Why the Democrats Failed to Win the Youth Vote
As the dust settles from former President Donald Trump’s win over Vice President Kamala Harris, breakdowns of national exit polls show how gains with voters of color and highly educated voters, as well as voters’ grievances over the economy, bolstered Trump’s victory.
Moreover, while this election saw relatively high voter turnout, Republican voters had a stronger showing than Democrats nationally, causing turnout to falter behind the record level in 2020. But across the country, one group cast significantly fewer ballots: young voters.
According to the Tufts University Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), turnout from voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine was down between 10 to 12 percent from four years ago. This coincided with a shift in favor of Trump, whose support from young voters was up 10 percent from 2020. By contrast, in 2020, President Biden won the young white male demographic over Trump by 15 percent. Four years later, Trump reversed that margin, winning among young men across all races by 14 percent compared to Harris. Trump’s lead doubles to a 28 percent margin among young white men, specifically.
The Trump campaign’s success in retaining the support of young white men amid a drop in youth turnout shows that efforts to reach this demographic in the final legs of the race paid off—and that the Harris campaign fell short with young people.
During Trump’s victory celebration, Dana White, the CEO of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), took the stage to thank a slew of popular online personalities, including the NELK Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, and “the mighty and powerful” Joe Rogan. Each of these creators—prank YouTubers, livestreamers, and podcast hosts—has a sizable following of young white men who are detached from traditional news media, something Tony Fabrizio, a pollster and strategist for the Trump campaign, said the campaign recognized and used to its advantage. In August, at the behest of his eighteen-year-old son, Barron, Trump participated in a ninety-minute interview with the twenty-three-year-old Ross. The interview was livestreamed on Kick, a scantly regulated and popular platform among rightwing content creators which Ross began using in 2023 after being permanently banned from Twitch for allowing racist and antisemitic speech in his comment section.
“There is a reason why we’re doing podcasts. There is a reason why we’re doing Adin Ross,” Fabrizio told the Associated Press in August. Bringing in tens of thousands of viewers per stream, Ross became a fixture of the online right through his relationship with mentor Andrew Tate, a kickboxer-turned-influencer infamous for touting misogyny online to an audience of millions. Ross’s massive audience of young men watched him stream with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, support Tate amidst human trafficking and sexual misconduct charges, and, by August, endorse Trump.
The Trump campaign circuit included other high-profile influencers with younger audiences like the viral brothers Logan and Jake Paul, the latter of whom boxed former heavyweight champion Mike Tyson in November for an audience of 100 million live Netflix viewers. In late October, Trump sat for a three-hour interview with Joe Rogan, who hosts the most popular podcast on Spotify and whose audience consists mostly of men aged eighteen to thirty-three. Trump’s appearance on the Joe Rogan Experience amassed fifty-two million views on YouTube.
The Trump campaign appeared to bank on the young male demographic that dominates these audiences to outpace what Fabrizio called Harris’s “honeymoon” period of increased support after Biden dropped out of the presidential race in July. However, exit polls and podcast interviews alone do not reveal whether the youth demographic flocked toward Trump or away from Harris and the Democratic Party.
“Young white men are increasingly conservative, and it’s a really alarming trend,” Miranda Rector, a Gen Z organizer based in Connecticut, tells The Progressive. “It’s easy to dismiss it as social media and YouTube and podcast bros, and all of the things that manifest from it and seem kind of silly to us, but it has very serious consequences.”
Rector, who has worked in grassroots organizing around LGBTQIA+ and reproductive justice, the 2018 and 2022 midterm elections, and the Uncommitted Movement, says that the apparent underperformance among young voters goes hand-in-hand with a Democratic strategy that does not speak to the needs and interests of young people—including liberal and progressive voters who could potentially comprise the Democratic base. The result was an alienated young voting bloc that did not turn out to support Harris.
“A lot of young folks—myself included—were feeling incredibly disempowered this election, and I think that feeling of disempowerment was felt widely across the left,” Rector explains. “The youth vote was taken for granted by both major parties, but specifically [by] Democrats who should have known better than to completely sacrifice that.”
Instead of amassing support among progressive youth, Harris campaigned to Gen X white women, who she thought could win her the election in a few states. This was evident in states like North Carolina, where the Harris campaign tailored its messaging to suburban women. But Trump ultimately increased his lead from 2020 among white women, which Rector says left Democrats “campaigning to a voter that doesn’t exist: a voter that would be won over by Liz Cheney, a voter that doesn’t have a need for economic policy issues.”
Harris’s youth outreach campaign came by way of rallies and concerts with big names in music like Lady Gaga, Megan Thee Stallion, Beyonce, and Charli XCX; endorsements from megastars like Taylor Swift; and an appearance on the popular Call Her Daddy podcast. Additionally, the Harris campaign tapped into Gen Z’s online culture by capitalizing off of memes like “brat summer,” a reference to Charlie XCX’s Grammy-nominated dance-pop album, brat, and the viral interview moment in which the Vice President joked, “You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?”
But to Rector, this only meaningfully appealed to “a type of upper-middle class millennial,” and not to members of Gen Z who may have broader concerns about the economy, climate change, or Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, which the Biden-Harris Administration has continuously supported.
Reflecting on the past six years—including last spring’s pro-Palestine campus protests—Rector says that young progressives are increasingly opting for forms of activism outside of electoral politics and toward grassroots organizing and direct action.
“Witnessing all the air get sucked out of the room in 2020 and just being completely failed in terms of delivering on any of the promises that Biden had offered just changed what types of activism young folks were engaging with.” Rector specifically cites the Biden Administration’s failure to codify Roe v. Wade after it was overturned in the summer of 2022—while Democrats still had a narrow majority in Congress—as souring young activists’ attitudes toward electoral politics.
Shortly after the election, Gen-Z for Change, a coalition of more than 450 progressive Gen Z content creators, prescribed a solution for the Democratic Party’s fallout among young male voters: Win back the working class.
“Economically, we had the ability to convince not just minorities or women that we are in their best interest, but everyone, and we failed,” Nessa Diosdado, former executive director of Gen-Z for Change, posted on the group’s TikTok account on November 11. “Establishment Democrats failed to give the working class, specifically working class men, a genuine platform to rally behind, and let themselves get too out of touch with their base’s concerns.”
Republicans campaigned by “creating a genuine fear of the ‘other’”—in other words, waging a culture war—to distract from their platform of tax cuts for the wealthy and gutting social services like Social Security, healthcare, and education, Diasdado argued. Indeed, states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump also supported progressive ballot measures on election day. In deep-red Missouri, voters backed raising the state minimum wage to $15 an hour, paid sick leave, and the right to an abortion until “fetal viability.” Voters in Montana and Arizona, both of which Trump won in, supported similar measures protecting abortion access until 24 weeks of pregnancy.
“It’s not the time to move right on issues like immigration and climate change,” Diosdado finished. “It’s time to double down on our ambitious pro-labor policy, and properly represent the evolution of our voting base.”