Voters under 30 back Democrats by nearly 50 points in midterms

Talarico carries under-30 Texas voters by 60 points

Democrats carried voters under 30 by nearly 50 points on Tuesday, a margin Moore described as the party’s largest with young people in decades. Exit polling put the swing at roughly 37 points to the left compared with the 2024 election, when young voters shifted toward Republicans.

In recent elections, Moore said, Democrats have performed well when they win young voters by a margin of at least 20 points. The margin this week was more than double that threshold.

Young voters turn out at lower rates than older voters, Moore said, but the size of the Democratic advantage made a difference at the edges of close races.

In Texas, Democrat James Talarico won the Senate race by 12 percentage points statewide. Among voters under 30, he won by 60 points, Moore said.

Other winning Democrats drew large shares of the youth vote as well. Moore cited Georgia, where Jon Ossoff won 85% of young voters, and Kansas, where Adam Hamilton won 82%.

Asked what drove the reversal, Moore said the shift was likely a mix of factors, adding that many young people are unhappy with Trump and his agenda. Economic issues were the top concern among young voters, who expressed deep frustration with the state of things, she said.

Exit polling found that more than 8 in 10 young voters saw Trump’s tariff policies as hurting the economy, according to Moore. A similar share said the United States made the wrong decision in going to war with Iran.

Young men accounted for part of the movement. Trump narrowly won that group two years ago; on Tuesday, young men shifted left by double digits, Moore said.

Not all of the Democratic gain came from new voters. Moore said there is not much data yet on nonvoters, and some young people may simply have stayed home. But at least some voters flipped: CIRCLE estimates that about 15% of young people who backed Trump in 2024 voted for a Democratic House candidate this cycle.

Leela Strong, who heads CIRCLE, distilled the finding on a call with reporters Thursday. “Young people are not transactional voters,” Strong said. “They are acting on concerns about the economy and a democracy that isn’t working for their generation, and rewarding candidates who hear and see them.”

Moore cautioned against treating the result as a permanent return to the Democratic fold. A plurality of the generation identifies as independents, she said, and both parties face high stakes in the group.

Democrats are now under pressure to deliver the economic change they campaigned on, Moore said, something she described as key if the party wants Gen Z to stay in its camp. Republicans, she added, will have to do a lot of work to chip away at the expanded Democratic edge.

The group’s weight is growing. By 2028, Gen Z and millennial voters will make up more than half of the electorate, Moore said, which is why she said investments in young voters matter.