#WTH MAGA goes to college

Young men are dramatically more conservative than their elders.

The new Yale Youth Poll got a ton of coverage when it came out last month. So we invited its founder, Yale junior Milan Singh, to join us and discuss.

America has always fetishized the politics of its youth. Remember Rock the Vote? So cringe. Or celebs coming out for the Democrats? Ditto. And when Kamala Harris was forced to fess up that she had paid those celebs, um, ew. Nor were the results of these gimmicks anything to write home about, at least not for Democrats who believed that young people were their natural constituency. So imagine our surprise when it turned out that if 2024 was a vibe election, the vibe was MAGA, not Brat. (Look it up; I had to.)

A majority of men under 30 supported Trump, a flip from Joe Biden’s majority share four years earlier. Some 60 percent of white men voted for Trump, and about half of young Latino men. About a third of young black men voted GOP. And the Yale poll underscored that these results were no flash in the pan:

Finally, our data uncovered an interesting divide within under–30s as a cohort: When asked whether they would vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the 2026 congressional elections in their district, voters aged 22–29 favored the Democratic candidate by a margin of 6.4 points, but voters aged 18–21 favored the Republican by a margin of 11.7 points.

Singh dives deeper into the numbers using pollster David Shor’s even more granular data:

I'm going to cite some of David Shor's numbers because his sample size was 8 million and my sample size was 4,000. […] His data found that among voters under 26, Trump won non-white men, white men, white women. So Harris won non-white women under 26, but every other group voted for Trump on that, and you back that out, probably means Trump carried voters under 26 outright unless his margins among say, white men and white women were very narrow and he got blown out of the water with non-white women, which seems unlikely. We did observe some gaps as well ourselves. So if you look at say, net favorability for the two presidential candidates this last cycle, among men 18 to 21, Trump was plus seven, Harris was minus 48.

In other words, the Yale (and other) results were not some strange anomaly: Among under-30s, all but non-white young women voted for Trump. The question is, why? Singh cites a number of factors, but the one that will ring truest for our readers is simple: COVID. As 22-year-old Singh notes, when bars were open and schools were not, it told you something about adult priorities. And what that cohort learned was that something is broken in government, and in schools, and that the “establishment” did not perhaps have their best interests at heart.

Turns out, this truth rings as clearly for young people as it does for their parents. Clearly, however, COVID was not the only factor. Social media has become the deus ex machina of choice for all hard-to-explain phenomena, but again, it makes sense. Social media algorithms do a brilliant job of doubling down on user preferences, and socializing them to “their” cohort. And the Trump campaign invested brilliantly — and it was far more authentic than the lame Beyoncé blathering — in the media that this group listens to.

One final point we make in the pod that I think rings true-ish: The Left is now the establishment. Your school, your paper, your classmates, your professors, and your books tell you what’s expected. But dammit, 18-27 year olds (or some such variation) don’t want to be told what to do. Timothy Leary told the 1960s version of these kids to “tune in and drop out.” So, that’s what they’re doing — tuning in to people who share their perspectives, and dropping out of the Lefty establishment that let them down. In short, MAGA kids are rebels, the 21st-century counterculture.

There’s plenty more in this space, and a few hundred words aren’t going to do justice to the political ructions in our society. There are all sorts of educational and class factors that contribute to the changes that we’re seeing in the body politic, something our colleagues Ruy Teixeira and Charles Murray have captured with great insight. But we can’t deny that these changes are afoot.

So, next time you watch the White House pump out a meme of Donald Trump dressed as the pope, and gasp in horror at the impropriety, remember, his audience isn’t necessarily who you think it is. Many of us may not get the MAGA vibe, but there’s little doubt that at 78 years old, Donald Trump does.

And don’t forget…

HIGHLIGHTS

Tell us about some of the notable takeaways from the Yale Youth Poll?

MS: So the R plus 12 versus D plus six number you're referring to is from our generic ballot question. For those who don't know, generic ballot is when you ask people if the midterm elections for Congress in your district were held today, would you vote for the Democrat or the Republican? And so R plus 12 means that people aged 18 to 21 by 12 points favor the Republican candidate, D plus six, people 22 to 29 favor the Democratic candidate. One thing I will say is that because it's fairly early out from the midterms, both of these age segments have about one in five people undecided. Now, that's not to say, "Oh, those undecideds will all break for Democrats, all break for Republicans all break 50/50." We don't know, but it's just something that people should keep in mind. But you're right, we did see a divide throughout our poll between younger Gen Z, 18 to 21 and older Gen Z, 22 to 29.

It's not just the generic ballot. So for example, we took a look at the favorability for President Trump. Among voters aged 18 to 21, the president's favorability was plus three. That is to say the share of people with a favorable opinion of him less those with an unfavorable opinion. The result was three points. Among 22 to 29, the president was minus six, and among all voters he was minus five. When you look at specific issues, for example, whether the U.S. should continue or end military aid to Ukraine, whether transgender women should be allowed to play on women's college sports teams or whether the level of legal immigration should be decreased, increased, or stay the same, you find a similar gap where younger Gen Z voters, 18 to 21 are more conservative than older Gen Z voters 22 to 29, and in some cases are even more conservative than the electorate overall, for example, on Ukraine aid.

Why is this happening?

MS: So I would say there are three big reasons. I'm not saying these are the only three reasons. I'm saying these are the three reasons that to me or jump out as the most significant. It's possible I'm missing something, et cetera, et cetera. But first I would say is ideological sorting among young non-white voters. Second is social media driving gender polarization among young people in particular. And third I would say is dissatisfaction with inflation and with post-pandemic life and the post-pandemic economy in particular. So in the first one, if you look at CCES data for the 2024 election and you break it out by say Black voters and Hispanic voters, and within that you break them out by people who self-identify as liberal, conservative or moderate. Among Black voters who are over 65 and self-identify as conservative, Kamala Harris won a large majority, I mean two-thirds or over two-thirds.

Similarly, she won about one in five self-identified conservative Hispanics over the age of 65. Among young people under the age of 25, Harris won about 5% of conservative Hispanics and under 50% of self-identified conservative Black people. I think that's important. Black and Hispanic voters are more likely to self-identify as moderate or conservative than white Democrats, not than white voters, but then white Democrats. That's an important distinction. And what that means is that historically Democrats have enjoyed a large majority or have been able to win a large majority of the votes of non-white moderates and conservatives. That's not the case anymore. With the younger generation, people are increasingly voting on the basis of their ideology, and that means that as we have generational replacement, which is to say older people eventually pass away, younger people turn 18 and are eligible to vote, the effect is that the non-white vote becomes less democratic and more Republican. And because the young generation is more non-white than older generations, that effect reduces democratic votes among this demographic.

Is COVID a factor?

MS: If you're 18 to 21, you went to most of high school during COVID. If you were in college or if you're in the workforce now, your formative years have been in the post-COVID economy, and if your first experiences in the workforce are with high inflation, you feel like, "Oh, prices are too high. I'm frustrated by that." If you are fed up with wokeness or perceived overreaches by left-wing institutions or actors or movements, I think that's understandable why that pushes people in a more conservative direction. If you see a president who's visibly too old to do the job well, you can understand why that sours your impression of his party. I will say one other thing is that I wouldn't know about this because I was about five when Obama was elected, but my understanding is that about 20 years ago, if you were young and you were liberal, that was kind of a countercultural thing, right?

A lot of your parents' generation were Bush Republicans, and so being a young liberal was a way to be against the mainstream. And I think that for many people in my generation, a lot of cultural tastemakers, celebrities, actors, musicians pretty clearly have personally liberal politics and that's fine, but in a way that makes being conservative the new counterculture,

And we’re mostly talking about young men, right?

MS: The divide we observed in our data was more between men and women rather than college and non-college. But yes, you are correct that there is a gender gap. Again, I'm going to cite some of David Shore's numbers because his sample size was 8 million and my sample size was 4,000. But this is all stuff that he talked about on the Ezra Klein Show. His data found that among voters under 26, Trump won non-white men, white men, white women. So Harris won non-white women under 26, but every other group voted for Trump on that, and you back that out, probably means Trump carried voters under 26 outright unless his margins among say, white men and white women were very narrow and he got blown out of the water with non-white women, which seems unlikely. We did observe some gaps as well ourselves. So if you look at say, net favorability for the two presidential candidates this last cycle, among men 18 to 21, Trump was plus seven, Harris was minus 48.

That is to say only 24% of men 21 and under had a positive impression of Kamala Harris. 72% had a negative impression. So this isn't something that can be chalked up to a lack of name recognition. It's also worth noting that among this group, when we ask them the generic ballot question, men 18 to 21, were R plus 19. So it can't be explained only by this group is just generally super conservative. Part of it is that they're more conservative, but part of it is that they uniquely did not like Kamala Harris. As to why that's the case, I think the theory that best fits the data is that this is a social media driven phenomenon. These days, social media, YouTube, TikTok, Instagram are the dominant modes of media consumption for people my age. And obviously there are say TV shows that are more targeted towards women, TV shows that are more targeted towards men, but by and large TV shows cannot be super segmented in which gender they target.

Some have written that being conservative is being a rebel in the 21st century.

MS: I think there's definitely something there. I do agree that I think it is countercultural. This is not an academia thing, but if you look at say, the big social media influencers, so Logan Paul, the Nelk Boys, Andrew Schultz, none of them are partisans. Their content is not political at its core or Theo Von is another one, but all of them interviewed Donald Trump in the lead up to the election, and all of them are more Republican-friendly. They don't mind doing things that are against PC culture, being edgy, being politically incorrect. So I think that's one sense in which being conservative is kind of counter-cultural, I think.

In terms of what's going on at universities, yeah, I think a lot of students who have more conservative views do feel that they are victimized or that they are judged for being conservative, and I think some of them do kind of take pride in that, or in the same way the left has sort of a victimhood culture of, "Oh, I'm oppressed. I should get these special favors." I do think that is increasingly something you see with political conservatives at certain university campuses. One thing I've noticed is that some of my friends who are conservative at Yale, you talk to someone and they'll be like, "Oh, hey, by the way, I'm a conservative. I like Donald Trump." And I'll be like, "Yeah, I could tell. Yeah, so what?"

But you can tell that some of these guys, and it's primarily guys, have only talked to other conservatives about actual policy issues, and so they've never heard a critical take on what they believe. And so I think in some ways that can undermine critical thinking and the ability to have a productive back and forth conversation in the same ways that liberals or leftists who don't want to engage with right wing persons, right wing ideas can similarly have sort of a more impoverished worldview and understanding of things.

Why did you start the poll?

MS: I got the idea last summer, we'd seen a lot of discourse over the summer and during the election campaign about the youth vote, right? Trump's going on podcasts, Harris is going on, Call Her Daddy, he's going on. Rogan, is the youth vote up for grabs? Turns out the answer is yes. And I thought, "Well, it'd be nice to have more data on this," because a lot of these articles, this is not to denigrate the journalists, but are written more on speculation around like, "I interviewed five people, here's what they said." I thought that more data would be beneficial. Harvard has a youth poll. They do a really good job. They have some really interesting questions, but it's still only one poll. Each poll is one data point. Even for ours, I'm proud of the work we did. I know the entire process from writing the questions to getting the data, we did all of it.

Read the full transcript here.

SHOWNOTES

Harvard Youth Poll Key Takeaways (Harvard Youth Poll, April 23, 2025)

Harvard Caps Harris April Poll (Poll Conducted April 9-10, 2025)

Fox News Poll: The first 100 days of President Trump's second term (Dana Blanton, Fox News, April 23, 2025)

How popular is Donald Trump? (Nate Silver and Eli McKown-Dawson, Silver Bulletin, Updated April 24, 2025)

President Trump’s Approval Rating: Latest Polls (New York Times, Updated April 24, 2025)

Young Americans ‘continue to lose faith in government institutions’ (Politico, April 23, 2025)

Voters warn Trump: MAGA, but not like this (Zachary Basu, Axios, April 23, 2025)

Young People Are Now Overwhelmingly Republican (Newsweek, April 16, 2025)

Young Voters Support Taxing University Endowments; Oppose Deporting International Students (Yale Youth Poll Memo, Milan Singh and Jack L. Dozier, April 17, 2025)

Yale Youth Poll reveals deep nationwide splits on protester deportations, institutional neutrality (Baala Shakya, Yale Daily News, April 16, 2025)

The Gerontocracy Continues to Hurt Democrats (Nate Moore, Liberal Patriot, April 14, 2025)

Rachel Janfaza on the Two Gen Zs (Rachel Janfaza, X, February 3, 2025)