Young voters powered the Democratic wave in the US midterm elections

After helping Donald Trump to victory in 2024, young voters swung decisively toward the Democrats this time. Their votes played a major role in delivering a wave of midterm victories for the Democrats.

According to early estimates from Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (Circle), which monitors youth civic engagement, youth turnout in this midterm was the second-highest in 30 years. Only 2018, when an estimated 31 percent of young voters turned out during Donald Trump's first presidency, was higher.

While voters over 45 were roughly split between the parties, voters ages 18 to 29 went for congressional Democrats at a 35-point edge. The margin held across race, gender, ethnicity and education levels. Leela Strong, the director of Circle, said the plus-35 lean for voters 18 to 35 parallels the 2018 blue wave, which elected populist Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

The shifts were large across demographic groups. Latino youth, who went for Trump by slim majorities in 2024, voted Democrat this year by margins of plus-10 to plus-15. Sixty-three percent of young white men went for Trump in 2024; this cycle, 54 percent voted Democrat. White young women also switched allegiance from 2024 by plus-15. Rural voters went from 50 percent voting for Trump in 2024 to 60 percent supporting Democratic candidates.

According to Circle, the data even suggests that 15 percent of young people who voted for Trump in 2024 voted for a Democratic House candidate this cycle. The outcome has been so decisive that Republicans are openly fretting over heavily blue youth turnout in states like Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

In the battleground states, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Maine, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin, the estimated youth turnout was, in aggregate, 30 percent.

For many young voters, the election was personal. Motyko Morales, 26, an artist in Miami, said that in her working-class, immigrant neighbourhood, families are afraid to go outside, drive to work or pick up their children from school. She said attacks on legal routes to citizenship and the threat of third-country deportations have had a real physical and psychological impact on her family members.

Amanda Chapa, 22, a recent college graduate and community organiser from Rio Grande City, Texas, said that for the first time in her life, she got to see a candidate who looked like her and represented the same values of the Rio Grande Valley that she holds. Governor-elect Gina Hinojosa won 77 percent of voters 18 to 29. In 2024, Trump flipped Starr County on the Texas-Mexico border by over 70 points; this year, voters flipped it back by over 70 points.

Sarah John, 26, a law student from Los Angeles, said she is critical of Democrats, but having witnessed the impacts of Trump's ICE raids in Los Angeles, she strongly believed her vote against Republicans would make a difference. On Thursday, Los Angeles elected its first democratic socialist mayor, Nithya Raman, making two of the country's three biggest cities now run by democratic socialists.

Patrick Schranck, 27, who manages an independent movie theatre in Portland, now identifies more as an independent and is active in his local Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) chapter. He spent Tuesday night at Portland DSA's election night party celebrating the re-election of their three city councillors. Jordan Korgood, 24, of Boston, a sexual health educator, said voting was the most immediate and direct way she could still engage with electoral politics in a meaningful way.

The context of the shift matters too. Young people were credited in part with powering Trump's 2024 win, though just under half of eligible young voters turned out, not hitting the 50 percent turnout achieved in 2020. Plenty chose to sit out over US funding for Israel's assault in Gaza, as well as the decision by schools and elected officials to criminalise students in the thousands for protesting it.

A year later, the picture has changed. Seventy-five percent of New York City voters 18 to 29 chose democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as the city's mayor. Elise Joshi, 26, who runs the progressive campus program More Perfect University, said young people are active, fed up with corporate greed and corruption from Washington, and ready to be really engaged in politics in all the ways they can be.

More than a few of the successful candidates promising change are young people themselves. Melat Kiros, 29, the newly elected Colorado congresswoman, defeated a 15-term incumbent. Providence, Rhode Island, elected its youngest-ever mayor, 28-year-old David Morales, a democratic socialist. That same day, the city became the largest in the United States to vote in support of divesting from companies complicit in genocide.

Just over half of young voters ranked the economy and jobs as their top priority, followed by healthcare, Iran, immigration, education and the climate.