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Six months ago, young Democrats were preparing for a very different conversation. They were breathing a sigh of relief after Joe Biden formally dropped out of the 2024 presidential contest. Gen Z, some said, was ready to feel the “#Kamalove” and break with the past that Biden represented. The flurry of “Brat summer” and coconut-tree memes that filled social media platforms was surely proof that there was a latent enthusiasm for Harris among the youth. It was Biden’s sputtering candidacy that had depressed that energy over the last year.

The organizations dedicated to engaging, mobilizing, and speaking to and for various youth constituencies thought this reset and the ensuing summer of good feelings would make their civic and campaign efforts much less difficult. The work could now focus more on turning out the youth for a fresh candidate instead of persuading those who had been disillusioned by Biden to drag their way to the voting booth. This election was now more a matter of simply getting youth to show up.

At least, that’s what was expected.

Here’s what happened instead. Donald Trump’s favorability among young Americans continued to improve, trending up or remaining steady as it had been for most of the last year. He continued his strategy of campaigning through influencers and on unconventional media platforms and podcasts, betting his celebrity appeal and anti-establishment message would reach voters, especially young men, who didn’t usually care for politics.

On the Democratic side, Harris’s honeymoon period ended. The campaign would turn more negative, and polls showed Harris reaching a ceiling in youth support.

The end result was a rightward lurch by the youngest cohort of voters. Voters under 30 still preferred Harris to Trump, but by just 4 points, according to an analysis of AP VoteCast data by Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). That was a tinier margin than the 25-point advantage Biden had in 2020 and that Hillary Clinton had in 2016 (about 30 points). (VoteCast differs from traditional exit polls, which can be notoriously unreliable, but is still preliminary.)

So what’s driving Democrats and young voters apart?

Did the Democrats and their allies in the youth organizing and activist group space misdiagnose what the youth actually felt and wanted? Were young progressives right that Harris, and Biden before her, should have tacked further to the left to excite and turn out their base? Or do those young-voter organizing groups share the blame for pushing the candidates to address progressive ideological priorities instead of kitchen-table issues?

For answers, I talked to youth leaders, organizers, and those who followed their work. I also reflected on my own coverage of the youth vote over the last two years. Combined with election results and post-election polling, these data points paint a nuanced picture of what’s underlying Gen Z’s rightward lurch: a deep disconnect between the Democratic Party and its youth allies on one hand and young adults on the other.

See, there’s a fundamental divide between the young people who care about Democratic politics and the kind of people they were trying to persuade.

Many of their turnout targets simply didn’t trust institutions or the status quo like organizers and young Democrats did. They existed in different information bubbles and media ecosystems, missing persuasion efforts including memes, celebrity endorsements, or digital organizing. Or they just didn’t care enough about the complex issues youth activists were talking about, when their concerns were much more basic, like how much a paycheck could afford, whether Democrats could be trusted to help them get ahead financially, and whether Harris or Trump would be a bigger disruptor of the status quo.

These are problems without easy solutions, but if Democrats can’t fix this divide, they risk losing these voters in election years to come.

This problem goes beyond blaming progressives for moving too far left

Since Harris’s loss, a loud debate emerged among a class of political commentators and activists over how much blame largely urban progressive and activist groups should bear. Some liberals and moderates accused these groups of having pushed Democratic elected officials, candidates, strategists, and their staffers and campaigns too far to the left, thus missing a rightward shift by the electorate.

The organizations I’m describing can’t be lumped in cleanly with these “Groups” even if........

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