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If there is a Democratic wave in next week’s midterm elections, one of the biggest reasons for that will be young voters.
While voters of all ages have soured on President Donald Trump and the Republican Party since his 2024 victory, polls show that the decline has been particularly pronounced among the young people who’d backed him in surprising numbers just two years ago. That election result prompted endless conversation about a “vibe shift” among Gen Z, and whether younger voters had turned against “woke” progressives, become radicalized by “manosphere” podcasts and TikTok algorithms, or lashed out against Biden-era gerontocracy.
But the story looks very different heading into November. A Pew Research Center poll released earlier this month found that, of people aged 19–34 who voted for Trump over Kamala Harris, only 49 percent approve of his job performance as president. (In contrast, among Trump 2024 voters aged 50 and above, about 75 percent still approve of him.)
Pew also found earlier this year that partisan identification among young adults has shifted — or, rather, reverted.
In 2022 and 2023, Democrats had a 17-point advantage among adults aged 18–29 — 55 percent of them said they were Democrats or leaned toward Democrats, while just 38 percent said they were Republican or leaned toward the GOP.
In 2024, that gap closed, and Republicans actually took a slight edge, 47 percent to Democrats’ 46 percent. But now, in 2026, Democrats are back to a 16-point advantage, getting 54 percent of young voters compared to the GOP’s 38 percent.
And it isn’t just that fewer young people are saying they’re Republican. Those who remain Republican are also saying they’re less likely to vote this year.
According to the Harvard Youth Poll released last week, 50 percent of Democrats aged 18–29 say they’ll definitely vote, but only 34 percent of Republicans in that age range say the same. That’s a 16-point partisan gap; the biggest this poll found in recent midterm cycles.
The core reasons for all this in a sense aren’t too surprising. Like older voters, young voters say they’re most concerned about issues like the cost of living, corruption in government, overseas wars, and the cost of health care.
But the swings — and the feelings of betrayal and disappointment among prior Trump supporters — have been particularly dramatic among the young, which raises the question of what about their experience and outlook is influencing their politics in particular.
To answer that, I spoke to advocates and political consultants focused on young voters. Here’s what they see as the origins — and limits — of the coming youthquake.
Rachel Janfaza, founder of the Gen Z-focused strategy firm The Up and Up, told me that we should think about young people who voted for Trump in 2024 as really three separate cohorts.
First, she said, are the “hardcore MAGA young people who still stand by the president, just like the older MAGA folks.” They supported him in 2024, and they still do.
Second, she said, are the young people who “are very much on the America First train” but who “resent the fact that Trump’s basically become part of the establishment, whether it comes to building a White House ballroom, or the Epstein files, or starting new wars” — and have moved away from him as a result.
These young people are much less likely to move toward Democrats, but many of them could be disillusioned and not bother to vote this year.
Third, she said, is “a large cohort of young people, predominantly young men, who were never hardcore MAGA, but who voted for Trump in 2024 because they were frustrated by the political conversation at large.”
“They were frustrated by their economic situation; they were tired of political correctness and the pendulum swinging too far in the direction of ‘wokeness,’” Janfaza continued. These people, she said, now feel “politically homeless.”
Tina Tang of the Democratic-aligned firm Navigator Research has conducted many focus groups interviewing young people who now regret voting for Trump. She told me that many of those “Trump regretters” said they’d initially hoped he would bring change to the political system generally, and that he’d deliver on his promises about the economy and jobs.
“Young voters are especially worried about jobs right now,” Tang said. “That was actually one of the biggest frustrations we heard from young voters this time around: frustration with the job market. We hear a lot about how he promised a lot of things; he promised the economy was going to get better, that costs were going to come down, that there would be more jobs.”
Several of those I interviewed also urged caution about the common trope that young people tend to be strongly progressive or liberal, a longtime assumption that led many observers to be caught off guard by their swing toward Republicans in 2024.
Indeed, the Harvard Youth poll released this week found that 25 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds thought of themselves as liberal, 23 percent as conservative, and about 46 percent as something in between.
Santiago Mayer, founder of the progressive youth-focused group Voters of Tomorrow, told me that while Gen Z voters often have liberal values and policy views, they often didn’t define politics in ideological terms: “I think for a lot of things many of us would consider progressive, for them, they are common sense, and they’re not necessarily analyzing these issues through a political lens.”
Indeed, Mayer said that while the politicians who are most appealing to young voters can vary in ideology, “the one thing they have in common is that they are very pragmatic and very practical. They are talking about how they’re going to improve things today and how they’re actually going to create material, tangible change in young people’s lives.”
Tang of Navigator Research concurred, telling me that young people are “absolutely still very skeptical of both parties.” She added: “What we hear from young people a lot is: they want to see results.”
And the results they crave are, above all, about the economy and cost of living. Janfaza told me that there’s been a longtime misconception among pundits that young voters are obsessed with identity and the culture war — but, she argues, that was never quite true, and it’s even less true now.
“Now, climate and abortion do not even make it into the top issues that young people are saying they care about,” Janfaza said. “And it doesn’t mean that they don’t care about those issues, but the economic concern just ranks much higher.”
Indeed, she believes that the “flirtation with socialism” among some young voters is really more about policies such as affordable housing, affordable health care, and affordable education — as well as a promise to break with the status quo. “That’s really what young people are hungry for.”
Key to young people’s worldview is that they’re feeling increasingly pessimistic about that status quo. One striking finding in the Harvard Youth Poll was that, when asked whether they expected to be financially better or worse off than their parents when they reach their age, more said worse — a first-time finding for the poll.
“I think you see that in the numbers that there’s a level of nihilism amongst young voters,” Mayer said. “They’re basically giving Democrats another chance. But I worry that this is kind of our last chance to get them to believe in democracy.”
And, he worried, if Democrats don’t deliver actual improvements to their lives, “they’ll be gone for good.”
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