Youngest voters now tilting conservative, new poll finds. What’s causing shift?

A rift has emerged within Generation Z voters, with the youngest among them shifting significantly toward the right, according to new polling. What’s driving the change?

In the latest Yale Youth Poll, when asked who they would support in the 2026 congressional elections, voters aged 18-21 leaned Republican by 12 points, while voters aged 22-29 leaned Democratic by 6 points.

“The youngest voters are breaking sharply from their older Gen Z peers,” Zachary Donnini, the poll’s lead data scientist, wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter.

The younger cohort’s alignment with the right is largely driven by men, who favored Republicans by 19 points, compared to women who favored the GOP by 4 points.

Conducted April 1-3, the poll sampled 4,100 registered voters — including 2,205 voters under 30 — and has a margin of error of 1.9 percentage points.

In response to the poll, political scientists and public opinion experts said that a number of factors could be playing into this intragenerational split. However, they cautioned that the findings should be replicated in other surveys before they are taken too seriously.

Factors at play

When examining this divide, it’s important to consider which party was in power when voters came of age and became politically engaged, experts said.

“For 18-21 year old Americans who entered voting age during the later stages of the (Joe) Biden years and maintained significant dissatisfaction with the direction of the country, the Republicans represent somewhat of an alternative to the status quo,” Christopher Borick, director of the Muhlenberg College Institute of Public Opinion, told McClatchy News in an email.

“While this cohort may not be enamored with (Donald) Trump and his administration,” Borick said, “they still see the GOP as more likely than the Democrats to shake things up with the state of affairs they are displeased with.”

By contrast, 22-29-year-olds have a different frame of reference.

They likely remember Trump’s first term better than their younger counterparts, “and that was probably a factor in their thinking about preferences,” Berwood Yost, the director of the Center for Opinion Research at Franklin & Marshall College, told McClatchy News in a phone interview.

Yost also said that social media could have played a part in shaping voters’ political beliefs.

“There’s a lot of talk about social media and the way that social media may have appealed to certain groups of voters, particularly younger voters,” he said. “I would think messaging and marketing really reinforced certain issue positions.”

But, elections are fundamentally about issues, and the biggest issue of the 2024 election was the economy, Yost said. It’s possible younger voters — who are just entering the workforce — were more dissatisfied with the economy than those a few years older.

This kind of rightward shift is also not unprecedented.

“When you look back to the 1980s, you had this conservative movement in the (Ronald) Reagan revolution,” Yost said. “At that point some younger voters were inclined toward the Republican party.”

Grain of salt

However, the results of the Yale Youth Poll should be taken with a grain of salt — for a few reasons, experts said.

For one, freshly minted voters tend not to be firmly grounded in their political beliefs.

“The 18- to 21-year-old cohort has voted in only one presidential election and maximum two congressional elections,” John Mark Hansen, a political science professor at the University of Chicago, told McClatchy News in an email. “Partisan identification is very plastic among young voters and strengthens over time. A distinctive pattern of political support will have more meaning if it persists.”

Additionally, these findings are from one poll, so drawing broad conclusions from it would be a dubious enterprise.

“Averages of polls are always better than single polls,” Hansen said. “I wouldn’t want to bet the farm on a handful of people in one poll.”

Donnini, the lead data scientist at the Yale Youth Poll, said as much himself, cautioning against overinterpretation in a post on X.

“As is true of any study, we have to be careful about just one result,” Yost said.

Still, the results are “interesting,” he said, adding, “If we see it in other studies, it’s something to dig into.”

This story was originally published April 23, 2025 at 10:20 AM with the headline "Youngest voters now tilting conservative, new poll finds. What’s causing shift?."