Commentary Home July 15, 2024

The GOP is Poised to Make Gains With Young Voters

Daniel A. Cox

Of the many ways that Donald Trump has scrambled the country’s political demography, none is more surprising than the way he changed the GOP’s relationship with young voters. Not all polling agrees, but many reputable polling outfits have found Trump neck-and-neck with Biden among young voters. But it’s not simply that Trump has suddenly become more appealing or Joe Biden less popular. The way young people relate to the two major political parties is undergoing a momentous change.

A mounting number of polls suggest that young voters are shedding their Democratic attachments. The Pew Research Center just released the raw data for the 2024 National Public Opinion Reference Survey, a large and methodologically rigorous benchmark study, that’s incredibly bullish for Republicans. The poll finds that young Americans are evenly divided between the parties: 47 percent lean towards or identify as Republicans and 46 percent identify as Democrats. A historically high number of young adults refuse to identify with either political party—nearly half of young adults in the NPORS survey identify as independent or “something else”—but when asked which party they lean towards, they split right down the middle.

The GOP’s advantage among young whites is even more impressive. Over six in ten (62 percent) young white Americans identify as Republican, while just 35 percent are Democrats. They are one of the most Republican age groups and notably more GOP-leaning than Americans in their 30s and 40s. A few years ago, I don’t think many people would predict that, at least among whites, Gen Z would end up being more Republican than Millennials.

 

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