2024 Election Reflection - Youth Populism Rising

This election cycle, young people felt locked out of the American Dream, and the defining feature of the youth electorate has become economic populism.

The Young People’s Alliance is a bipartisan organization that empowers young people to shape their future through advocacy and organizing.

What happened?

This election cycle, the Young People’s Alliance had conversations with over 20,000 young voters in North Carolina across 23 colleges and high schools. Suffice to say, we got a good sense of how the youth electorate felt. Long before election night, it was clear that something had changed about our generation’s politics. Initially, Gen Z was seen as the most progressive in history; but in this cycle, we saw Trump making substantial gains in our generation, particularly among young men across racial lines. Last week, young men voted for Trump by a 14-point margin.

So what changed? The top issue on voters’ minds was the economy, and young people were no exception. Economic concerns are especially acute for young people who are dealing with high education and housing costs, a difficult job market, and inflation on consumer goods. Meanwhile, we haven’t been around for long enough to build wealth that would insulate us from this (and homeownership, the best opportunity to build wealth, is out of reach for us). We are locked out of our own American Dream.

Neither party put solutions forward that would truly solve these problems. Harris had some success with more popular progressive stances on social issues, but her top surrogates for youth catered to the priorities of the activist class rather than regular people, such as climate change, past student loans, and Gaza (very important issues, but near the bottom of young people’s priorities when polled). At the same time, she failed to center the issues that young people outside of the activist class ranked as their top issues: inflation, healthcare, and housing. While the Harris campaign did propose grants for first-time homebuyers, they wouldn’t have addressed the root cause of expensive housing and could have further contributed to inflated prices.

Contrastingly, although his social policies were less popular among youth, Trump’s promises to improve the economy through tariffs, tax cuts, and deportations were key to his victory. It’s dubious that these policies would actually work, given that broad tariffs would further inflate the price of consumer goods and that trickle-down economics has been thoroughly disproven. Yet these efforts still resonated. Young Trump voters I spoke to wouldn’t always defend his policies, but his campaign gave them more hope for improvement of the standard of living for non-elites. For instance, in his appearances on podcasts like Joe Rogan and Theo Von, Trump came across as more authentically understanding of the hurt of young men who want to be able to provide for a family, but are on track to be economically worse-off than their parents.

This held up in the data. In 2020, the working class voted for Biden, a president with decades of pro-worker bona-fides from labor unions. In 2024, they voted for Trump. This flip of working class support shows that this election was defined by economic populism, and on that scale, Trump was the more believable candidate.

What do young people want?

Young people are no longer a given for Democrats. However I wouldn’t necessarily say that young men are now mostly Republicans. I spoke to many voters who voted for Trump alongside Democrats in down-ballot races. They are loyal to Trump, but traditional Republican policies like economic libertarianism and conservative stances on social issues don’t necessarily resonate.

Looking forward, young people will vote for the party that can effectively speak to their interests. At YPA, we’ve been discussing youth disempowerment for a while, and coined “post-partisan youth power” (say that five times fast) to describe the type of movement that could achieve youth-centered policy. Our goal with this phrase was to highlight how solving youth issues isn’t necessarily partisan, and these issues have been sidelined by both parties due to a lack of young people’s political power.

In the face of this election, we’ve adopted a much sharper phrase to describe this same idea: “youth populism¹.” We’ve identified that the lack of youth power is inextricably linked to a disconnect between politicians that rate their success by stock market numbers and the economic lived experiences of people. While older generations can live with this because they have invested alongside major corporations, young people are getting the short end of the stick. 

Our government can’t keep prioritizing 1% more GDP growth by allowing our communities to fall apart and taking away opportunities for meaningful work (whether this means letting private equity firms buy up our neighborhoods and removing opportunities for homeownership, allowing Big Tech to experiment on our children’s minds without regulation, or heavily subsidizing AI automation without a plan for the future of work). Young people have been subjected to the brunt of these harms while the profits pad older generations’ retirement accounts. We can see that the Faustian bargain that our parents and grandparents made with the Fortune 500 wasn’t worth it.

To the probably-mostly-political-elite audience of this piece, this sounds like a platform that the Democrats are better positioned to hold. However, left populists like Bernie Sanders feel like the elites in their party have sold out these ideas and are focused on serving multinational corporations while leaning on popular progressive stances on social issues as a cover. Meanwhile, traditional elite Republicans may promote economic libertarianism, but Trump (at least in rhetoric) and populists like JD Vance and Sen. Josh Hawley (moreso in policy) have expressed more willingness to go toe to toe with big companies to protect the American worker and communities. This promise to fight for the little guy, as noted previously, was key to Trump’s election. Youth populism, and by extension the youth vote, is anyone’s game.

Addressing the potential harms of populism.

Both parties have populist movements within them that have attempted to confront (or at least speak to) these problems. While the most notable populists—Bernie Sanders on the left and Donald Trump on the right—are controversial figures who tend to occupy political extremes, they have been successful because they’ve been better at understanding the biggest problems in this country than the political establishment.

Now populism isn’t exactly popular with politicos, and for some good reasons. A populist candidate isn’t subject to the same checks by the political establishment as typical candidates, because they don’t rely on the establishment for support. This can enable demagogues to rise who can pass extreme policy that isn’t vetted by an establishment of experts, who may have more information on the effects of certain policies than the voters alone.

However, youth populism doesn’t have to lead to demagoguery. In order to articulate what bipartisan youth populist ideas look like in practice, I would point to Lina Khan, who has created rules holding social media companies accountable for surveilling and manipulating children, stopping junk fees, requiring one-click cancellation from predatory subscriptions, and even giving McDonald’s the right to repair their own ice cream machines. These may sound smaller compared to broad economic changes, but they meaningfully impact people’s daily lives. They are common-sense, people-centered reforms that have gained approbation from everyone from Bernie Sanders to JD Vance. At the same time, billionaire mega-donors to both Harris (Mark Cuban and Reid Hoffman) and Trump (Elon Musk) pressured the candidates to fire her if elected, showing what stands in the way of bipartisan youth populism.

The fundamentals are there elsewhere too. A huge bipartisan majority of Congress wants to hold social media companies accountable with the Kids Online Safety Act. Charlie Kirk (the founder of Turning Point USA) and some Congressional Democrats agree that massive private equity firms should be restricted from buying up single-family homes. The ball is now in the hands of party leaders, who must adapt and center this new movement. The political establishment can retake its necessary place as a check on unbridled populism by recognizing what this election told us and starting to center these real solutions to solve the most material problems affecting young people.

Moving forward.

We will spend the next four years building up people-centered policy through bipartisan organizing on youth economic issues while continuing to counter Big Tech manipulation in order to protect our generation’s mental health (another material, pressing problem alongside economics). We plan to work with politicians on both sides of the aisle who are channeling youth populism into reasonable policy. Specifically, we plan to launch legislation centering youth opportunity in North Carolina, with a focus on meaningful yet reasonable solutions to housing and education costs.

If we’re successful, the establishment should recognize the importance of these material issues to their continued existence. Regardless of who I personally support (or who anyone supports in our bipartisan organization), I hope the 2028 election shows both parties competing to center around people, not profit and special interests.

1. I’m using populism in its original sense, referring to broad-based reforms that center the interests of regular people as opposed to elites. It doesn’t need to include reactionary social policy. This is expanded on later in the article.