About three-quarters of voters under 30 backed local Democratic House candidates

Della Volpe says young voters are up for grabs

The AP Voter Poll surveyed more than 100,000 midterm voters and found that about three-quarters of voters under 30 supported their local Democratic candidate for the U.S. House; about one-quarter voted Republican. Many young men sat out or backed Democrats in 2026, so the result did not represent a uniform ballot shift among all young voters.

John Della Volpe, a pollster who regularly surveys U.S. youth for the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, said the whiplash over the past two elections suggests that young voters are not a generation of Democrats or Republicans. “They’re up for grabs,” he said. “Especially given the state of the economy and their concerns about the future.”

Andy Soma, 24, does not identify with either political party and had skipped elections since he became old enough to vote. Disappointed with the economy and President Donald Trump’s war with Iran, he cast his midterm ballot for Roy Cooper, the North Carolina Democrat now headed to the Senate. Soma, who is pursuing a Ph.D. in mathematics at North Carolina State University, said, “I would describe it as the first time that I’ve truly felt the need to vote.” He said he wanted to “kind of take a stand, if you will.” His tipping point was Trump’s broken pledge to keep the United States out of Middle East conflicts, a sentiment student after student echoed in interviews on the university’s Raleigh campus the day after the election.

The AP’s comparisons placed the House result in context. Democratic support among young voters outpaced 2018, when Trump’s Republican Party suffered midterm losses during his first term. Voters under 30 moved left by double digits in nearly all the major Senate races compared with two years earlier, when young voters were roughly split between Trump and Democrat Kamala Harris, according to AP VoteCast, a survey of more than 120,000 voters that year.

In 2024, Trump courted young men who felt disillusioned by economic stagnation, interventionist foreign policy and the government’s focus on diversity, equity and inclusion. He attended football games and UFC matches and appeared on podcasts with comedians who rebuffed “cancel culture.” More than half of male voters under 30 supported him in 2024, AP VoteCast found.

Other young voters who broke for Democrats said their choices were motivated by personal experiences, including working multiple jobs to get by and watching artificial intelligence data center projects advance into their communities. Corey Herzog, 28, an independent-turned-Democrat in the traditionally conservative town of Celina, Ohio, works at Walmart during the day and bartends at night while building out a small side business selling house plants. “I’m trying to save money and buy a house and all that, but it’s difficult right now,” Herzog said.

Kidus Girma, campaigns director for the left-leaning Sunrise Movement, said that while knocking on doors in Michigan he met young men who may not typically turn out in a midterm election but did this time because they were disappointed by Trump. One complained about struggling to find a job even though Trump was insisting the economy was going great, Girma said. “It’s like this deep disillusionment with the statements the president makes versus the material impacts people are facing in their everyday lives,” he said.

The AP Voter Poll found that voters under 30 were more likely than older age groups to say the cost of living was crucial for their vote for Congress and that the United States was wrong to take military action against Iran. About half of young voters said they were angry about the way things were going in the United States, compared with only about one-third of voters 65 and older.

Only about one-quarter of voters under 30 said Trump was a strong leader or had the mental capacity to serve effectively as president, a sharp contrast with 2024, when about half said he was a strong leader and mentally fit. The AP Voter Poll found the decline was larger than in any other age group. About 6 in 10 voters under 30 said one reason for their House vote was to express opposition to Trump. Charlie Sabgir, director of the Washington-based Young Men Research Project, said, “This cultural coalition and cultural cache that Trump had behind him going into 2024 — they’ve clearly soured on him.”

Once in office, Trump started the war with Iran and pursued tariff policies that continued to drive up inflation, according to AP reporting. Separately, he resisted releasing documents about convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and launched an immigration enforcement campaign that faced widespread criticism. Sabgir also said, “This was the perfect cocktail for disaster.”

A national consortium of college Republican groups, the College Republican Patriot Coalition, issued a statement saying young Republicans “were not given what they were promised.” The group said, “In the wake of last night’s election results, the College Republican Patriot Coalition unequivocally lays the blame for the greatest Republican defeat by Democrats since 1974 at the feet of the Trump administration and the Republican Party.”

Sarah Stull, an 18-year-old student at the University of Texas at Austin, thought it was funny that so many of her classmates spent Halloween dressed as “millennial optimism,” wearing skinny jeans and infinity scarves with grins on their faces to satirize the elder generation for being unabashedly hopeful. Stull got the joke. Like others her age, she described herself as “very sarcastic, very jaded — and do sometimes expect the worst.” But on election night, sitting in a dorm room with friends watching results stream in, that all went out the window. “We were freaking out, all of us were crying,” Stull said. “I just felt this sense of community that I had never felt before.” The young Democrat voted for James Talarico for Senate and Gina Hinojosa for governor. She posted a video on TikTok of herself and friends jumping for joy outside the Texas Capitol, captioning it “millennial optimism cause texas went blue.”

Katherine Haenschen, a political science and communication professor at Northeastern University, said young adults like Stull had only ever known “the Trumpification of politics.” Stull was 7 when Trump rode down the escalator in New York’s Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his first presidential campaign. Haenschen said that era now seemed to be coming to a close, bringing hope for the first time to left-leaning young people.

Dakota Hall characterized the moment as fragile. Hall, executive director of the progressive youth political organization Alliance for Youth Action, said he thought young voters could shift to the right again if Democrats leading Congress did not do enough to lower the cost of living, regulate artificial intelligence and address government corruption. “Young people have a very short leash,” Hall said. “If you do not deliver, ’28 will be a rough road ahead.”

Rankin reported from Raleigh, N.C.