The Circle at Tufts University focuses on studying civic engagement. After the epic win by President-elect Donald Trump in the 2024 election, The Circle analyzed AP exit polling and discovered some interesting findings about the youth vote.
The significant shift in youth vote choice (+25 for President Biden over President Trump in 2020, +6 for Harris over Trump in 2024) can be examined and explained in different ways. In other analyses, we have focused on demographic shifts; for example, young men and white youth both preferred Biden in 2020 and Trump in 2024. We have also looked at the salience of issues like the economy, which was young people’s top priority and drove the youth vote for Trump.
One other way to examine and explain this shift is the partisan and ideological makeup of the electorate. Compared to 2020, young voters in 2024 were more likely to identify as conservative and as Republican. And the young moderates who cast ballots were more likely to vote for Trump.
Forty-three percent of women 18-29 voted for President-elect Trump. Vice President and selected Democrat nominee Kamala Harris was banking on young women’s upset over Dobbs and the falsehood of “reproductive rights” being threatened. However, the post-election analysis shows that women in general weren’t falling for that canard; they were more pissed about their grocery bills than amorphous rights being restricted.
But the analysis of the young women polled rendered even bigger revelations.
There were also more Republican young women in the 2024 youth electorate: 6 percentage points more white women and Black women compared to 2020, and 9 points more Latina women.
Young people who identify as neither major party also made up a smaller part of the 2024 youth electorate. That is especially notable because young people overall are less likely than other age groups to identify with any of the major political parties.
Like her surrogate Mark Cuban, Harris assumed that women who supported Trump were stupid or beholden to their MAGA husbands/boyfriends. But a percentage of young women saw beyond the abortion rights issue to greater concerns, like their livelihood and their safety.
It seemed Harris believed the best way to reach young women was to make abortion the epicenter of her campaign. In the 100-plus days of her candidacy, she touted the claim that a Trump victory would mean all so-called “reproductive freedoms” and “rights” would be stripped away.
And while at least 13% of registered female voters listed abortion as their top issue, there were a large number of women who didn’t share this concern. According to The Daily Mail, 40% of this demographic said their No. 1 issue was the economy. Eleven percent named immigration as their biggest worry.
Two factors were major contributors to mining and maximizing this vote. One does have to give it up to TPUSA and Charlie Kirk, who mounted a “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour” of college campuses, particularly in battleground states.
Charlie Kirk helped influence the outcome of the 2024 presidential election by taking his unabashedly conservative approach to college campuses nationwide, particularly in critical swing states, his reps said Friday.
Kirk, 31, founded Turning Point USA in 2012 to organize students while seeking to “restore traditional American values like patriotism, respect for life, liberty, family and fiscal responsibility,” according to the nonprofit’s website.
The prominent right-wing activist has since expanded the group’s reach to more than 3,500 high school and college campuses nationwide, including events as part of its “You’re Being Brainwashed Tour” featuring Kirk and guests like former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy.
“Millions of Americans are being brainwashed and led to believe the opposite of what’s real,” Kirk said in a statement announcing his plan in late August. “From immigration and the economy, to science, biology, and faith, the conservative position on these topics is either completely absent, or so contorted and misrepresented that young people aren’t being afforded the opportunity to make informed decisions about what they believe. This tour is about changing that.”
It did indeed. Kirk telegraphed this in his 2024 RNC convention speech. Gen Zers have been told by Democrats to lower their expectations of career opportunity, relationships, home ownership—the American Dream. Harris campaigned on “Government as Savior,” when this generation saw firsthand how much the government had failed them. They rightly said, hard pass.
WATCH:
This is also the generation who saw their rites of passage destroyed under the Biden-Harris regime thanks to the COVID vaccine mandates and social distancing madness. Pivotal sports scholarships robbed, proms and graduations canceled. Kirk gave Gen Z a rallying cry and inspired them to not be spectators to their demise, but to take action to secure their future—a future that includes more than government dependence and murdering their creative output, which is beautifully illustrated in one’s ability to reproduce.
Students for Life is another advocacy group that campaigned against the baby-killing propaganda of the Harris-Walz campaign, not just in their opposition to abortion, but in focusing their message to smart women who care more about what’s between their ears than what’s between their legs. Students for Life emphasized that smart women do not kill their offspring; smart women care about life across the spectrum; and smart women are, get this: environmentally conscious. The unchecked use of abortion pills could be having deleterious effects on our drinking water, not just from the mifepristone drug entering our water supply, but from the human waste resultant from an aborted fetus.
Way to snatch a talking point from the mouth of the Left.
Donald Trump has been re-elected as President of the United States!
Here is what the Pro-Life Generation is looking forward to working with his administration on…
1) Telling Planned Parenthood to go fund themselves (aka defunding them of our tax dollars)
2) Committing to only appointing pro-life leaders to key public offices
3) Protecting our drinking water and women (not to mention innocent babies) across our nation from dangerous Chemical Abortion Pills
It was clear to forty percent of young women that Kamala Harris only offered death or subjugation: economically, the issue of men in women’s spaces, and harm to their bodies from criminal actors. Many young women voted for a future that looked beyond “my body, my choice,” and looked toward “my vote, my future.”
If this trend holds and grows, the kids are going to be all right.
