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Data released in April showed that young Americans are “overwhelmingly Republican,” particularly those under the age of 30.
Data from Yale Polling found that young people are swaying significantly to the right, with voters aged 18 to 21 leaning Republican by 11.7 points when looking at their prospective voting in the 2026 midterms, according to Newsweek. While young people have traditionally voted Democrat for generations, Gen Z may be making history in their ideologies.
Breaking Down The Data
Vice President J.D. Vance was ranked as the most popular personality amongst Republicans with a +65 rating overall, +54 among Republican voters under the age of 30. A majority (53%) said they would support Vance if he ran in the 2028 GOP primary, while only 27.5% of Democrats said they’d vote for former Vice President Kamala Harris despite having a generally good favorability rating.
Trump is also very popular among young people, with a 52.7% rating among 18 to 29-year-olds.
Screenshot/x/YalePolling
Screenshot/X/zacharydonnini
Why Are Young People Going GOP?
Bloomberg’s David M. Drucker argued that the reason so many young people favor Trump and the Republican platform is because this is “what happens when American teenagers get stuck at home, prevented from experiencing the coming-of-age social milestones that most adults took for granted,” referencing the COVID lockdowns as the reason kids are pro-America.
We disagreed with Drucker — who is most definitely NOT a young person — and decided to ask other youngsters why they like the Republican platform. Here were our favorite replies:
– “Republicans don’t want me to work for minimum wage then give all my money to people who can’t be bothered to work at all.”
– “Crime.”
– “Trump didn’t want to cut my [genitals] off.”
Perhaps it’s not that young people are mentally defective because of the Democrat policies to shut down the country during the COVID-19 pandemic, but they realized that Democrats were the ones who took that time away from them, and would take a lot more if they were allowed to roam free. “They’re significantly more conservative and while they still have some tendencies to lean towards progressive social issues, their economic issues and, at the end of the day, their party choice is significantly more conservative,” said Yale Youth Poll deputy director Jack Dozier.
Dozier was a teen during the pandemic, so understood these crises first-hand. “The world that my generation started to see developing made … Republican and populist-leaning policies so much more attractive because they promised a better reality,” he added.
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