When Donald Trump is inaugurated as the 47th president, he will have been the most dominant Republican political figure since at least 2015. When he finishes his term, he’ll have spent close to a decade and a half atop American politics. While I find him repugnant, we should probably put away the word “normalize” in discussing his effects on our democracy.
For a whole cohort of younger voters, Trump and Trumpism are how they came to politics. For some, they’re what they prefer. For others, they’re merely an unwelcome reality of American democracy. But in either case, he is their normal.
We know that political socialization in the teens and 20s is an important period in shaping a person’s partisan preferences. So Trump’s success is a potential foothold for MAGA-type candidates with a generation of younger, predominantly male voters who are right now developing their adult political identities.
In terms of political socialization, it matters when and how you become an active voter. Voting, as scholars Alan S. Gerber, Donald P. Green and Ronald Shachar have argued, “may be habit forming.” There’s plenty of evidence that the electoral choices young voters are making now could harden into the partisan identifications they carry into their middle and late adulthoods.
Daniel A. Cox of the American Enterprise Institute, a right-leaning think tank, produced an excellent analysis of youth voting data in the 2024 election. This past cycle, 56% of young men voted for Trump, compared with 40% of young women. What’s more, 2018-24 saw men 18-29 go from D+19 to R+13. Women shifted, too, sliding from D+33 to D+18.
Still, Trump’s strength was among young men. As Cox notes, per The Associated Press’ VoteCast Data, 55% of young men who voted held favorable views of Trump.
That should be worrying for small-l liberals given what it could mean in crucial battleground states. According to analysis from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning Engagement at Tufts University, “In key battleground states like Arizona, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania, where Biden had strong double-digit youth support in 2020, Harris still won young voters but by a much smaller single-digit margin.” We will have to wait some time for more complete election analysis, but the early trend lines simply don’t portend a coming rejection of Trumpism and a national snap back to some vaunted “normal.”
I don’t believe it’s a short-term problem that Trump managed to turn out these young voters, especially men. It’s plausible a MAGA-fied GOP could retain these voters over multiple cycles and lock in their identity as loyal partisans.
Moreover, whereas generalizations about young liberals and old conservatives miss the mark, when a person comes of age is important for political identity. As political scientist Derek Fischer writes in his analysis of generational political identities from 1976 to 2020, “Partisan identities are adopted in early adulthood, stabilize quickly, and thereafter become highly resistant to more than transient change. … Political events and personalities therefore have the greatest and most lasting influence during the stage of life when partisan identities are being formed.”
It’s true that Vice President Kamala Harris carried the national youth vote. But even as young voters overall rejected Trump, we have reporting to indicate they’ve acclimated somewhat to this new era. When NBC News interviewed 20-somethings ahead of this election, one noted never having had an election without Trump on the ballot and stated: “It’s kind of hard to imagine having a ‘normal election.’ I don’t even know what that means anymore.” Pre-election polling from the University of Chicago showed 80% of young voters said at the time that they “pretty much already know” what they need to know about Trump.
He isn’t a mystery to them. They know him. To put a finer point on it, he is all they’ve known. And he’s all they can expect. There have been three consecutive elections with Trump on the ballot, and 2028 is almost certain to see Republicans compete for who will get to take up the Trumpian mantle.
That idea brings us from the national electorate to the Republican Party and its base. Here, Trump and his style of politics aren’t just the new normal for young voters. They’re wildly popular.
During the 2024 contest, young Republicans strongly preferred Trump to the offerings of a putatively return-to-normal candidate like Nikki Haley. Of the early primary states, New Hampshire boasted comparatively solid youth turnout at 16%. Trump romped in the 18- to 29-year-old demographic, carrying 58%. That tells a clear story about the kind of candidates the GOP’s youth wing wants. And when we consider peer effects, the party’s young voters could compound the rightward and MAGA direction of the primary electorate.
As political scientist Betsy Sinclair puts it: “Politics are incredibly contagious in social networks. Shared political behaviors of an individual’s social network affect both participation and political choices.”
As for 2028, a December poll from Morning Consult shows Donald Trump Jr. tied with JD Vance as GOP voters’ top choice, at 30%.
I take all of this to be a strong indication the party will keep nominating candidates in the Trumpian mold. This means the further normalization of a broken, extremist Republican Party, as each cycle replaces older voters with younger ones who’ve ever seen only this kind of presidential politics.
Over time, more American voters will come to expect a steady supply of Trumpian candidates. They will expect it because this is their normal. And many will expect it because it is what they want.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
