Democrats Stung by the Cult of Youth, Again

By Noah Rothman

Monday, February 10, 2025

 

There is plenty of good news for Donald Trump in CBS’s latest poll. The president’s job approval rating is in positive territory. Most American adults think he’s delivering on the promises he made during the 2024 campaign. Respondents describe both Trump and his set piece policy preferences in positive terms.

 

There are also warning signs in this survey. Elon Musk is fast becoming a political liability for this administration. In addition, two-thirds of respondents say Trump isn’t devoting enough attention to his pledge to lower consumer prices, and the tariffs on places like Mexico, Canada, and Europe that the president has floated are deeply unpopular. Overall, however, the poll suggests that the ingredients for a sustainable pro-Trump political coalition are available to the president and his movement.

 

To survey the demographic breakdown of Trump’s job approval rating as measured by CBS/YouGov pollsters is to take some small measure of Democrats’ sense of betrayal. With just 47 percent of women disapproving of Trump’s performance while 60 percent of men approve, the gender gap now decisively favors the GOP. Fully one-third of black respondents expressed support for Trump. While a staggering two-thirds of white adults without a degree support Trump, white degree holders — maybe the Democratic Party’s most pandered-to demographic — are split down the middle. But what must sting the most for Democrats is the perfidy of the young voter. Among respondents under 30, 55 percent approve of Trump’s conduct in office.

 

Of all the disorienting revelations voters imposed on Democrats last November, young voters’ departure from their ranks may be the most bewildering. For a party that has committed itself to the cult of youth for over half a century, few political outcomes could be as psychologically devastating as this.

 

Consider how Democratic activists flattered younger voters in the wake of the 2022 midterm elections, as The Atlantic’s Kaitlyn Tiffany chronicled. Generation Z was fêted in the most obsequiously laudatory terms. They were “saving us from the world we’ve given them,” meeting the expectation that they would “make the world a better place.” As Tiffany observed, the highly conceptualized idea of this generation, who were regarded by their elders as a political instrument to be wielded, amounted to condescension. More than that, it was also a self-serving fantasy.

 

In the election that produced all these encomia for Gen Z, young voters “often displayed lower turnout rates than in the 2018 midterms,” Brookings Institution analysts observed. “This is opposite of what happened between the 2014 and 2018 midterms as well as between the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, when the younger group registered the largest turnout gains of all age groups.” After the party’s electoral debacle in 2024, the scales fell from Democratic eyes.

 

Younger voters, it turned out, were more ambivalent about the Democratic Party than they had been in previous cycles — a condition that was not new in 2024 but had been ignored. The Gen Z influencer set seems wildly out of touch with the generation for whom they are presumed to speak, some admitted only after it had become culturally safe to do so. Indeed, many of the activist organizations on which Democrats leaned to drive turnout did not share the party’s ideological objectives or policy preferences. Again, the fact that Democratic elected officials haven’t had a pleasant interaction with the young activist set in years might have been a clue.

 

It isn’t fair to say that no one on the left saw the Democratic Party’s struggles with young voters coming. But those Cassandras did not receive their due, perhaps because the Democratic self-conception is as the party of youth.

 

The modern Democratic origin myth is rooted in the campus activism of the late 1960s and early ’70s. Theirs is the party of MTV’s “Rock the Vote” campaigns, which evolved into the more menacing “vote or die” campaign. The Democrats are the party of TikTok dances, teenage stridency and moral blackmail, and interminable efforts to pander to young people’s imagined wants (like lowering the voting age or foisting their student debt burdens onto everyone else). This is the party of Barack Obama, who “forged a much different relationship with young voters” and built the machinery necessary to maintain that relationship through the generations. They fawned over him and he flattered them right back. (This is “the most incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced,” he would tell college audiences that hadn’t yet achieved anything.)

 

All this mutual admiration was superficial. In fact, the Obama effect among young voters was short-lived. After 2008, young adults never exhibited the enthusiasm for Obama’s program they reserved for him personally. Hillary Clinton counted on young voters to save her candidacy, and they did not. Bernie Sanders banked on the same delusion. Kamala Harris had no right to the belief that she could reignite the Obama coalition, but that seemed to be her campaign’s theory of the case.

 

These campaigns’ appeals to young voters were predicated on narrower and narrower conceptions of who their young voters were. Democrats could convince themselves that they still owned the young adult bloc only because they defined it in ways that excluded ever increasing numbers of young voters. And now, the idealized young voter they invented in their own heads has betrayed them.

 

Democrats will confront the temptation to retreat into the self-serving misapprehensions they projected onto young adults in the first place. The party out of power will tell itself that it needs to be more obsessive about climate change and abortion rights, more hostile toward Israel, more embittered by and cynical toward the American social compact. But none of these issues explain Trump’s support among young voters. And as Democrats spend more time stewing over their unenviable condition, they may just conclude that the young people deserve to suffer for their faithlessness.

 

“The youth will not save us,” Slate’s Luke Winkie opined ruefully in the last election’s wake. He chronicled the outpouring of Democratic frustrations with “the worst generation of all time,” a spastic and ditzy contingent that never “learned to see through disinformation,” and who had consigned their elders “to hell for the rest of our lives.”

 

That’s the spirit! Indeed, acrimony of this sort is what Democrats typically reserve for the apostate members of erstwhile Democratic constituencies. How else can Democrats navigate the world in the absence of their cultish affinity for the notion that the youth have some special claim on political virtue? It can’t be that the party’s cherished preconceptions about the noble young American monolith were flawed. No, it will be the children who are wrong.