Election Post-Mortem: Age, Faith and the Vote in 2024

How are Zoomers thinking about politics?

Do the youths love Donald Trump?

In 2016, that question seemed just impossible to consider. I mean, the data that came out right after Trump stunned Hillary Clinton indicated that young folks favored the Democrat by an 18 point margin. In fact, according to the exit polls, Trump actually did five points worse than Mitt Romney did in 2012. In some leaked documents to the Miami Herald in 2020, the Trump campaign called a lot of young voters “deadbeats” because of their paucity of political knowledge and their low likelihood of turning out on election day.

But the 2024 election cycle was something different entirely. In the days after Trump’s resounding victory, Sara Pequeno of USA Today wrote, “Well, the secret is out. The world finally knows that Gen Z isn’t so special after all and not the generation of progressives sent to save us from a second Trump presidency.” The realization had finally set in for a whole crop of political observers - Trump was not kryptonite to Gen Z.

So, let’s dig into that in the post today. And let’s add race, gender, and religion to the mix, too. What kind of young folks warmed to Donald Trump in 2024? And what may that portend for the future?

First things first, let me show you how the partisan composition of young adults has shifted since 2006. This includes only 18-29 year olds.

The first thing worth flagging is that the share of young adults who identify with Republicans has remained almost completely unchanged since the mid-2000s. It was 32% in 2006 and it was 31% in the most recent data. It bounces a bit, but nothing to write home about.

However, the same is not true for the Democrats. They’ve lost significant share in the last 18 years. When Obama got elected the first time in 2008, 58% of 18-29 year olds were Democrats. It dropped below 50% by 2020 and has stayed there in the last few surveys. Today, 47% of young adults are Democrats - almost a ten-point drop.The independents have picked up those Democrat losses - going from 13% to 22%.

But, as I’ve said a bunch, all that doesn’t matter at the ballot box. Elections offer a (functionally) binary choice. So, here’s voting behavior since 2008.

This is certainly not a staggering graph in terms of huge swings in the youth vote. I think it’s very fair to say that in a generic election over the last 15 years, about a third of young adults will support the Republican and about 60% will vote for the Democrat. Of course, there was a lot more third party voting in the 2016 contest, but that was an aberration. In most elections, about 5% of twenty-somethings go third party.

There are two elections that deviate from this trend: 2012 and 2024. Which seems a bit odd. In both cases, the Republican did about five points better than average. Romney got 37% of young voters and Trump was at 38% in his most recent campaign. But, you can absolutely see the ‘Trump surge’ among this demographic. Trump clearly made some gains. Harris’ performance was six points worse than Biden and eight points worse than Obama in 2008.

One more look at this before we dig into the religion angle - I broke the youth vote down by race. I think this helps to clarify a bit of how these shifts happened.

The huge upshot from this graph is that it wasn’t young white people who became more comfortable with Donald Trump. I mean, he may have done 2-3 points better, but that’s certainly not anything to write home about. Instead, it’s young people of color who started trending toward the GOP in 2024. You can see it among young Black voters. In 2016, 11% voted for Trump. That rose to 14% in 2020 and then 18% in 2024. Those are some sustained gains.

The numbers for both Hispanic and Asian young people are really the headline here. About 20% of Hispanics cast their ballot for the GOP in a generic election. Trump did really poorly in 2016 at just 15% of the Latino youth vote. But in 2024, he earned 36% of their votes. There’s no doubt in my mind that Hispanics are a growing problem for the Democratic party. But, so is the Asian vote, too. About 36% of them supported Trump in 2024 - twenty points better than his prior two elections.

However, it’s time to turn to religion. I’ve got 16 religious traditions and I’m going to show you young adult voting patterns in every election since 2008. There’s a lot of data to think through.

The white evangelical vote is pretty stable, I would say. About 75% of younger white evangelical voters supported McCain in 2008. It was 75% for Trump in 2024. In 2016, Trump only received 69% of the young white evangelical vote, though. So he has made some inroads there. The young white Catholic vote used to be noticeably tilted toward the Democrats, but in 2024, it was R+7. A complete reversal of 2020, which was D+7. Sample sizes for Mainline Protestants are so small among young voters that it’s hard to draw reliable conclusions.

I do need to point out that Trump’s biggest gains were with young non-white Christians. He was up 15 points among non-white evangelicals and 14 points among non-white Catholics. That tracks with what I described in the previous graph. It’s just hard to see a larger religious group here where Trump clearly lost significant ground. He held serve with some and made inroads with others.

But let’s talk about age differences inside each tradition now. Are young Christians more Democratic leaning than older ones? This is just the result from 2024.

So, younger white evangelicals are slightly less Republican than older ones. But the key word there is “slightly.” About 75% of young white evangelicals supported Trump - which is 8 points lower than evangelicals as a whole. The white Catholic result shows a much starker generational divide. Only 51% of the youngest adults supported Trump. For older white Catholics it was much closer to two-thirds support. The other huge finding is the Latter-day Saints. A young Mormon was nearly twice as likely as an older one to vote for Harris in 2024. I’ve written about this before - there’s a huge partisan age gap among the Latter-day Saint community that’s worth watching.

There are a couple of groups in the bottom two rows that are also worth mentioning. Older Jewish voters are noticeably more right leaning than younger ones (about 10 points). Young Muslims are warmer toward Trump than older ones - that’s a surprising reversal. But among the atheists and agnostics, there’s really no difference there at all. However, for the other types of nones (nothing in particular), there’s some clear evidence that older folks tend to be more Republican.

And I couldn’t finish this post without writing about the gender gap at the ballot box. One of the biggest religion stories right now is the fact that young men are just as religious as young women. Of course we don’t have a great answer to that right now, but it does seem like politics could be a contributing factor. Young women are continuing their leftward drift and young men are squarely in the ‘moderate’ part of the ideological spectrum.

I can’t show you every single religious group because the sample sizes just get way too small, but here’s six of the biggest traditions.

For white evangelicals, there’s essentially no evidence that young men and young women diverge at the ballot box in a noticeable way. That’s not been the case at all in the last five presidential elections. But that’s not true for non-white evangelicals. In 2008-2020, young men were much more likely to vote for the Republican compared to young women. In some elections, the gap was 25 or more points. But in 2024, the gap actually reversed. The share of young non-white evangelical women who voted for Trump went from 22% in 2020 to 43% in 2024. That’s insane! Someone follow up on that, please.

In terms of the mainline, I don’t even know what to make of these results. Young mainline men moved 18 points to the right and young women moved 21 points. Again, we have to realize that there just aren’t that many young mainliners out there. So, a big dose of skepticism there.

But the Catholic sample is still pretty big and we can have a bit more confidence in these results. For white Catholics, the big story for me is how the gender gap has disappeared. In both 2016 and 2020, men were significantly more likely to vote for Trump than women. However, in 2024 both were just above 50%. For non-white Catholics, the result is staggering. In 2016, 15% of young men voted for Trump and 12% of young women. In 2024, it was 56% of young non-white Catholic men and 16% of women. That’s a forty-point jump for males. Just staggering.

I know that there’s a whole lot here to parse through - age, race, gender, and religion. That’s a bunch of moving parts. So, here’s a few bullet points that really jump out to me.

1. Overall, Trump made inroads among young adults in 2024. About five percentage points better than 2016 and 2020.

2. Those gains were almost entirely among the non-white sample. That was especially evident with Hispanic and Asian respondents.

3. When looking at religious traditions, you just don’t see any examples of Harris gaining ground with younger voters.

4. There are huge age gradients in the vote among white Catholics and Latter-day Saints.

5. Trump made staggering gains among non-white Catholic men. Forty points in two election cycles.

If you are a Democrat, I just don’t know how you can look at these results and feel anything but despair. At best, some segments of the youth vote held steady in the last election cycle. But there are a whole bunch of examples of just the opposite - Trump taking away the Democrats advantage.

However, with Trump exiting the stage in a couple of years and the Democrats not putting forth a clear front runner, who knows how much different this will look when I do the same bit of analysis in 2029.

Code for this post can be found here.