The Kids Are...All Right
Why are The Youngs suddenly Trumpy?
Winston Churchill once said: “If you’re not a liberal when you’re young, you have no heart, and if you’re not a conservative when you’re old, you have no brain. Whoa, that’s a good one. Someone write that heart/brain thing down, that’s a keeper. I did it again — nobody comes up with quotes like ol’ Winny C.! Suck my dick, Shakespeare.”1
For as long as anyone can remember, young people have been to the left of older ones. Recently, young people were the ruthless vanguard of the Great Awokening, striking fear into their older coworkers like the kid in that Twilight Zone episode who controls a town with his mind. Which is why it’s shocking that young people are suddenly the most conservative cohort in generations — here’s what pollster David Shor said in a recent interview:
“This is the thing I am the most shocked by in the last four years — that young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the baby boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”
The numbers backing up Shor’s assertion are striking. 75-year-old white men voted for Harris at a much higher rate than 20-year-old white men. If you divide voters under 26 by gender and by white/non-white, nonwhite women are the only one of those four groups that backed Harris. Here’s a graph few people would have predicted a few years ago:
Young people — and I mean really young people, like young-enough-to-date-Leonardo-DiCaprio young — are surprisingly conservative. A major reason why Trump won was strong support from the first generation so young that they picture black-and-white newsreel footage when they hear the words “Iraq War”. Why are The Youngs suddenly so right-wing?
