The political experiences of young men and women have diverged
My breakdown of how young people voted in 2024 and the context that shaped how/why they did. And despite skepticism, young people are running for office and winning elections.
We’re on the other side of the 2024 election. Donald Trump was reelected president of the United States, thanks, in part, to support from the young men his campaign aggressively courted in the weeks leading up to Election Day. But that’s just a fraction of the story about young voters this cycle.
For months, I’ve been talking about the youth gender gap and growing disaffection from young people of all stripes. As I wrote for Teen Vogue today, one thing is clear: the political experiences of young men and women have diverged. You can find some of what’s below and more in the Teen Vogue piece.
As election results continue to trickle in, analysis of National Election Pool and Census data from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts (CIRCLE), shows that an estimated 42% of young Americans voted in the 2024 presidential election. That’s lower than in 2020, when CIRCLE estimated that more than 50% of young Americans nationwide cast a ballot. In key battleground states however — Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — youth voter turnout this year reached an estimated 50%.
Nationally, young people backed Vice President Kamala Harris by 6 points (52%-46%), according to CIRCLE’s analysis of AP VoteCast data, which is much lower than in 2020, when young people backed President Joe Biden over Trump by 25 points.
Broken down by gender, young women backed Harris by 18 points, while young men backed Trump by 14 points, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast data from CIRCLE.
And broken down by race and gender, young white men were the most likely to support Trump. Meanwhile, Black women, Latino women, and AAPI women were the most likely to support Harris, CIRCLE says.
Looking at the issues, young voters (like older voters) were most likely to say the economy was top of mind.
There is lots of surprise with how young people voted, but there shouldn't be. All the signs were there. (And if you’ve been reading The Up and Up, you probably weren’t as shocked as others!) In March, I wrote about an ideological shift right amongst Gen Z teens — in part, I hypothesized, because of social media but also a desire to buck the status quo. Gen Z teens said they were twice as likely to identify as more conservative than their parents than millennials were 20 years ago, according to a Gallup and Walton Family Foundation study.
The stark gender gap we see in this early post-election data confirms what young people had been telling me in listening sessions and 1:1 conversations for months. While many young women have fought for abortion access and women’s rights since Trump’s first term in office and lean left as a result, without a similar set of issues to rally behind, many young men feel politically homeless. Overwhelmingly, young women described feeling as though they were voting for their lives, while young men felt ostracized by Democrats.
Despite talk of Gen Z’s political disaffection, a desire to serve
Beyond the top of the ticket, Gen Z candidates won campaigns across the country this week, demonstrating a desire from members of this generation on both the left and right to opt into the political system, despite pronounced frustration with and skepticism of the powers that be from young people writ large.
I'm told 22 Gen Z candidates (born in or after 1997) endorsed by Run For Something, which helps recruit and support young progressives running for state and local office, have won their races so far this week. This includes leaders in Texas, Michigan, Missouri, Georgia, Virginia, Arizona, Oklahoma, North Carolina, Illinois, Maine, California, and Rhode Island.
“Electing Gen Z leaders to state and local offices is a necessary step in rebuilding the Democratic Party from the ground up. The kinds of candidates who got us to this point aren’t the ones who will get us where we need to go next,” Run For Something’s co-founder and Executive Director Amanda Litman told me today.
Moreover, over 1600 people have signed up to run for office with Run For Something this week — a sign that there’s energy to rebuild already.
On the flip side, Run GenZ, which recruits, trains, and mentors young conservatives to run for state and local office, had its most successful slate of election wins this week since the organization was founded in 2020. It’s worth noting that while the group has Gen Z in its name, not of all its candidates were born after 1997 (the cut off for the generation) and there are some young millennials in their cohort, too.
“We saw a 79% success rate across the board, the highest percentage we’ve achieved as a group. A big part of that was this new diverse coalition of voters that President Trump brought together that people didn’t see until election night,” Mason Morgan, Run GenZ’s Executive Director, told me today.
That includes candidates who ran for state assembly in California, and four new state senators across South Dakota, Kansas, North Dakota, and Pennsylvania (from the northern Philly suburbs). 49 Run GenZ candidates won their races this week — ages 20 to 31. Again, that number includes some young millennials.
I've seen reporting that the economy was top of mind for all age groups and was a big factor in the rightward trend of the vote. But I'm curious about specifically what economic policies they were voting for? Tariffs are the only specific policy I can recall from the messaging.