Analysis: Trump Makes Stunning Inroads with Young Voters

Former President Donald Trump could win the young vote in 2024, polling trends show, upending the nearly 30 year reign of Democrat hegemony among the demographic.

A Republican presidential candidate has not won the young vote since 1988, the year a federal smoking ban was introduced during domestic airline flights of two hours or less and the James Bond film License to Kill began shooting, Michael Jackson led a rock concert in West Berlin, and the space shuttle Discovery took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

Trump is within two points of Biden among young voters between the ages 18-29, a recent New York Times/Siena Poll found. The vote has not been that close since George W. Bush defeated global warming activist Al Gore in 2000.

Another poll, conducted by Quinnipiac, found Trump leading with registered voters between 18-34 by one point. In 2016, two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton won that demographic by 19 percentage points. President Joe Biden won the demographic in 2020 by 24 percentage points, according to CNN exit polling.

Trump’s inroads with young voters appear to turn on a couple of factors:

Biden’s economy crushed young voters with high housing costs and overall price spikes by about 20 percent — just as they graduated college, intended to buy their first home, or wanted to start a family.
Trump is an advocate of cryptocurrency, an area to which the Biden administration has been hostile. Trump boosted NFTs, promised to end regulatory hostility, and endorsed U.S.-mined Bitcoin.
Healthcare, Biden’s number one issue, is of less concern for young voters than the oldest voting bloc, which appears more sympathetic to his political pitches than younger voters. In eight sets of data encompassing the nexus of “cross-pressures,” Trump’s immigration policy sabotages and undermines the attraction of Biden’s most popular issue and thus essentially diminishes Biden’s political appeal, according to Ruy Teixera, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

Biden, meanwhile, is desperately trying to shore up the young vote. He offered them “free beer, free contraceptives, music concerts, free food, manicures, rent check sweepstakes, boot shines, comedy shows, and dance parties,” the Washington Examiner reported.

“The only way a weak, failed, and corrupt leader’s allies can entice a populace to continue four more years of disastrous policies is to get them liquored up,” Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita told the Washington Post, dismissing Biden’s efforts.

“Biden should stop treating young voters, Black and Hispanic voters like they are stupid,” he added. “His liberal financiers will stop paying rent bills and throwing block parties the second the election is over — and go back to ignoring their interests as they always have.”