Yes, it’s true that Trump did not actually win the youth vote by 34 or 36 points. But his embrace of Tik Tok is still almost certainly because of his gains among young voters in 2024:
In NBC News’s exit poll, Trump won first-time voters by 55 to 44 percent. This was a massive reversal from 2020, when Biden won them by 32 points in the same survey. And a large part of Democrats’ woes with first-time voters seems attributable to the declining liberalism of young Americans. In 2020, Biden won voters under 25 by 34 points, according to NBC’s exit poll. Four years later, Harris won them by just 11.
Exit polls are highly flawed. But Democrats’ performance with young voters looks even worse in more reliable data sources. For example, AP VoteCast shows Harris winning voters under 30 by just 4 points in 2024 after Biden had won them by 25 — a development that suggests the youngest, newly registered voters were unusually rightwing last year.
Meanwhile, election returns show that Democrats lost more ground between 2020 and 2024 in younger parts of the country than in older ones.
Finally, the fact that the youngest zoomers are aberrantly conservative is also apparent in some states’ voter registration data. Voters 18 to 25 in North Carolina were more likely to register as Republicans than Democrats over the past four years, a break with that purple state’s historical pattern.
This is not good. Young voters, steeped in shallow social media infotainment, don’t really remember a time before Trump. He is perfectly normal to them.
This could be a big problem. People tend to maintain their partisan identities. My only hope here is that this is so Trump centric and so devoid of real ideology for most of these kids that it may not stick when someone without his celebrity power is on the ballot. We’ll see. But it’s awfully depressing to think of young people, whom we’ve all seen as more tolerant and open embrace this fascist leadership.
Trump is so shameless that he has no problem completely reversing himself on the Tik Tok issue. His main reasoning is undoubtedly the massive donations from Jeffrey Yass, one of Tik Tok’s major investors. And he clearly has dreams of Global social media domination with his pals Musk and Zuckerberg. But I don’t think there’s any doubt that he’s very impressed with Tik Tok’s ability to sway young people to join his cult.