Are things beginning to change? Often, it was the Democrats who knew how to maximize institutional power and play the long game. They still have it on the former, but they might have screwed themselves on the latter. The Obama coalition was on life support heading into the 2024 election. Now, that movement has been obliterated as healthy numbers of union voters and young people have flocked to the Republican Party, specifically Donald Trump. You saw it on college campuses, fraternities especially—everyone was donning MAGA gear and doing the president’s iconic dance.
It's not a one-off thing: trends show that young people are veering toward the right on politics. What happened? Here’s where we get to Democrats maybe blowing up their future over Donald Trump: the COVID hysterics peddled by the Left, which turned out to be fake, eviscerated the credibility of the medical and political elites. The people labeled loons and conspiracy theorists turned out to be right. The Fauci bros turned out to be science fiction merchants. And if the media wants to whine about how we’re not ready for the next pandemic, they only need to look at who they gave airtime to during the era of COVID insanity. Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, who wrote about this shift, delved into how COVID turned the young toward the conservative end of the political spectrum. But remember, this is The Atlantic—so keep the prose in mind and how we're viewed here.
Why are young people—in the US and around the world—shifting right?
— Derek Thompson (@DKThomp) February 18, 2025
I wrote about a phenomenon I call Generation C—the young people whose experience with COVID's health, political, and economic crises caused a strong shift right among young ppl across the developed world.
In… pic.twitter.com/ypaG2bguIF
“The pandemic era didn't just demolish faith in scientific and political elites,” he wrote. “It also strongly increased alone time, sending young men and women in highly gendered social-media spaces, where the youngest men, in particular, seem to have become significantly more anti-feminist and open to right-wing influencers and parties.” Whatever the case, the data doesn’t lie, which is that between 2020 and 2024, there was a 20-point shift toward the GOP among voters under the age of 30:
Recommended
For decades, America’s young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recent CBS poll, Americans under 30 weren’t just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65.
[…]
What’s driving this global Rechtsruck? It’s hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first.
There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic.
Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person’s 20s.
[…]
New ideologies are messy to describe and messier still to name. But in a few years, what we’ve grown accustomed to calling Generation Z may reveal itself to contain a subgroup: Generation C, COVID-affected and, for now, strikingly conservative. For this micro-generation of young people in the United States and throughout the West, social media has served as a crucible where several trends have fused together: declining trust in political and scientific authorities, anger about the excesses of feminism and social justice, and a preference for rightward politics.
Sure, they still cast conservatism and right-wing parties as lunatics, though anything these people don’t like is considered fascist. Yes, there’s vaccine skepticism because what would cause that, maybe? Was it Biden gambling that the COVID vaccine would prevent transmission? We know there was no evidence that the cocktail would do that, only that it was like the annual flu shot, but that incompetent administration already etched their promise in stone: get the shot, take off the mask. And in doing so, also chiseled the Democrats’ political epitaph among young voters, who have fled this clown show entirely by 2024.
Again, nothing is permanent in politics. Public opinion is shiftable sand, so the Left only hopes that things reset, though they’re doing a piss-poor job at that, taking the losing end of every 80/20 issue out there. They have gone off the reservation on spending, cultural values, feminism, social justice, and the race talk that permeates everything about the Democratic Party. It’s unwelcoming, it’s illiberal, and it’s stuck in an academic muck that’s putrid to most normal voters. People don’t want dudes in women’s sports, have prepubescent teens loaded up on puberty blockers, minors having their sexual organs mutilated, and gay porn all over school libraries.
I’m no culture warrior, as I lean libertarian-ish on a lot, but this is just degeneracy. And to throw science fiction nonsense about the shot, masks, transmission, and other therapeutics especially when it was so clear that the Democrats and the media were using the virus to maximize political power and win an election is the final knife thrust to the throat. Only the weird people remain with the Democrats: the isolated, the overly educated, the wealthy, and the ones with way too much time on their hands.
Join the conversation as a VIP Member