In November 2024, when President Donald Trump won 38.3% of the vote in California, this was 4 percentage points more than he won in 2020. It was a small shift to the right, owing to many factors among subgroups of voters. But what part did young voters play in it?
According to national exit polls, Trump made gains within the youth vote — generally categorized as voters ages 18-29 — in 2024 compared to 2020. Experts say reasons for this shift, both nationally and here in California, could range from fewer young people turning out to vote to changes in ideology.
Former Vice President Kamala Harris won California in her 2024 presidential bid by over 3 million votes. However, Trump increased his share of votes in 45 out of 58 California counties from 2020 to 2024, according to a CalMatters analysis. Imperial, Merced and Sutter counties saw some of the biggest gains.
Nationally, 7% of youth voters who voted for Former President Joe Biden in 2020 switched to vote for Trump in 2024, according to independent research conducted by The Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan research organization based at Tufts University in Boston.
Despite this national shift, young Californians are more likely to identify as Democrats and liberals. Eric McGhee, a senior fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, explained that rightward shifts in the state do not necessarily indicate the same for the youth vote.
“The people who are turning out to vote might be different than the broader population of people from that demographic, or even than the people who typically vote in that demographic,” McGhee said.
Some may choose not to vote altogether. The Tufts University research organization recently estimated that the national 2024 youth voter turnout was 42%, compared to 52% to 55% in 2020.
Adam Tallabas, a 26-year-old graduate of Cal State Long Beach and current chair of Orange County Young Democrats, met young residents in his community who planned on not voting in this election. When speaking to Orange County residents under the age of 35, Tallabas found that financial strains like paying rent and student loan debt were at the heart of their apathy toward voting.
“People, they have so much going on in their household that it’s hard for them to focus on what’s going on outside of that household,” he said.
In 2020, 53.5% of Orange County voters chose Biden compared to 44.4% who chose Trump. That margin shrunk in 2024 when 49.7% of voters chose Harris compared to 47.1% who chose Trump. The county also saw 129,173 fewer votes overall in 2024 than in 2020, approximately an 8.35% decrease in turnout rate.
“A big part of why young people don’t vote is because they’re less rooted to their communities. They’re not homeowners by and large … They haven’t reached that stage of life where they feel quite as, kind of, connected to things,” said McGhee, who has conducted research at the nonpartisan think tank for over 17 years.
Young Californians of all political parties are much less likely to be homeowners than those above the age of 34, according to a Public Policy Institute of California statewide survey.
Based on a CNN national exit poll, Harris won over young voters, with 54% of voters ages 18-29 voting for her to Trump’s 43%; however, the margin between the two candidates is much smaller than it was between Biden and Trump. CNN’s 2020 exit poll showed Biden winning 60% of the youth vote while Trump won only 36%, much less than he got this past election.
While national exit polls reveal some information about the youth vote in 2024, there were no exit polls for California and neither the state nor the federal government release age-specific voting data. This, McGhee explained, makes it difficult to analyze young voters in California but opinion polling and interviews help shed some light on attitudes within this demographic.
Personal finance issues, such as housing and inflation, were top issues for young people who did vote, The Brookings Institution found, with some seeing Trump as the solution.
Samantha Dalby, a 29-year-old financial advisor from Newport Beach, noted her belief that “Trump ran the country similar to a business.” This is one of the reasons she and a lot of her peers in Newport’s financial space are excited about the incoming Trump administration, specifically the conservative promise of “corporate tax cuts, which are important for a lot of business owners.”
While exit polls use age groups as one way to show voting patterns, Alice Siu, associate director for the Stanford Deliberative Democracy Lab, emphasizes being careful about categorizing the “youth vote” as one demographic. She noted that young voters hold diverse characteristics such as geography, identity and finances, not to mention the wide range of experiences within the age range of 18-29.
Party votes varied among various racial and ethnic groups of young voters as well, according to the Tufts University research organization’s analysis of an AP VoteCast Survey. Trump appeared to win among young, white voters while Harris won among Black, Latino and Asian young voters. Yet the CNN exit poll still showed 46% of Latino respondents voted for Trump in 2024, a 14 percentage point increase from 2020.
Another way in which the youth vote differed was by gender, with Trump winning big with young men, receiving 56% of their vote nationally while 58% of young women voted for Harris.
Sunjay Muralitharan, national vice president of College Democrats of America and a 20-year-old student at UC San Diego, said the inability to reach young men was one of the Democratic Party’s failures this past election.
“When I spoke to more people and took my own crack at kind of figuring out what went wrong, I noticed that a lot of young men felt like they were only treated as allies of women, rather than being represented themselves,” Muralitharan said. “I think this was really disheartening because a lot of the policies that we pushed for also benefit young men.”
Ethan Petty, a 26-year-old man living in Bakersfield — located in a county that also saw a rightward shift — expressed his support for Harris. He noted that while he did not feel strong excitement for Harris as a candidate, he found her to be favorable to Trump, noting worries about abortion and LGBTQ+ rights under a Trump administration.
“I’m pretty scared about what, you know, Donald Trump and the fully Republican-controlled government and Supreme Court will do to maybe change the laws of the land in the future,” he said. “I’m just kind of fearful of the future at the moment.”
Trump’s pick for vice president, J.D. Vance, excited some young Republican voters, according to Cynthia Kaui, 30, vice chair of the California Young Republican Federation. At just 40 years old, Vance will be the country’s third-youngest vice president.
“The fact that there is some level of representation, you know, in the highest level of government that one can achieve in politics, that was something that, you know, our membership was very excited about,” Kaui said.
Some young voters, like Antonia Lopez, were dissatisfied with all their choices at the polls. The 22-year-old resident of San Bernardino expressed her disapproval of the Democratic party’s campaign and her view that it was “encouraging right-wing sentiment” through moves such as highlighting an endorsement from prominent Republican Liz Cheney.
Lopez listed the Israel-Hamas conflict, bodily autonomy, freedom of the press, disseminating misinformation, and health care as some of her top issues. Though Lopez cast a vote for Harris, she didn’t feel represented by any candidate in the race and is “pessimistic” about the presidency and policies to come.
“Especially as I’m getting older and these issues become more daunting, I feel like the issues that I care about are being abandoned,” she said.
By June Hsu. This article was originally published by CalMatters.
