It appears the remaining old guy in the 2024 presidential race is trying hard not to make age his most obvious problem. Former President Donald Trump, who once led the charge to ban TikTok, in early June joined the platform where nearly a third of people under 30 are most likely to get their news. Since joining, he’s amassed 10 million followers with videos such as a mock face-off with boxer and provocateur Jake Paul and a decontextualized mashup of Vice President Kamala Harris calling 18- to 24-year-olds “stupid” (from a 2014 talk advocating for the rehabilitation of juvenile offenders).
Trump is understandably trying to court young people to the political party that has long struggled to win their favor.
Trump is understandably trying to court young people to the political party that has long struggled to win their favor. Few lawmakers — and zero House Republicans, according to July reporting by NPR — are on TikTok. That’s more on brand for younger, progressive politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and before that, Barack Obama, whose technological savvy and informal communication style aligned with their democratic, forward-thinking politics. Trump’s online vibe reads more anti-institutional than egalitarian, but his appeals to younger Americans, especially males, are not in vain: Data, and anecdotal observations, show that young voters’ consistent support for Democrats is becoming less assured. Gallup calculates that 18- to 29-year-olds prefer Democrats by a slimmer margin than we’ve seen since 2005. If this pattern holds, it will be the first election year since 2000 that the party hasn’t enjoyed a double-digit advantage among this cohort. The same survey projects that the Democratic Party would be at a deficit among the next youngest group, 30-49 years old, for the first presidential election year since 2004. Other pollsters caveat the difficulty of capturing youth voting preferences, but have noted a significant decline in support for the Democratic ticket and a boost for Trump. Last month, The New York Times warned of “the GOP convention looking awfully young” while The Free Press reported on “Zoomers turning MAGA.”
Democrats, on the other hand, have been smashing fundraising records on Zoom meetings organized around so-called identitarian groupings. But they should be wary about overdetermining such categories, including around age. Stanford University’s recent program “America in One Room,” which gathered more than 400 prospective first-time voters to discuss their varying political views face to face, rather than via the more commonly available — and more anonymous — online forums, suggests that young people hold a wide range of political beliefs. And that they are eager to connect with each other across their differences in service of a better, shared future.
In short: Democrats are going to have to work harder than usual to capture the support of young people they can usually count on — or at least count on not to vote Republican.
As a professor and parent who interacts with young people daily, and as a historian of American political culture, I’m skeptical that a MAGA surge is afoot among our youngest voting citizens, who are deeply concerned with issues like climate change and social inequality, planks of the Democratic platform. But if conjuring a future of revanchist frat bros and aspiring “tradwives” is an unlikely political vision, so too is its funhouse mirror image that, to our peril, often dominates popular depictions of young progressives: dogmatic left-wing radicals who glorify violence, fixate on identity and view America as irredeemable. Rather than take this characterization for granted, Democrats should focus on offering young people an optimistic, forward-looking vision of how their administration can make good on America’s unfulfilled promise for a more equally shared prosperity.
Trust me, I know firsthand this segment of the left exists among young potential voters, especially since campus protests took place following Hamas’ attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and Israel’s ongoing military attacks in Gaza. And even as a vocal contingent of students occupied buildings, dominated meeting agendas and drained university resources, it became clear that a significant number of students felt aggressed, or even just extremely annoyed by such antics, yet were uncomfortable speaking out. Contrary to popular impressions, all college students do not embrace this brand of political progressivism, and there is no reason to believe most young people subscribe to the beliefs we’ve seen covered in the media.
Gallup calculates that 18- to 29-year-olds prefer Democrats by a slimmer margin than we’ve seen since 2005.
To remain on my own campus, The New School, for just a moment: It has been clear that, even at a liberal arts college in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood, not all students are uniformly progressive, nor did their time on our campus and in our classrooms drive them leftward.
On the contrary. One of my students reflected that she remembered arriving at college in 2020 and being made to “feel like a bad person” because she craved “seeing peoples’ faces without masks.” Another reflected, “Can you believe I used to be one of those kids who posted ACAB [all cops are bad]?,” in disbelief he had once parroted such slogans, a perspective that had become more nuanced due to his time discussing such issues, and living in New York City, where public safety directly affected him.
A political education, especially in fraught times, can, and should, operate in multiple directions, and the Democrats would do well to speak to potential voters like these students who are thinking critically about progressivism rather than proclaiming its most popular slogans most loudly. Such quiet disaffection with the most vocal and visible progressive perspectives is hard to capture but is important for Democrats to remember, for it challenges a common refrain that to attract younger voters, the party must move leftward. “Silent majority,” with its Nixonian echoes, is a tempting but imprecise term to use for this group that in many ways is upset about the perceived erosion of liberal mores: respectful dialogue, cultural pluralism, the importance of higher education, and of the pursuit of the unfulfilled American project. If any generalization about young people holds true, it might be that they resist the imposition of dominant ideas. Thus, it makes sense that the “F Trump” sensibility that so galvanized Democratic support among young people in 2016 and 2020 is less passionate, as it has become at least nominally institutionalized in many educational institutions like the one where I work. To young people who have now spent a good chunk of their teen years hearing, often from powerful people like celebrities or educators, that resisting Trump is the morally correct position, acting otherwise at the ballot box and in their lives might carry an enticing whiff of rebellion, even as his policies all but ensure a darker future for all of us. Democrats would do well to make crystal clear why young people who care about, and want to contribute to, the future of this nation can count on the party, with Kamala Harris and Tim Walz at its helm, to support them. To do anything else only stands to entrench our political polarization more dangerously for a generation to come, by keeping desperately needed young people away from voting Democratic, or away from the polls entirely.
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela
Natalia Mehlman Petrzela is Professor of History at The New School in New York City. She is the author of two books, most recently "Fit Nation: The Gains and Pains of America's Exercise Obsession," and is currently a Carnegie Fellow, working on a new book about education and political polarization. 
