The Disappointment of Young Trump Voters

The past two months have been some of the worst for Donald Trump’s approval rating—ever. Polling aggregators have his net approval in the low 40s, with 34 percent approval on the economy and 30 percent on cost of living. In individual polls, his overall approval dips down into the mid 30s. The last time Trump’s numbers looked this bad was right after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. George W. Bush exited the White House with similar ratings.

The slippage is especially drastic with young voters. In the 2024 election, a majority of 18-to-29-year-olds voted for Kamala Harris, but compared with 2020, young voters swung hard toward Trump. According to the Cook Political Report, on March 1, 2025, Trump’s net approval rating with these voters was minus 7. Yet by February 1 of this year, it was an astonishing minus 31.8. Now young people are abandoning Trump faster than any other voting bloc.

It’s tempting to think that this is all happening because of this administration’s blatantly authoritarian and norm-shattering actions: deploying masked ICE agents into American cities, stonewalling on the Epstein files, demolishing the East Wing, capturing Venezuela’s president, sharing racist videos on social media. All of those actions matter, and are slowly chipping away at Trump’s base of support.

But they’re not the whole story—or even the main story—of why Trump is losing young people. I run focus groups with voters every week, and what I’ve heard from this age group is much simpler: Trump is not doing the things that he told Americans he would do to fix prices and the economy. In the focus groups, young people who voted for Trump have said that they believed him during the campaign when he promised to “build the greatest economy in the history of the world.” Now they say they feel duped and let down.

[Jean M. Twenge: The myth of the Gen Z red wave]

“ There are things that are very disappointing and very rough right now,” Kim, a Generation Z Trump voter from Virginia, said during a focus group last month. (To protect participants’ privacy, we do not identify them by their last name.)

“Overall, I think the job market is really hard right now,” Allison, from New York, said.

“I think things are pretty chaotic lately, honestly,” said Lizabel, from Florida. “You just see all this stuff on the news, and you see a lot of people are struggling to find jobs. A lot of people are feeling kind of pessimistic about what things are going on.”

For these young people to have placed their faith in a con man like Trump might seem naive. But most members of Generation Z were still children when Trump came down the escalator. They don’t remember a lot of the chaos and dysfunction of Trump’s first run for president, or even his first term. They don’t view Trump as sui generis or beyond the pale, because he’s been the dominant force in our politics for as long as they’ve been politically aware.

Now, though, they’re young adults entering the workforce. Many of them have student loans, and they’re at a particularly cost-sensitive point in their lives. They notice when a politician like Trump promises to lower prices, and then doesn’t deliver.

In 2024, Trump overperformed with young voters to a historic degree. Harris beat him by 19 points among 18-to-29-year-olds—which sounds good until you realize that, in 2016, Hillary Clinton won the same cohort by 30 points. And in 2020, Joe Biden won them by 26 points.

Compared with 2020, in 2024 young voters swung to Trump in every key battleground state except Georgia. That includes a 24-point swing in Michigan, an 18-point swing in Pennsylvania, and a 15-point swing in Wisconsin. About 56 percent of young men voted for Trump in 2024, the same share that voted for Biden in 2020. Trump’s overall youth support jumped 10 points relative to his performance in 2020.

That shift was observable in real time over the course of the campaign, particularly in red-pilled corners of the internet, the right-leaning spaces where young people get more and more of their political news. Trump popped up on bro podcasts with Joe Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross, and Lex Fridman, as well as on shows such as Full Send and All-In. He threw an unhinged Madison Square Garden rally just days before his election, in which one of his supporters called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.” The red-Solo-cup energy that sustains MAGA was in full effect, and America’s youngest voters—especially young men—were drawn in.

“For our generation right now, it’s a lot more acceptable for a guy to just be outright Republican and love Trump,” Gabrielle, in Florida, said in a recent focus group. “When you went on social media the day after the election, every single guy was able to just put on their story pictures of Trump winning the election, and like excitement, and all this stuff.”

During the Biden years, young people felt burned by the administration’s messaging on the economy. Ethan, from North Carolina, said in a February 2025 focus group that there was a constant stream of “Oh, the economy is getting better” sentiment from the Biden administration. “Meanwhile everyone knows that McDonald’s now costs $20 for a meal,” he said.

Young people like these were receptive when Trump said he would bring down prices and tame inflation, fix America’s broken health-care system, make housing affordable, create millions of new jobs, and do away with other economic woes that were plaguing many Americans, but that felt especially acute for young voters just entering the job market. The young people in my focus groups talk about how their student-loan debt is rising, housing is out of reach, and looming AI-powered disruption makes many jobs feel precarious. They’re clear-eyed that they might not be as well off as their parents’ generation.

Over the past 13 months, though, America’s young people have watched as Trump did a whole lot of things that weren’t what they elected him to do. Relative to when Trump took office, housing prices are up, job growth is stagnant, inflation has been persistent, college is less affordable, and people are more likely to be uninsured. That, more than anything else, is why young people in the focus groups say they’re disappointed.

“They could definitely be going better,” Alexandre, from Maryland, said last month, when we asked him how he thought things were going in the country—the “main cause being inflation and economic reasons,” he said.

“ I do not think we’re going super strongly, domestically. My biggest concerns are affordability,” said Sam, from Minnesota. “I have a job, but the unemployment rate for youth, and a lot of my friends getting jobs, is really hard.”

[Derek Thompson: How COVID pushed a generation of young people to the right]

“ From an economics factor, so many of the things that I would say are not wants, but instead needs, have just absolutely skyrocketed,” Joseph, from Michigan, said in September. “And basic families are spending so much on just the cost of living that they don’t have a cost to save, or anything like that. There’s just no financial way out.”

All of this suggests that Trump didn’t own the votes of young people who supported him in 2024; he rented them. And many of them are now getting tired of antics that, in their minds, take the focus away from the economy. When we asked a recent group about Trump’s threats against Greenland, Mukesh, a Trump voter from California, said: “I think we should just respect it, and leave it, and just focus on what’s actually happening inside the nation.”

What happens to these young voters now? That’s up to Democrats. I’m no policy hand, but I do know something about communications. Based on what I’ve heard in the focus groups, Democrats have a big opportunity with young people, because they’re some of the latest arrivals to Trump’s coalition. Democrats need to offer these voters a platform that addresses their concerns, while hammering Trump for his failure to do so.

In a recent focus group, the moderator asked Ruben, a Trump voter in Georgia, what advice he would give Democrats. He said: “ I’d say put a larger focus on the economic development. A lot of people these days are really coming of age, like being able to vote. And the younger Generation Z, we care about our finances, being able to pay rent, being able to afford food.”

These young people want someone who sees the economic pain they’re going through, and promises to actually do something about it. They don’t want policy papers. They want hope, good vibes, the red-Solo-cup energy—but directed toward what actually matters to them.