Women wearing MAGA hats attend the annual "March for Life" in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 23, 2026. REUTERS/Aaron Schwartz
President Donald Trump's once impressive edge with young voters has dried up at an "astonishing" rate, according to noted conservative pollster Sarah Longwell, as he bleeds support from them faster than any other voting bloc.
Longwell, who left the Republican Party last year following Trump's reelection, dissected the latest findings from the Cook Political Report in a Monday piece for The Atlantic. She noted that, while voters aged 18-29 still broke for Democrat Kamala Harris overall in the 2024 election compared to 2020, they made a major swing towards Trump. This swing was driven particularly by young men.
Early on in Trump's first term — March 1, 2025 — this young voter bloc disapproved of him by an approximate seven-point margin, per Longwell. Now, according to new findings as of February 1, his disapproval with those voters has exploded to a margin of 31.8 points.
"It’s tempting to think that this is all happening because of this administration’s blatantly authoritarian and norm-shattering actions," Longwell wrote. "Deploying masked ICE agents into American cities, stonewalling on the Epstein files, demolishing the East Wing, capturing Venezuela’s president, sharing racist videos on social media. All of those actions matter, and are slowly chipping away at Trump’s base of support. But they’re not the whole story—or even the main story—of why Trump is losing young people."
Citing regular focus groups that she runs on a weekly basis, Longwell argued that young voters are turning on Trump primarily for one reason: "Trump is not doing the things that he told Americans he would do to fix prices and the economy." These voters, she added, bought into Trump's promises of economic revival, but are now feeling "duped and let down."
"There are things that are very disappointing and very rough right now," one Gen Z voter from Virginia told Longwell.
"Overall, I think the job market is really hard right now," another from New York added.
“I think things are pretty chaotic lately, honestly,” another from Florida explained. “You just see all this stuff on the news, and you see a lot of people are struggling to find jobs. A lot of people are feeling kind of pessimistic about what things are going on.”
Longwell attributed a lot of this sense of betrayal among younger voters to the fact that many of them were children during Trump's early rise to power and throughout his turbulent first term, and are learning the hard truths about Trump's "con man" tendencies the hard way.
"They don’t view Trump as [unique] or beyond the pale, because he’s been the dominant force in our politics for as long as they’ve been politically aware," Longwell argued. "Now, though, they’re young adults entering the workforce. Many of them have student loans, and they’re at a particularly cost-sensitive point in their lives. They notice when a politician like Trump promises to lower prices, and then doesn’t deliver."
