In 2020, Owen Girard was all in for Bernie Sanders. The high-school junior couldn’t vote just yet, but he liked the pro-worker, anti-establishment policies championed by the progressive Vermont senator during the presidential campaign.
“I was fully embracing the ‘democratic socialist’ title of my beliefs,” he said.
Four years later, Girard, now a junior at Florida State University, found himself in a starkly different place — voting for Donald J. Trump and leading his campus’s chapter of Turning Point USA, a conservative student group.
President-elect Trump’s victory exposed a crack in a critical part of the Democratic Party’s base: young voters. Early data suggests that Vice President Kamala Harris won 18- to 29-year-olds by four points, which pales in comparison to President Biden’s 25-point margin in 2020.
One of the largest shifts occurred among young, college-educated men. In 2020, 62 percent of that group voted for President Biden. In 2024, 52 percent supported Trump — a swing of 19 percentage points. Those figures come from CIRCLE, a nonpartisan research organization housed at Tufts University, and are based on data from AP VoteCast, a national voter survey conducted by the Associated Press.
Young men who did not go to college were still far more likely to vote for Trump than those who did. But the change in the voting patterns of college-educated young men suggests shifting attitudes on college campuses, which tend to lean left politically, experts on youth voters told The Chronicle.
The rightward turn comes at a moment when higher ed is wrestling with two parallel trends: the declining number of men enrolling in college and the growing skepticism of higher ed, particularly on the right.
What Drove the Shift
Conservative attitudes have been growing among high-school boys for roughly a decade, according to the University of Michigan’s Monitoring the Future survey. What remains unclear is whether young men are becoming more ideologically conservative or if they’re motivated by particular issues.
It’s especially challenging to discern the meaning of a vote for Trump, a politician who has frequently changed his policy positions and isn’t a traditional conservative. AP VoteCast data suggests there wasn’t a big ideological shift among young people in 2024: Just half of Trump voters under 30 said they were somewhat or very conservative, compared to 80 percent of voters over 65.
One theory experts have is that young, college-educated men were motivated in 2024 by the same thing as most other voters: economic anxiety.
Melissa Deckman, a political scientist who studies the impact of gender, religion, and age on political behavior, believes young men voted with their pocketbooks in this election. Weighed down by student debt and high costs of living, many saw little relief under the Biden-Harris administration, she said.
“Clearly, in this election, that vote for Trump, especially for young people, was a referendum on who was currently in power, and Harris was just too close to Biden,” Deckman said.
Thomas Pyle, a University of Wisconsin-Madison senior and president of his College Republicans chapter, voted for Trump. He said he doesn’t like Trump’s divisive rhetoric and believes it’s contributing to political polarization. He opposes Trump’s repeated claims that the 2020 election was stolen.
But his presidential vote came down to who would take the most action on issues like the economy, he said.
“I thought about who would be able to come into the White House and actually solve problems and not have to play on the defense,” Pyle said. “I think it’s very clear from Trump’s economic and foreign-policy record that he is the person able to do that.”
While the economy may have defined this election, Trump’s appeal to college-educated young men extends beyond policy, experts say. Since 2016, Trump has embraced long-running Republican cultural talking points, including that colleges are pushing liberal orthodoxy and silencing conservative voices.
For many young men in college, the idea that higher-education institutions have become synonymous with progressive politics resonates.
Those progressive positions can feel like a pile-on to some men, Deckman said.
“It gets back to messaging by the parties in some ways,” Deckman said. “That essentially, maybe there are some young men who are — the focus on women’s disadvantages, on MeToo, on toxic masculinity, is sending a signal to them that, ‘Hey, what do you mean? We’re the problem?’”
A College-Republican Resurgence
Trump’s ascent to power has sparked a new era for conservative student organizations.
The shift traces back to 2016, said Bernard L. Fraga, an associate professor of political science at Emory University. Trump’s victory, Fraga said, spurred a “reckoning for many college Republicans.” Dormant campus chapters found new life, and right-wing groups like Turning Point USA, founded by conservative activist Charlie Kirk, gained national attention.
“They could either unite the Trump-led faction of the Republican Party that was dominant outside of colleges, or lose the opportunities that being a college Republican provides, including connections to local, county, state, and even the national GOP,” Fraga said.
Conservative students said the revival has been energizing.
“When I first came to college, I felt like I was the only conservative here, and being able to see Trump signs and MAGA hats — it’s really powerful to get that feeling that there is a community of Republicans here and that my vote matters,” Pyle said.
Girard described campuses as being crawling with “closeted conservatives.” At Florida State, Biden won the campus precincts by 26 points in 2020, but Harris’s margin this year narrowed to just 12 points.
Colleges, Girard argued, have drifted from their original mission as centers for critical thinking. He attributes this shift to the dominance of left-leaning faculty members who he says nudge students toward aligning with the modern American left. “What we saw this election cycle was the rejection of that,” he said.
Voters also associated Trump with traditional masculinity, seeing a candidate who embodied brash rhetoric, strength, and resilience. This tapped into many young men’s growing unease about shifting gender norms, Girard said.
For Colin Sharpe, a Boston University freshman and Trump voter, Trump represents more than a politician — he’s a “cultural force,” a figure Sharpe likens to Julius Caesar.
“When they voted for Trump, they weren’t voting for a boring Republican to cut their taxes or something like that,” Sharpe said. “They were voting for a generational, inspiring leader.”
Some young Republicans question whether the campus conservative movement has become too closely tied to Trump.
Ethan K. Bùi, a conservative freshman at Cosumnes River College, a two-year institution in California, admires how the president-elect is “expressing his masculinity proudly and is saying controversial things that young men themselves may be afraid to say.” But he is concerned about the youth conservative movement post Trump.
Popular organizations like Turning Point USA have focused their efforts solely on Trump’s re-election, Bùi said, neglecting conversations about who will lead the Republican Party after Trump’s second term.
“I think that Turning Point USA has a future, but it’s certainly going to be a challenge, given how much they’re forced to focus on one man right now,” he said.
‘An Existential Threat’
The swing of young men toward Trump comes at a moment when they’re also less likely to enroll in college. Trump’s allies have even suggested that fewer people should go to college.
That skepticism is reinforced by Republican lawmakers’ crackdown on campus diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, said Thessalia Merivaki, an associate teaching professor at Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. The campaign against DEI programs and the ways colleges teach about race and gender, Merivaki said, asserts that colleges are imposing particular beliefs about privilege and patriarchy upon students. Those messages reinforce a feeling that some young men already have: that their role in society is uncertain.
“That creates an environment where diversity and gender equality can be demonized and used as a way to threaten privileges, like what it means to be a white male,” Merivaki said. “It is reasonable to theorize about a relationship between” that trend and increased support for Trump among young men.
Young women favored Harris by a 17-point margin this election cycle. Many of them were driven by reproductive rights, according to CIRCLE’s analysis. Nearly 60 percent of undergraduate students are women.
If that divergence persists, it could present a challenge for administrators, Merivaki said, who must manage the culture of campuses as they become more politically divided.
Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, the Newhouse director of CIRCLE, said that if conservative men feel unheard on campuses, it makes sense that they’d turn to social-media influencers — a trend that’s already evident with the rise of podcasters who have amassed a colossal online male following, like Joe Rogan, who endorsed Trump shortly before the election.
As men in college more often find their communities online, Kawashima-Ginsberg said, it could deepen echo chambers — conflicting with the intended purpose of higher ed, which is to help people grapple with different perspectives on complex issues.
The erosion of dialogue and disagreement on campuses, Kawashima-Ginsberg said, would be “an existential threat to higher education.”
