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Since the 2008 election, Democrats have been counting on young voters as an essential part of what they called a "new American majority." But the 2024 election may have spelled the end of the youth vote as a dependable part of the Democrats' coalition. Parts of it should endure—in particular, young college-educated women—but other parts may fall by the wayside unless Democrats find a way to win them back.

The Democrats' large-scale support among young voters goes back to the early 2000s. In the Reagan-Bush years, young people had backed Republicans. Clinton won a plurality and then a majority of young voters in 1992 and 1996, but George W. Bush and Al Gore each got 47 percent of the 18-to-24-year-old vote in 2000. The shift to the Democrats begins in the 2004 election when Democrat John Kerry won the youth vote against Bush 56 to 43 percent. In 2008, Barack Obama won the 18–29-year-old vote by an even wider margin, 60 to 32 percent. That trend continued through the 2020 election when Biden won the youth vote 60 to 36 percent.

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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Let's see how TLP does and what conclusion they come up with here.

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But in the 2024 election, there were signs that youth allegiance to the Democrats and their identification as liberals were abating. According to the AP-NORC VoteCast study conducted this cycle, young voters preferred Kamala Harris by only a 51 to 47 percent margin over Trump—a twenty-percentage point drop from 2020. Young people still identified as Democrats, 42 to 39 percent, but that was a 14-percentage point drop from 2020. There was also a seven-point shift away from identifying as liberal rather than conservative.

The result may partly reflect a lack of enthusiasm for Harris and a diminished disapproval of Trump, as memories of his erratic response to the pandemic and his attempt to overturn the November 2020 elections have faded. But the turn away from the Democrats and liberalism also reflects the degree to which the current group of twenty-somethings came of age after the seminal events that shaped the earlier young voters. Their reference point was not George W. Bush and the invasion of Iraq or the Great Recession, but what occurred during the Trump and especially the Biden years. In the case of the latter, many of the young voiced the same concerns about inflation and immigration that fueled Trump's margin among older voters.

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These are trends that clearly will not benefit Democrats. There are more young men without college degrees that may hearken to the siren song of right-wing populism than there are young college-educated women who find themselves in line with Alexandra Ocasio Cortez's progressivism and democratic socialism. If the Democrats want to become a majority party again, they need to find a way to win back these younger male voters, and their female counterparts without college degrees, who exited the party or stayed home during the last election.

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