Prediction: Young voters will swing hard right the next few cycles

[ProgressiveModerate]

On net I still believe they will vote Dem, however, for a variety of reasons, I think we will Gen Zs and Gen Alphas being notably to the right of millennials when they entered the electorate:

-People being exposed to social media from a younger and younger age, and from my experience, social media generally tends to promote far more right-wing culture war traps than left-wing stuff. Especially if you're seeing this stuff from the age of 13 or 14, it becomes fact in your mind. Social media content generally has a great theme of governmental distrust.

-Factions amongst young people becoming more political. For instance, I feel like social media has spread this idea that to be masculine, you have to be conservative cause otherwise you're a wuss that relies on the government (I also think the gender divide is going to get a lot worse and it'll be bad for society). Social media has also made the college/non-college divide more prominent, making non-college folks have a genuinely hatred for those who attend college, hence making non-college folks more right leaning. Basically, by turning factions of people against each other, that means some are going to become more conservative from what was previously a very homogenously liberal group.

-Increased politicization and polarization activating conservatives from a younger age. Traditionally, conservatives start voting later than liberals, but again social media is changing that dynamic.

-Republicans being seen as the more "anti-establishment" party these days. Younger people naturally like to rebel against systems and authority.

-Children being increasingly more likely to be raised in a right-leaning household.

-Economic circumstances being better; I think the 2008 recession blocking many young people out of the economy is what caused millennials to lean so hard to the left. Now that circumstances have improved, new young people feel less likely to need government help.

Is this something Democrats need to worry about? I think yes in the sense they can't just rely on generational turnover giving them a permanent majority. Is this something that Republicans should be excited about? Not really; young people will still lean left on net and the current Republican coalition relies almost exclusively on shrinking groups; gaining ground with young voters is necessary to stay viable but is unlikely to singlehandedly become dominant.

[It’s so Joever]

The answer to all of this generational voting stuff is actually extremely obvious. Younger people vote more left as a percentage because the ones who do bother to vote are left leaning. Left leaners are more likely to start voting and being politically active at an earlier age, thus they skew the numbers of the young.
Right wingers do start voting later on which is the real reason generations “swing” right. It’s all abo it turnout dynamics and who bothers showing up.

So yes Gen Z will “swing right” if you are going by pure voting percentages. But no it won’t be because a bunch of Zoomers had a shift in their personal voting patterns, it’ll be because the frat boys of today who don’t vote because “they all suck bro” will be solid Rs by the 2040s.

Now for your other points, i think social media just increases polarization if anything, but I don’t see a major shift beyond that. Economic circumstances even in two months are incredibly difficult to predict so I wouldn’t touch that now. The only real concern I’d the right wingers being more likely to have kids, although what I’ve heard and think could be true from anecdotal experience is that having kids is almost the inverse of voting. Younger conservatives are more likely to have kids early on while liberals wait a bit longer.

[ProgressiveModerate]

The answer to all of this generational voting stuff is actually extremely obvious. Younger people vote more left as a percentage because the ones who do bother to vote are left leaning. Left leaners are more likely to start voting and being politically active at an earlier age, thus they skew the numbers of the young.
Right wingers do start voting later on which is the real reason generations “swing” right. It’s all abo it turnout dynamics and who bothers showing up.

So yes Gen Z will “swing right” if you are going by pure voting percentages. But no it won’t be because a bunch of Zoomers had a shift in their personal voting patterns, it’ll be because the frat boys of today who don’t vote because “they all suck bro” will be solid Rs by the 2040s.

Now for your other points, i think social media just increases polarization if anything, but I don’t see a major shift beyond that. Economic circumstances even in two months are incredibly difficult to predict so I wouldn’t touch that now. The only real concern I’d the right wingers being more likely to have kids, although what I’ve heard and think could be true from anecdotal experience is that having kids is almost the inverse of voting. Younger conservatives are more likely to have kids early on while liberals wait a bit longer.

I agree that Conservatives entering the electorate at an older average age is also true, but this post is comparing how the 18–24-year-olds bloc voted in different cycles, not comparing voting habits of a given generation across cycles as they age if that makes sense.

Social media increasing polarization inherently leads to more right-wing young folks if you're starting base was pretty homogenously left leaning. Also, increasing polarization increases politicization which means many of these younger conservatives who may have otherwise not joined the electorate until they were much older might start voting much sooner. Basically, social media has helped to activate young conservatives from a younger age.

I do agree about the economy; if another huge recession happens that locks many young folks out of the economy, it could def affect voting tendencies. My post was under the presumption that we wouldn't see something of that magnitude again for a long time, but that's perhaps naive on my part.

[GALeftist]

With all due respect, seems like lazy analysis based mostly on anecdotes. Gen Z voters voted for Biden by 20 points – basically the same as millennials. What's more, it appears they moved somewhat left in 2022 – see this, this, and this. Now, of course they will move right over time, but Gen Z will also be aging into the electorate until 2030. (Gen alpha imo is just way too young for us to know anything about their voting habits yet). Point is, all the data right now seem to indicate that Gen Z is a lot like millennials in terms of their politics, which indicates that they will in all likelihood be left of where you'd expect for quite a while. That could be an incomplete picture, I'm way more confident saying millennials will be durably liberal than I am saying the same about zoomers, but it's what I'd guess.

For what it's worth, you can come up with counterexamples for all these anecdotes. For example, while social media might push men right (although I'm not sure this is uniformly or even mostly the case, tbh), it definitely pushes women left, to the extent that it's kind of a joke among zoomers that any straight man left of Mussolini has to put "liberal" on their Tinder bio if they want any matches. Although college polarization is increasing, zoomers are also going to be the most college educated generation so far. Although zoomers (mostly) don't have formative memories of Bush being blamed for the Iraq War and the 2008 crash, they mostly do have formative memories of a generally popular Obama administration followed by a generally unpopular Trump administration and its COVID crisis, with the associated lockdown and recession. Now, I could be wrong about some or all of this. My point is just that these observations are not rigorous enough to draw any meaningful conclusions yet.

[Хahar 🤔]

A lot of your posts recently have suggested that it would be good for you personally if you stopped thinking about politics so much for a while.

[It’s so Joever]

The answer to all of this generational voting stuff is actually extremely obvious. Younger people vote more left as a percentage because the ones who do bother to vote are left leaning. Left leaners are more likely to start voting and being politically active at an earlier age, thus they skew the numbers of the young.
Right wingers do start voting later on which is the real reason generations “swing” right. It’s all abo it turnout dynamics and who bothers showing up.

So yes Gen Z will “swing right” if you are going by pure voting percentages. But no it won’t be because a bunch of Zoomers had a shift in their personal voting patterns, it’ll be because the frat boys of today who don’t vote because “they all suck bro” will be solid Rs by the 2040s.

Now for your other points, i think social media just increases polarization if anything, but I don’t see a major shift beyond that. Economic circumstances even in two months are incredibly difficult to predict so I wouldn’t touch that now. The only real concern I’d the right wingers being more likely to have kids, although what I’ve heard and think could be true from anecdotal experience is that having kids is almost the inverse of voting. Younger conservatives are more likely to have kids early on while liberals wait a bit longer.

I agree that Conservatives entering the electorate at an older average age is also true, but this post is comparing how the 18–24-year-olds bloc voted in different cycles, not comparing voting habits of a given generation across cycles as they age if that makes sense.

Social media increasing polarization inherently leads to more right-wing young folks if you're starting base was pretty homogenously left leaning. Also, increasing polarization increases politicization which means many of these younger conservatives who may have otherwise not joined the electorate until they were much older might start voting much sooner. Basically, social media has helped to activate young conservatives from a younger age.

I do agree about the economy; if another huge recession happens that locks many young folks out of the economy, it could def affect voting tendencies. My post was under the presumption that we wouldn't see something of that magnitude again for a long time, but that's perhaps naive on my part.

No it does not, it leads to people being more partisan and falling into tribes more quickly though, but that’s not creating more right wing people, they already were right wing even if they weren’t voting yet.
If you are suggesting that means right wingers will vote earlier Im still not convinced given the very two different attitudes towards voting among the camps and the type of rhetoric around elections you see. However say it does cause right wingers to vote younger causing the discrepancy to lessen, that has a counter effect in that the swing right wards as the generations age is reduced. Essentially it all balances out. You could argue in the short term this creates a bit of an issue due to the traditional equilibrium being disrupted (and that would benefit Rs by default in the situation you give) but long term it doesn’t really change anything.

[ProgressiveModerate]

The answer to all of this generational voting stuff is actually extremely obvious. Younger people vote more left as a percentage because the ones who do bother to vote are left leaning. Left leaners are more likely to start voting and being politically active at an earlier age, thus they skew the numbers of the young.
Right wingers do start voting later on which is the real reason generations “swing” right. It’s all abo it turnout dynamics and who bothers showing up.

So yes Gen Z will “swing right” if you are going by pure voting percentages. But no it won’t be because a bunch of Zoomers had a shift in their personal voting patterns, it’ll be because the frat boys of today who don’t vote because “they all suck bro” will be solid Rs by the 2040s.

Now for your other points, i think social media just increases polarization if anything, but I don’t see a major shift beyond that. Economic circumstances even in two months are incredibly difficult to predict so I wouldn’t touch that now. The only real concern I’d the right wingers being more likely to have kids, although what I’ve heard and think could be true from anecdotal experience is that having kids is almost the inverse of voting. Younger conservatives are more likely to have kids early on while liberals wait a bit longer.

I agree that Conservatives entering the electorate at an older average age is also true, but this post is comparing how the 18–24-year-olds bloc voted in different cycles, not comparing voting habits of a given generation across cycles as they age if that makes sense.

Social media increasing polarization inherently leads to more right-wing young folks if you're starting base was pretty homogenously left leaning. Also, increasing polarization increases politicization which means many of these younger conservatives who may have otherwise not joined the electorate until they were much older might start voting much sooner. Basically, social media has helped to activate young conservatives from a younger age.

I do agree about the economy; if another huge recession happens that locks many young folks out of the economy, it could def affect voting tendencies. My post was under the presumption that we wouldn't see something of that magnitude again for a long time, but that's perhaps naive on my part.

No it does not, it leads to people being more partisan and falling into tribes more quickly though, but that’s not creating more right wing people, they already were right wing even if they weren’t voting yet.
If you are suggesting that means right wingers will vote earlier Im still not convinced given the very two different attitudes towards voting among the camps and the type of rhetoric around elections you see. However say it does cause right wingers to vote younger causing the discrepancy to lessen, that has a counter effect in that the swing right wards as the generations age is reduced. Essentially it all balances out. You could argue in the short term this creates a bit of an issue due to the traditional equilibrium being disrupted (and that would benefit Rs by default in the situation you give) but long term it doesn’t really change anything.

This is an interesting point. It could be possible that younger people aren't actually more right-wing, but the rise of social media has engaged young folks both left and right into their political camps at a much faster rate. I also wonder if it's sped up or slowed down the natural process of individual people tending to lean more and more conservative as they get older, as what was once new and progressive becomes normalized and the new young folks take up new issues.

Either way, this means the election results would indicate young people leaning more R because of more young folks voting early.

[Pericles]

This is silly. Everything about young people points to them being more left-wing; they naturally have more liberal/progressive values, they are economically not well-off and always end up being bad fits for the party of wealthy old home-owners, and they start out to the left to begin with because they are more diverse than the general population.

[ProgressiveModerate]

With all due respect, seems like lazy analysis based mostly on anecdotes. Gen Z voters voted for Biden by 20 points – basically the same as millennials. What's more, it appears they moved somewhat left in 2022 – see this, this, and this. Now, of course they will move right over time, but Gen Z will also be aging into the electorate until 2030. (Gen alpha imo is just way too young for us to know anything about their voting habits yet). Point is, all the data right now seem to indicate that Gen Z is a lot like millennials in terms of their politics, which indicates that they will in all likelihood be left of where you'd expect for quite a while. That could be an incomplete picture, I'm way more confident saying millennials will be durably liberal than I am saying the same about zoomers, but it's what I'd guess.

For what it's worth, you can come up with counterexamples for all these anecdotes. For example, while social media might push men right (although I'm not sure this is uniformly or even mostly the case, tbh), it definitely pushes women left, to the extent that it's kind of a joke among zoomers that any straight man left of Mussolini has to put "liberal" on their Tinder bio if they want any matches. Although college polarization is increasing, zoomers are also going to be the most college educated generation so far. Although zoomers (mostly) don't have formative memories of Bush being blamed for the Iraq War and the 2008 crash, they mostly do have formative memories of a generally popular Obama administration followed by a generally unpopular Trump administration and its COVID crisis, with the associated lockdown and recession. Now, I could be wrong about some or all of this. My point is just that these observations are not rigorous enough to draw any meaningful conclusions yet.

I do agree my response is mostly anecdotal, but that's a large part of these predictions.

In 2020 for instance there was a lot of anecdotal evidence Cubans in Miami would swing hard right even when polling didn't really reflect that.

In 2022, I was early to state based on my anecdotal experience, Kathy Hochul would do really poorly in NYC, especially in Asian, Jewish, Italian, and other ethnic enclaves. In the end, we saw many of these neighborhoods swing 20+ points rightwards; Hochul literally lost a precinct in Chinatown Manhattan!

Since I am a young person who attended a large public High School, I feel at least somewhat qualified to speak anecdotally from my experience. Maybe my experience doesn't apply more broadly and I'm wrong, but the sense I get is it's a universal phenomenon.

Also, if exit polls are accurate and Gen Z voted for Biden by 20 points, that's still less blue than the baseline of Millennials voting closer to D+30 when they entered the electorate back in 2008. And in 2022, they may have "swung left" because more liberal Zoomers tend to go to colleges and college ed folks see less turnout drops in off cycles, especially at a young age when there's so much political activism on college campuses. I also think this uptick in culture war stuff on social media is a relatively new phenomenon that wasn't as big of a factor in the 2020 election.

As for your point about women shifting left, that's def fair, but Gen Z men have more room to become more R than Gen Z women have to become more D. Ig a similar situation would be like Madison WI; because it's already so liberal, you can't get the 10 point leftwards swings you get out of other cities; any further Dem gains will mostly come from increasing population.

Also, I don't think most Gen Zs care about Obama. When Obama was elected President I was 3, and by the end of his term when I understood basic news, it was basically a lame duck. I think Trump and Biden are truly the first 2 Presidents Gen Z really lived with.

During COVID, most Gen Zs were at an age where they were still in school and they wanted to be young, go out, and explore. For many, I think this was a segway to being more favorable to Conservative politics. While it did not make me into a Republican/Conservative, I was certainly very unhappy that many Dem politicians, especially on the local level choose to die on the hill of keeping schools closed even once we had vaccines that were accessible to everyone, and the inability of those on the federal level to call it out. Schools were kept close here until September 2021. Yet, they still made us go to school during that apocalyptic smoke a few months ago despite my school having windows that literally don't close.

I do agree generally with your point though that this is not something that is necessarily true. It's just a prediction I have that the folks who are currently in the 14-20 age range lean less D than their older peers; it's kind of impossible to say right now because they've barely entered the electorate and polling on the politics of this age range is pretty sparse.

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is silly. Everything about young people points to them being more left-wing; they naturally have more liberal/progressive values, they are economically not well-off and always end up being bad fits for the party of wealthy old home-owners, and they start out to the left to begin with because they are more diverse than the general population.

I do wonder if home-ownership, zoning, and NIMBYism will become a bigger conversation in our politics at some point. It seems relatively underdiscussed on the federal level given all the problems we have with housing and how important housing is. Generally, though, people associate NIMBYism and maintaining single family home neighborhoods with conservative politics while upzoning and increasing supply is associated with liberal politics. I have yet to really see either party take on more formal positions federally though.

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is an example of what I'm talking about. According to data from "Monitoring the Future", teen boys have always been more right leaning than their female counterparts, but there's been a recent spike in them becoming more conservative, and at a more abrupt rate than teen girls shifting left. As a consequence, on net teenagers are more likely to self-identify conservative as of the most recent survey data.

I will concede this chart is a bit misleading because it excludes people who don't self-identify as either liberal or conservative, but you can still see the general point.

[ملكة كرينجيتوك]

This is an example of what I'm talking about. According to data from "Monitoring the Future", teen boys have always been more right leaning than their female counterparts, but there's been a recent spike in them becoming more conservative, and at a more abrupt rate than teen girls shifting left. As a consequence, on net teenagers are more likely to self-identify conservative as of the most recent survey data.

I will concede this chart is a bit misleading because it excludes people who don't self-identify as either liberal or conservative, but you can still see the general point.

The change from the bracket containing my birth cohort to the bracket containing my brother's birth cohort is jaw-dropping. Not sure if the sudden shift between 1995-born and 2000-born girls or the sudden shift between 1998-born and 2003-born boys is more surprising.

[WalterWhite]

This is an example of what I'm talking about. According to data from "Monitoring the Future", teen boys have always been more right leaning than their female counterparts, but there's been a recent spike in them becoming more conservative, and at a more abrupt rate than teen girls shifting left. As a consequence, on net teenagers are more likely to self-identify conservative as of the most recent survey data.

I will concede this chart is a bit misleading because it excludes people who don't self-identify as either liberal or conservative, but you can still see the general point.

We have seen this sort of data before. The truth is that young men have recently STOPPED becoming more conservative, and young women are CONTINUING to become more liberal.

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is an example of what I'm talking about. According to data from "Monitoring the Future", teen boys have always been more right leaning than their female counterparts, but there's been a recent spike in them becoming more conservative, and at a more abrupt rate than teen girls shifting left. As a consequence, on net teenagers are more likely to self-identify conservative as of the most recent survey data.

I will concede this chart is a bit misleading because it excludes people who don't self-identify as either liberal or conservative, but you can still see the general point.

We have seen this sort of data before. The truth is that young men have recently STOPPED becoming more conservative, and young women are CONTINUING to become more liberal.

I haven't seen much evidence that shows young men have stopped becoming more conservative; if there is probably too soon to tell if that's just a blip in the data or if things will actually stall long term.

[WalterWhite]

This is an example of what I'm talking about. According to data from "Monitoring the Future", teen boys have always been more right leaning than their female counterparts, but there's been a recent spike in them becoming more conservative, and at a more abrupt rate than teen girls shifting left. As a consequence, on net teenagers are more likely to self-identify conservative as of the most recent survey data.

I will concede this chart is a bit misleading because it excludes people who don't self-identify as either liberal or conservative, but you can still see the general point.

We have seen this sort of data before. The truth is that young men have recently STOPPED becoming more conservative, and young women are CONTINUING to become more liberal.

I haven't seen much evidence that shows young men have stopped becoming more conservative; if there is probably too soon to tell if that's just a blip in the data or if things will actually stall long term.

I think what I am saying makes sense; young men shifted hard right during the height of the anti-SJW craze, which portrayed feminists as red-haired misandrists, and during #MeToo era because it was portrayed as "anti-male". It was easy to paint feminists as nutjobs back then, so young men bolted right. Now that the anti-SJW craze and the #MeToo movement have died down, these trends have stopped.

[ProgressiveModerate]

This is an example of what I'm talking about. According to data from "Monitoring the Future", teen boys have always been more right leaning than their female counterparts, but there's been a recent spike in them becoming more conservative, and at a more abrupt rate than teen girls shifting left. As a consequence, on net teenagers are more likely to self-identify conservative as of the most recent survey data.

I will concede this chart is a bit misleading because it excludes people who don't self-identify as either liberal or conservative, but you can still see the general point.

The change from the bracket containing my birth cohort to the bracket containing my brother's birth cohort is jaw-dropping. Not sure if the sudden shift between 1995-born and 2000-born girls or the sudden shift between 1998-born and 2003-born boys is more surprising.

100% social media.

Social media existed back in about 2010ish when those 1995-2000 kids would've been Seniors in HS, but it was really around 2015 you started to have this more accessible, instantaneous, infinite scroll thing going on that just constantly feeds people BS. I also think post-COVID, many teens never returned to the full in-person lifestyle of going outside and seeing friends, and so just spend even more time on social media. I also think this explains the worrisome uptick in depression amongst teens.

I am very confident in saying this contributes to influencing many young people's political beliefs. At the ages of 13-15, a kid likely doesn't have much of a pre-existing belief structure, and all these Instagram reels and tik-toks saying the vaccines are dangerous, LGBTQ is a cult, and the left wants to groom them might be their first introduction to politics, and therefore become their political truths. Once you've ingrained those beliefs into a teenager through several years of addiction, it's hard for someone to rationally break out of them.

I feel fortunate in some sense I was unique and developed much of my basic political understanding *before* getting on social media, but my Instagram definitely tries to feed me a lot of crazy mostly right-wing culture war stuff.

One thing I think makes this worse is teens are naturally rebellious, and reels play on this. There are a lot of reals where some educated figure of authority trying to disprove a conspiracy theory actually further re-enforces it in the eyes of many teens.

I am telling ya'll, I live in liberal NYC, and know so many people who were previously a-political but now buy into some sort of right-wing culture war thing solely because of social media. The one I'm the most worried about is the anti-LGBTQ stuff; go on Instagram and look at the comments on some of these reals, it's a bunch of naive teens saying really terrible things about gay and trans people. When Uganda recently passed that anti-LGBTQ bill, there were a lot of reels about it, and I remember going through the comments of one and seeing things like "W Uganda", "Homosexuals must be eliminated", "Watch the gays cope", laughing emojis, ect, from people my own age (18) and younger. At my school there definitely has been an increase in othering and looking down on some LGBTQ folks, particularly trans folks. The only good thing is there does seem to be widespread acceptance of gay and lesbian folks who still mostly conform to gender norms; the hate really seems to be against those who challenge gender norms rather than sexuality.

Idk, maybe I sound like the crazy one here, but I promise I'm trying to be genuine from my experience and observations.

[Horus]

This is an example of what I'm talking about. According to data from "Monitoring the Future", teen boys have always been more right leaning than their female counterparts, but there's been a recent spike in them becoming more conservative, and at a more abrupt rate than teen girls shifting left. As a consequence, on net teenagers are more likely to self-identify conservative as of the most recent survey data.

I will concede this chart is a bit misleading because it excludes people who don't self-identify as either liberal or conservative, but you can still see the general point.

The change from the bracket containing my birth cohort to the bracket containing my brother's birth cohort is jaw-dropping. Not sure if the sudden shift between 1995-born and 2000-born girls or the sudden shift between 1998-born and 2003-born boys is more surprising.

100% social media.

Social media existed back in about 2010ish when those 1995-2000 kids would've been Seniors in HS, but it was really around 2015 you started to have this more accessible, instantaneous, infinite scroll thing going on that just constantly feeds people BS. I also think post-COVID, many teens never returned to the full in-person lifestyle of going outside and seeing friends, and so just spend even more time on social media. I also think this explains the worrisome uptick in depression amongst teens.

I am very confident in saying this contributes to influencing many young people's political beliefs. At the ages of 13-15, a kid likely doesn't have much of a pre-existing belief structure, and all these Instagram reels and tik-toks saying the vaccines are dangerous, LGBTQ is a cult, and the left wants to groom them might be their first introduction to politics, and therefore become their political truths. Once you've ingrained those beliefs into a teenager through several years of addiction, it's hard for someone to rationally break out of them.

I feel fortunate in some sense I was unique and developed much of my basic political understanding *before* getting on social media, but my Instagram definitely tries to feed me a lot of crazy mostly right-wing culture war stuff.

One thing I think makes this worse is teens are naturally rebellious, and reels play on this. There are a lot of reals where some educated figure of authority trying to disprove a conspiracy theory actually further re-enforces it in the eyes of many teens.

I am telling ya'll, I live in liberal NYC, and know so many people who were previously a-political but now buy into some sort of right-wing culture war thing solely because of social media. The one I'm the most worried about is the anti-LGBTQ stuff; go on Instagram and look at the comments on some of these reals, it's a bunch of naive teens saying really terrible things about gay and trans people. When Uganda recently passed that anti-LGBTQ bill, there were a lot of reels about it, and I remember going through the comments of one and seeing things like "W Uganda", "Homosexuals must be eliminated", "Watch the gays cope", laughing emojis, ect, from people my own age (18) and younger. At my school there definitely has been an increase in othering and looking down on some LGBTQ folks, particularly trans folks. The only good thing is there does seem to be widespread acceptance of gay and lesbian folks who still mostly conform to gender norms; the hate really seems to be against those who challenge gender norms rather than sexuality.

Idk, maybe I sound like the crazy one here, but I promise I'm trying to be genuine from my experience and observations.

The "queer" community so to speak.

[Yoda]

In the most general terms, everything I've read about why young voters are voting so overwhelmingly against the GOP these days always quotes these young voters as saying that the modern GOP is very out of step with their social views on black people, gay people, trans people and abortion, and economically with respect to student loans and workers' rights/pay, etc. Unless the GOP makes a huge move to the center on the issues these young voters care about, I do not see this hard right swing happening.

[WalterWhite]

In the most general terms, everything I've read about why young voters are voting so overwhelmingly against the GOP these days always quotes these young voters as saying that the modern GOP is very out of step with their social views on black people, gay people, trans people and abortion, and economically with respect to student loans and workers' rights/pay, etc. Unless the GOP makes a huge move to the center on the issues these young voters care about, I do not see this hard right swing happening.

Basically, the GOP needs to become a carbon copy of the Democratic Party to have any appeal to young voters.

[Yoda]

In the most general terms, everything I've read about why young voters are voting so overwhelmingly against the GOP these days always quotes these young voters as saying that the modern GOP is very out of step with their social views on black people, gay people, trans people and abortion, and economically with respect to student loans and workers' rights/pay, etc. Unless the GOP makes a huge move to the center on the issues these young voters care about, I do not see this hard right swing happening.

Basically, the GOP needs to become a carbon copy of the Democratic Party to have any appeal to young voters.

A carbon copy? Absolutely not. But it is worth noting that among a ton of young voters, the Democratic Party is not sufficiently leftist enough for them (on the environment/climate change, income inequality), thus why a lot of them turn to hucksters like Jill Stein and whatever former republican is calling themselves a "Libertarian" these days and hyping up how much they want to legalize weed. So, yeh, if republicans want to seriously contest the  current generation of youngest voters, they're gonna have to seriously move to the center of the country on a lot of issues like lgbt rights and gun control. These young voters in question are very progressive, they're not going to vote for a far right, violent, fascist party that spends half of it's time in Congress babbling nonsense about drag queens while they see their class mates getting mowed down with AR -15's. Move to the center or die.

[ProgressiveModerate]

In the most general terms, everything I've read about why young voters are voting so overwhelmingly against the GOP these days always quotes these young voters as saying that the modern GOP is very out of step with their social views on black people, gay people, trans people and abortion, and economically with respect to student loans and workers' rights/pay, etc. Unless the GOP makes a huge move to the center on the issues these young voters care about, I do not see this hard right swing happening.

That's the thing though. It seems like there's a growing movement of the pendulum swinging back a bit and many people my age becoming skeptical of LGBTQ, feminism, abortion, ect. To me, it felt like 2019 was peak acceptance where I literally couldn't find a single person my age who actively opposed the LGBTQ community but now it's a more notably subset (though still certainly a minority).

There is data to back up the idea that the past 2-3 years or so, Amreicans as a whole have started to slightly revert on social issues that for the past 20+ years had been rapidly gaining support. I think a lot of that is from younger folks.

I still agree overall though the GOP likely needs to drop things like gay marriage, and make their conversations around transgender issues more serious (i think a reasonable debate can be had over how transitioning should work for children). On abortion, just advocate for the idea of abortion being rare and discouraged but sometimes necessary for medical reasons. Argue that by and large America has already achieved racial and gender equality, but don't go overboard saying white people are oppressed in a country that's increasingly non-white but where white people still tend to hold the most wealth and stuff.

[ProgressiveModerate]

These stats are pretty crazy, and suggest their may be more of an economic lens to  young voters possible rightwards shift than I originally suggested