Image by DJ Paine.

Can Donald Trump retain the allegiance of the key voter groups that swung his way in 2024? Perhaps none of those voter shifts were as dramatic and consequential as the defection of youth – long a mainstay of the Democratic base. Gen Z voters, fueled by despair over student debt and mounting joblessness, fled en masse to the GOP last November, helping to drive Trump over the top. The defection was especially strong among Gen Z men, who felt alienated by the female-centric messaging of the Harris campaign. The final numbers came as a shocker to Democrats: Harris won youth by paltry 10 points, compared to Biden’s 20, and Trump crushed her among young men by a whopping 14 points. With Gen Z and millennials now occupying such a dominant place in the electorate, it’s an ominous storm cloud on the horizon.

But that was eight months ago. While still publicly jubilant, many of Trump’s allies, including the very strategists that helped design and carry out his youth mobilization campaigns, are beginning to get worried. None of these strategists is more worried than Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, which started as a conservative campus youth group back in 2012 but soon morphed into a major Trump presidential campaign arm. Kirk was one of the leading proponents of the “low-propensity” voter strategy aimed at convincing deeply disaffected and apathetic conservatives to register and show up to vote for Trump – and despite widespread skepticism among traditional Republicans, the strategy paid off, as millions of voters who hadn’t cast ballots consistently since 2016, did so in 2024.

While youth voting has actually improved since 2016, Kirk saw an opening to convert this youth voter surge to Trump, exploiting a latent antipathy towards feminism and abortion to drive men especially to swing conservative in record numbers. And so they did.

But Kirk is now busy sounding the alarm that youth may not stay in the GOP........

© CounterPunch