Why did young people move towards the left in the US elections this month? | Corey Albert
CJust a few months ago, the political landscape seemed permanently changing Young people are turning right – especially Youth. Democrats have launched a maelstrom of efforts to win them back, but they have often seemed faltering. But this month’s elections told a different story.
Young people in the United States are facing a political identity crisis. It should not be controversial to say that the world that many were promised as children has not come to fruition. Two decades of war and a turbulent economy have combined with a dramatically changed workforce. Youth discontent should come as no real surprise.
An entire ecosystem of hucksters has emerged to take advantage of these young people, promoting a dark vision that presents violence and control as a response to a changing world. At the same time, the Democratic Party failed to envision a political future that included these young people. In Democratic parlance, anyone who took a single step in that direction was hopelessly lost, unable to see the beautiful, egalitarian future we can create together.
There is a fine line here. I am not advocating redemption, welcoming, or whitewashing the people who promoted this dismal reality. But we can and should build a political coalition that includes this generation, and does not leave them out in the cold, only to find a home in the darkest fringes of a political movement that tells them that the desire to control others, especially women, is the only way to find meaning.
On the left, we tell ourselves the story of our vaunted compassion, yet we place the blame only on young people who do something similar, searching for community and finding it only among the most opportunistic and dangerous political movements. We did little to welcome them.
While Democrats had strong economic policies and plans, Republicans, supported by an army of digital content, were able to take on the mantle of running on the economy and frame the left as cultural warriors out of touch with the majority of Americans.
But the good news is that this month’s elections in Virginia, New Jersey and New York show that Democrats have learned a lesson.
The three major campaigns this year were remarkably similar, though they came from different parts of the ideological spectrum. Their messages focused relentlessly on affordability – how expensive and difficult life had become for the working and middle classes in their communities. Their solutions covered a wide ideological range, but the focus remained the same.
Most young people, like most trans people, Black people, immigrants and everyone else, are dealing with housing that has skyrocketed in price, especially compared to our parents’ generations. Instead of having one career in our life, we now have to constantly look for new careers. Living independently as an adult is now more expensive and complicated than it used to be. These affordability campaigns gave young people something they could do about those pressures rather than ceding that frustration to more cynical actors.
This conversation undoubtedly becomes easier when Donald Trump takes three steps every day to dismantle the economy. There is a real feeling that the economy is getting worse. It’s hard to pay the bills and keep food on their table, especially when Republicans are, quite literally, ensuring that 42 million people can’t afford to keep food on their table by refusing to fund Snap during their government shutdown.
Republicans have been distracted, trying to defend Trump, and even trying to repeat his book of tying Democrats to the culture war of the moment. But without Trump’s unique ability to control the media narrative, Republicans with far less political talent and capital faltered, making themselves look weak and silly in the process.
The political miracle is that this harsh focus on affordability and the cost of living may have brought on board many of those same young people who followed Trump a year ago. In Virginia and New Jersey, men under 30 defected from their new Democratic governors, with about six in 10 supporting Spanberger. According to the Associated Press. In New York, young people preferred Zahran Mamdani over Andrew Cuomo by a margin of nearly 40 points, according to an opinion poll. Tufts circuit analysis.
It turns out that these guys weren’t completely lost to us. We just failed to imagine the reality in which they could be in our camp.
Affordability has emerged amid the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, with consumer prices higher than ever, thanks in part to Trump’s tariffs. For all his threats, the economic reality eventually becomes an inevitable political crisis for anyone who has not gone too far in his personality cult and has to pay his bills.
Mickey Sherrill in New Jersey, Abigail Spanberger in Virginia, and Mamdani in New York City have shown us that the frustration felt by every working- and middle-class person can be channeled into a political coalition that sees the marginalized as people also affected by the greed and corruption that has made life unaffordable for so many.
Young people, like everyone else, are looking for politics that can make life a little better. Democrats have finally figured out how to give them that opportunity.