of The Politics of Our Time: Populism, Nationalism, Socialism and, with Ruy Teixeira, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?