What Happened to the Youth Vote?

This year, North Carolina Democrats made a bet on young voters as the key to turning the state blue for Vice President Kamala Harris.

The Democrats’ extensive ground game homed in on newly registered voters in the state, and 18 to 25 year olds made up the largest share of them. In North Carolina and elsewhere, the Harris campaign targeted student voters. The state’s Democratic Party chair, Anderson Clayton, said the efforts could make all the difference.

“We put an emphasis on young voters because that’s where I think the party had lacked the emphasis,” she said in a PBS interview ahead of the election. “We know that [the] North Carolina youth vote is going to change this election cycle for us.”

But that didn’t happen.

Democrats’ plan required strong turnout among young voters and unaffiliated ones, who tend to vote at lower rates than other groups. Some ballots are still being counted, and the demographics of the electorate are not immediately available across the state, but overall turnout appears to have been down from 2020, when about 75 percent of registered voters cast ballots. About 73 percent of registered voters cast ballots this time around. 

“What is clear right now is that the youth vote was a bit off from 2020,” said Gunther Peck, a professor of history at Duke University who researches young voters in North Carolina. “What’s not clear is exactly why and where.”

It will take some time to figure out the breakdowns of young voters’ turnout, though Peck pointed out a few factors that could be relevant, such as less organizing by students on campuses who are opposed to the war in Gaza and lower participation among college students in western North Carolina impacted by Hurricane Helene. While overall turnout remained steady in those counties, Peck said preliminary data his research team collected indicates that the student vote on campuses like the University of North Carolina-Asheville was lower this cycle.

Another early possibility has emerged that is likely to be startling for North Carolina Democrats. Young voters, along with other key demographics in the presidential race, appeared to shift toward former President Donald Trump, who won the state and another term in the White House.

An analysis by Tufts University’s Tisch College of the AP VoteCast survey of registered voters found that 51 percent of voters in North Carolina between the ages of 18 to 29 backed Harris, compared to 47 percent who supported Trump. In 2020, President Joe Biden won that group by 16 percentage points compared to Harris’ 4 point advantage. (The margin of error on the analysis is plus or minus 5 points.)

Nationwide, Tufts’ analysis showed young voters favored Harris by 6 percentage points—the largest of any age group, though that support was much less than it was for Biden in 2020 at 25 percentage points. As some polling indicated, young men shifted significantly toward Trump, giving the former president 56 percent of their support in 2024 compared to 41 percent in 2020.

A Shift in the Air

Tufts had ranked North Carolina as a top state where the youth vote could sway the 2024 presidential race, as it did in the 2008 election for Barack Obama. And while college-aged voters generally turn out in lower numbers, Gen Z students bucked the trend with record rates in 2020. Both sides of the aisle took note this year, making concerted efforts to court hundreds of thousands of student voters on campuses throughout the state.

At UNC-Chapel Hill, the focus on the youth vote has been felt for months on campus.

“You can’t really walk anywhere without someone being like, ‘Hey, have you pledged to vote?’” said Martha Plaehn, a junior at UNC-Chapel Hill who volunteered with a nonpartisan group that aims to get out the youth vote.

Nearly every council of state candidate from both sides of the aisle visited the campus, and the campus Democrat and Republican chapters were a big piece of state and national campaign efforts. The interest on campus rose, too, with the memberships at the college Democratic and Republican chapters both doubling this fall semester, the groups’ leaders said.

“Elections in North Carolina are always close. They always come back to the wire,” Sloan Duvall, the president of UNC Young Democrats, said ahead of the election. “But I’m confident in the work that we’ve put in on campus.”

Matthew Trott, the president of the College Republicans chapter, felt the same way. But he had a different view on young voters—and believed they would help Trump in North Carolina and elsewhere.

“Unfortunately, a lot of young voters are apathetic to politics,” Trott said. “But I think of those who are engaged, there is a shift towards the Republican Party, conservative policies in general.”

While voters between the ages of 18 to 25 registered as Democrats more than Republicans in the state, an analysis by The Assembly found that newly registered Gen Z men leaned more Republican than women. Around 28 percent of young men registered as Republicans in N.C. compared to 20 percent as Democrats. Gen Z women were 29 percent Democrat and 19 percent Republican. 

Topping the charts, however, were unaffiliated voters, who made up about half of newly registered young voters of both genders—a rate that blows previous generations out of the water. It’s still not clear how all those young unaffiliated voters cast their ballots.

Leading up to the election, Trott said the College Republicans chapter held tailgates ahead of home football games in partnership with coordinators from the Trump campaign. Media outlets from Germany to Australia came by their events to capture their work on campus.

“A lot of people are realizing that college students and Chapel Hill in particular are not one homogenous group and that we have a wide array of viewpoints,” Trott said. 

Trott said three issues came up again and again in students’ motivations to vote: The economy, immigration, and foreign policy. AP VoteCast also found that 40 percent of 18- to 29-year-old voters said the “economy and jobs” was their top issue.

“There is a general consensus, especially amongst Republican students, that we are in a worse place now than we were four years ago,” Trott said. “As young people who will be very soon entering the workforce and trying to own our own homes or apartments and start our own families, naturally, we want, of course, the best economic circumstances.”

All in all, Trott felt confident about Republicans’ chances in the council of state and legislative races, though he did not see “any path” where Republicans won the governor’s office. But he still wasn’t sure what would happen at the national level.

“Everyone is anxious,” Trott told The Assembly on Tuesday afternoon from the College Republicans table stationed outside an on-campus polling site. “We’re not sure which way it will go.”

Wait and See

After the polls closed, Trott and other members of the UNC-CH College Republicans chapter headed over to Bralie’s Sports Bar on the outskirts of Durham. They met up there with the newly founded Duke College Republicans chapter for the Orange County GOP and Durham County GOP watch party. The bar was packed, and at some points, it was standing room only.

Cautious optimism filled the room. But Trott said no one was quite willing to say they’d won—until Fox News called North Carolina for Trump just before midnight.

“Once North Carolina was called,” Trott said, “everyone just went crazy.”

He said the younger Republicans in the room were among the most energetic, jumping up and down at every state that was called. While most of the party left after Pennsylvania was called for Trump, many of the college students stayed. They hung out with the GOP party officials that remained. Students mostly stuck around the bar until Trump gave his victory speech around 3 a.m. 

While the presidential election didn’t go as she’d hoped, Duvall, the UNC Young Democrats chair, said UNC-CH and Orange County helped secure Democratic victories for statewide candidates. Nationwide, Harris won the youth vote by the largest margin of any age demographic, as Tufts’ analysis found, which to Duvall is meaningful. Still, she said it’s disappointing that young men didn’t vote with the “rights and freedoms of young women of our country in mind,” and that older generations overall decided the election.

“The future that they chose for us, at least these next four years, is not the one we desire, but we know that the fight doesn’t stop here,” she said.

Meanwhile, Trott is awaiting the detailed numbers to see just how much the youth vote made a difference in North Carolina and elsewhere.

“If Gen Z, for instance, is more Republican than Millennials, which very well could be a possibility, depending on the data, that would just be amazing,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

Andy Jackson, director of the conservative-leaning John Locke Foundation Civitas Center for Public Integrity, thinks conservatives in North Carolina and beyond will be keeping an eye on those numbers, too.

“Unless things get really weird,” he said, “Gen Z can only get better for Republicans as they age.”

Johanna Still contributed reporting.