Of the many disheartening results for Democrats in the 2024 election, the single most demoralizing may have been what happened with the youth vote. Although Kamala Harris still won the country’s youngest voters by a larger margin than any other age group, her support was the lowest of any Democratic presidential candidate in two decades. While every Democrat since the end of the Bush administration—Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden included—had carried the country’s youngest voters by at least 20 points, Harris only barely managed a double-digit margin among the demographic, even though her opponent was the oldest major party nominee in American history.

By itself, this massive shift toward the GOP—well over 20 points, according to exit polls—was possibly enough to have cost Harris the election, especially when coupled with the overall fall in youth turnout. Even if it wasn’t that decisive, the shift undoubtedly cost Democrats several seats in Congress that could have been vital to stopping Trump’s agenda. But its impact was also, somehow, even more consequential than this, because it signaled the potential destruction of one of the Democratic Party’s most cherished narratives.

Throughout the trials and tribulations of the Trump era, consistent Democratic strength among young voters was looked upon as a major source of long-term optimism among liberal politicians and voters alike. While Trump’s strength among the shrinking pool of old and white voters might have been enough for him to narrowly win in 2016, it was said, his inability to win the voters of the future meant that he and his movement were living on borrowed time. But by making massive gains with these exact voters in 2024, Trump completely reversed this dynamic, seemingly claiming the future liberals expected to be theirs.

This has made a lot of people very, very anxious, and it has caused youth voters to receive an outsize focus in postelection discourse relative to other demographics. For the past four months, practically all discussions about the path forward for Democrats have involved, either directly or indirectly, some discussion about how they can win back their traditional strength among youth voters—particularly young men. This has also invariably come to involve some discussion about how the party could and should use social media, which is now seen as practically synonymous with the project as a whole.

As a card-carrying member of Gen Z—born after 9/11, came of age with Trump in office, went to college during Covid, etc.—being on the receiving end of this kind of crush of attention is far from a new experience. Our generation has been subject to faddish political analysis for as long as I can remember, and hardly any of the assumptions made about us have survived the test of time. And although it may be tempting to say that this is simply a result of commentators not listening to enough “Gen Z voices,” that’s not really true. There are many people my age who are having their voices heard; it’s just that practically all of them have turned being professional Gen Zers into their entire careers.

These people care more about building their own brands than anything else, and they’ve been quite successful in charming the older people who staff media outlets and run political parties. Not much of what they suggested worked all that well with Gen Z in 2024, and since then, they’ve all defaulted to clichés whenever they are asked to provide insights about their generation. Naturally, this has continued to work out quite well for them—in fact, one of them was just elected vice chair of the DNC. But I can also imagine their shtick has run quite thin for many others engaged in politics, whether you’re someone of my generation who does not feel represented by them or a discerning observer of any age who finds their commentary to be superficial. In that spirit, I hope to provide some insights about the recent trends among my generation as one of the few Gen Z political observers who doesn’t make purporting to do so their entire job.

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But I’m going to try something different from the kind of piece you’ve probably become used to. I won’t spend this article talking about social media or Joe Rogan. Instead, I will look at something that’s all-too-often ignored: the actual history of the youth vote.

First, it is true that, from 2008 to 2020, Democrats won the youth vote by overwhelming margins. Whether their candidate was a young, inspiring Barack Obama or a less-young, less-inspiring Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, their strength among the demographic was never in question. Over time, this made many observers assume that young voters were simply a natural part of the post-1960s Democratic coalition, as reliable and consistent in their liberalism as other party stalwarts like Black voters. In this sense, the harsh rightward shift among young voters in 2024 has been treated as an unprecedented development heralding an unprecedented problem for liberals.

It’s quite easy to take this framing for granted, especially in light of other rightward shifts across the 2024 electoral map that are legitimately unprecedented. Whether you look at the Rio Grande Valley in Texas or heavily Latino cities in New Jersey, there is no shortage of places across the US that actually did back Democrats for generations before suddenly shifting hard toward Trump in 2024.

But the youth vote doesn’t fit so neatly within that narrative. Even today, far too much of our understanding of young voters is influenced by stereotypes of the New Left, anti–Vietnam War movements of the 1960s, when youth voters indeed were more left-leaning than their older counterparts. In the 1968 election, for instance, voters under 30 years old backed Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate, by a nine-point margin even as he lost nationally. This gap only became more pronounced in 1972, when George McGovern lost voters under 30 by only four points even as he lost to Nixon overall by 23.

Skip directly from McGovern to Obama’s first victory without stopping at the 36 years in between and you have a consistent story—one in which Democrats, in their post–Civil Rights Act, liberal iteration of themselves, do significantly better among the youth than voters at large. Look through those 36 intervening years, however, and you see a far more complex history—one where Democratic strength among youth voters waxed and waned so often that it makes the shifts seen in 2024 look significantly less shocking.

Let’s start in 1976. In that year, the relative strength Democrats had with the youth vote in the previous two Vietnam-era elections completely disappeared. According to exit polling, Jimmy Carter outright lost the youngest voters in the country even as he won the popular vote (although he won voters under 30 as a whole). And while Carter eked out a win among young voters against an ultra-hawkish Ronald Reagan in 1980, Reagan went on to win 18-to-24-year-olds by a whopping 22 points in 1984. George H.W. Bush, Reagan’s successor, would also do roughly as well among young voters—winning them outright in 1988—as he did nationally in both of his elections, even when he ran against a young Bill Clinton in 1992. And while Clinton would outperform with young voters when he ran against a reverse-ageist Bob Dole in 1996, the youth vote was once again depolarized in 2000. Not only did Al Gore tie with Bush among college-age voters, but his best age demographic in the country was the Greatest Generation.

This was all far more than just one or two elections where Republicans had particularly good youth outreach. Across the board, post-Vietnam, pre–George W. Bush American politics had practically no age polarization at all, at least compared to post-Bush elections. This is the most important thing to understand about the shifts we saw in 2024. While it may be enticing to talk about Joe Rogan and Covid lockdowns as having turned the entire political world upside-down, volatility in the youth vote is nothing new in the grand scheme of things. Democrats have won, lost, and won it back several times, and they could very well do it again.

So let’s look at the most recent time Democrats surged among the youth. What caused 2000s-era Democrats to lock down the young voters in the first place?

It’s a relatively simple answer: George W. Bush. Although Bush, as stated before, performed relatively strongly with young voters in 2000, voters under 30 ended up being the sole age group he outright lost in his narrow reelection victory four years later.

Notably, this was not because John Kerry pulled off some kind of ingenious, proto–Joe Rogan new media strategy to win them over. In fact, young voters actually found Bush more personally likable than Kerry. What turned them off from Bush was his actual record, especially on the economy. Although there was no shortage of discontent about the Iraq War and the prospect of a potential draft, the voting youth in 2004 cared first and foremost about their wallets, and they broadly saw their job opportunities as mediocre-to-bad. This led them to be anti-Bush in a way that other generations simply were not, and it began a long trend of liberal strength among those under 30.

It would only be in 2008, however, when the bottom truly fell out for Republicans and the youth vote. Obama won young voters in a complete landslide, and he did so for reasons beyond his often-cited youth and innovative campaign tactics. Although Obama was more effective at reaching young voters than McCain, he also benefited from the fact that the cohort had become significantly more left-leaning than practically every other age group over the course of the Bush administration. After eight years of failure and amid the biggest recession in 80 years, they had become extraordinarily supportive of government intervention in the economy, nearly-unanimously opposed the Iraq War, and were far more likely to describe themselves as liberal than any of the generations before them. In addition to all of this, they were also the most diverse age cohort by far, the fact of which made them naturally favorable to an Obama campaign that did extraordinarily well among Black and Latino voters.

All of these factors would stick over the next four years of Obama’s presidency, allowing him to once again decisively carry the youth vote in 2012 (albeit by a reduced margin). As in 2008, the new class of youth voters in 2012 held attitudes that were significantly to the left of the rest of the population.

Looking back now, it’s not hard to see why this was the case. To these new voters, conservatism was defined by the failed presidency that they grew up under, while liberalism was represented by the young, hip, charismatic leader who fought against it. Economically, the challenges they faced in a high-unemployment post-recession job market naturally oriented them toward liberal policies. Culturally, their values of acceptance put them at odds with a socially conservative GOP. Their experience watching repeated foreign policy catastrophes made them more skeptical of hawkish Republican positions than their elders.

Had Democratic elites chosen to meet this class of voters where they were, they might have had a much easier time dominating the youth vote for years to come. But Democrats didn’t meet these voters where they were. Instead, they went backward from Obama by rallying behind the more centrist, establishment-oriented Hillary Clinton. This move sent young Democrats—who, at this point, represented young voters more broadly—rallying strongly in the primary behind the self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders, whose focus on economic issues matched their concerns far more closely than Clinton’s potpourri of hawkishness and cynically deployed identity politics. Although Clinton and her campaign worked relentlessly to outflank Sanders on cultural issues, her efforts hardly made a dent in his support among his pocketbook-focused youth base.

Had Clinton gone on to significantly regress with young voters in the general election afterwards, there would have been an obvious explanation as to why. While Obama and Sanders represented a new politics of outsider energy and economic liberalism, it could have been said, Clinton didn’t, and young voters rejected her because of it. But, in the end, she didn’t. Even after her failure to win over young voters in the primary, and even as she shed support from countless traditionally Democratic areas, Clinton still handily defeated Trump among young voters in 2016.

Four years later, an even-older Biden would do the same, also handily winning young voters in the general election after also losing them by dramatic margins to Sanders in his primary. Clearly, a great number of youth voters were able to hold their noses and vote for an establishment Democrat they did not necessarily like when Trump was the alternative.

Why did things change so dramatically in 2024? The reason is that the failures of the Biden era changed everything. To understand how, put yourself in the perspective of a voter my age; e.g., someone born in the early 2000s. When we grew up, the Democratic Party was defined by a charismatic leader who oversaw a growing economy and ended his term with strong approval ratings. When we came of age, we came to know a Republican Party defined by an unpopular, flailing Trump whose weak leadership defined the most traumatic period of our lives (the pandemic). We had never known a popular Republican president or an unpopular Democratic one.

But when Biden’s administration burst into flames, it marked the first time since Jimmy Carter that voters our age came to know Democrats through an administration under which their standard of living declined. And when retrospective evaluations of Trump’s first term turned positive, it marked the first time since Reagan that young voters could look back on a Republican administration they knew that wasn’t abjectly hated. The dynamic that had dominated the way that people our age had understood politics for 20 years had been completely reversed for us. Operating with the limited frame of reference available to us, we then swung strongly toward the same exact candidate that people our age rejected decisively in the prior two elections.

What can be done about this? Did Biden’s failures poison the well for his party among Gen Z in the same way that Bush’s failures did for Republicans with millennials?

History indicates that there’s a chance that it could, as millennials were far from the only generation to have their lifetime views shaped by the politicians they grew up under. As The New York Times reported in a fascinating 2014 study about the influence that someone’s birth year has on their politics, there is almost a century of data showing that political sentiment is profoundly influenced by first impressions. According to the study, most voters who were born in 1941 and came of age under the popular President Eisenhower gained lifelong pro-Republican views. Those born in 1951, meanwhile, were substantially more liberal throughout their lifetimes as a result of the combined unpopularity of the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon. These trends only continued in future decades, from the Gen Xers who grew up under Reagan having Republican leanings all the way to our aforementioned Bush-scarred left-leaning millennials. In the worst case scenario for liberals, Biden could have the same kind of long-term impact on Gen Z that past unpopular presidents have had on the young voters who saw them fail, turning our age cohort into (relative) conservatives for decades to come.

Still, and quite mercifully for Democrats, there’s a chance that Biden could prove to be less influential than his predecessors on the views of young voters. One thing in his favor: as unpopular as he was, he never reached the depths of Richard Nixon or George W. Bush, so he might not change things as dramatically long-term. Some evidence of this can be seen in Tufts University’s post-election youth poll, which shows that the actual ideological leanings of youth voters in 2024 did not shift as dramatically as their vote choices did. While the proportion of young voters declaring themselves as outright conservatives did increase, the bulk of Trump’s gains came from self-described “moderate” young voters who were strongly focused on the economy. On top of this, it’s also likely that Democrats lost a significant portion of their youth vote to the couch. Relative to 2020, the youth share of the overall electorate decreased quite meaningfully, suggesting that young voters who weren’t necessarily conservative but were angry with Biden’s record on Gaza or the economy simply chose to sit out the race.  Put together, the data and historical record we have suggests that while young voters did not like Biden and that their dislike did profoundly influence their vote choices, this rejection of him did not spark the kind of full-on revolution in ideological views that we have seen in the past.

Still, what about the things beyond Biden? What about our culture? While I, as a Gen Zer, can understand why many are drawn to our unique personal experiences as explanations for our behavior, very few of the explanations that have been given over the past few months hold up to scrutiny.

Take school lockdowns as just one example. I fully understand that they could have been a cause of resentment, because I was there! I had to spend my entire first year of college quarantined. It sucked! But it’s also true that voters my age overwhelmingly backed Democrats when those lockdowns were actually in place and Trump was running as the candidate who would get rid of them. We also backed Democrats overwhelmingly in the post-Covid 2022 midterms. While our experience with Covid may make us culturally distinct from millennials or older Gen Zers, there’s little compelling evidence that it is the principal reason why we are politically distinct from them.

The same is even true of the supposed disconnect between Democrats and the so-called “new media” that Trump proved so adept at using. While Biden and Harris may not have gone on Joe Rogan, they still put new media outreach at the core of their communications strategy in 2024. Their efforts just never made an impact, in stark contrast to the surprisingly successful digital campaign of the then-popular Biden of 2020, because people fundamentally were not interested in the product being sold anymore. It was the substance, not the medium or the messaging, that was the problem.

This is the most important thing for Democrats to understand going forward. By itself, there’s nothing wrong with any candidate going on a show outside of the mainstream or paying more attention to the specific experiences of my generation. But young voters aren’t children. Our shift away from Democrats is just one new iteration of a historical process that has gone on for decades, not some kind of sui generis problem. Because none of us had any living memory of a failed Democratic administration prior to Biden, we naturally gravitated towards liberals as the most logical choice. Even when they backed candidates we overwhelmingly opposed and prioritized other demographics above ours, the bulk of us still stayed loyal. But when that myth of competence was shattered by Biden’s disastrous four years in office, the party lost more purchase with us than any other demographic in the country. What happened next speaks for itself.

If Democrats truly want to rebuild their Obama-era strength with the voters of tomorrow, they will need to move beyond gimmicky solutions like podcasts with Charlie Kirk and address the problems they are facing head-on. The era of resting on their Obama-era laurels is over. Instead of continuing to defend the failed administration that served as our first impression of their style of governance, they will need to break from it and convince us that they are offering something different. Instead of playing fast and loose with our votes by nominating their preferred establishment insiders year after year, they will need to get comfortable with running and supporting candidates who can speak to our understanding of the political moment. If they don’t do this, someone else will—and they may not like who that ends up being.