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This year's midterms were, in a word, disappointing for conservatives. While we regained the House majority, we all wanted and expected more. This is old news by now.
But there is one piece of news that will be new to the vast majority of Americans because it's either been completely misrepresented or ignored altogether. There are emerging signs that the Democrats' supposedly unbreakable hold on the minds of young people is weaker than it seems.
Sure, American young people are liberal. You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. But did you know they're getting less liberal? This is true on two levels: America's ultra-liberal Obama youth vote of a decade and a half ago has moderated significantly, and the "Zoomer" or Gen Z vote of the present is less liberal than millennials were at the same age.
In 2008, voters 18-29 years old voted 66-32 for Barack Obama over John McCain, a 34-point landslide. More than one pundit speculated that, as these voters aged and their elders died, they would create a permanent liberal majority in America.
Fourteen years have now passed. Those millennials who favored Obama by 34 points are now in their 30s and early 40s, and their voting pattern might surprise you. In this year's midterm, voters aged 30-44—essentially the same voters from 2008, but older and wiser—favored Democrats by just four points, 51-47. Instead of remaining in lockstep with Democrats their entire lives, millennials are officially a swing vote.
How about today's young people, the "Zoomers?" In the midterms, 18-29-year-olds voted Democrat 63-35, or 28 points. That's a one-sided margin, to be sure, but it's 6 points closer than it was for Zoomers' millennial counterparts when they were the same age. And there's an even more interesting data point buried in exit poll numbers: the younger half of that cohort, those aged just 18-24, was the more conservative half, favoring Democrats by just 25 points.
This shift can be seen in other measures as well. According to research conducted by Morning Consult, 47 percent of Americans aged 18-34 identified as some strain of liberal in 2017. Just five years later, that figure has dipped to 34 percent. That's right—by 13 points, young people are significantly less likely to call themselves liberal than they were just five years ago.
Obviously, it would be far better if the young were a real conservative demographic. But given the cultural and institutional headwinds facing conservatives, these margins represent real, demonstrable gains. The question is, how can we build on this shift and turn it into real momentum?
Conservatives can start by looking at the things that are already pulling millennials toward the center and beyond. The moments in a person's life that most tend to make them conservative, as even the Brookings Institute admits, are the events that increase their stake in society. Getting married tends to make a person more conservative. So do buying a home, becoming a business owner, and having a child. Millennials are finally doing most of these things, but at lower rates and at an older age than the generations before them.
Attending a traditional four-year college, on the other hand, is a very liberalizing life event. It's not just a matter of professors being uniformly left-wing, though they are. It's built into the nature of college life itself. Teenagers are ripped away from everything that provided structure in their lives and handed near-total independence, all at once. Nobody is there to nudge them to keep attending church or stay away from drinking and drugs. Every adult influence in their lives is pulled away, replaced by instructors, administrators, and upperclassmen who preach a uniformly liberal message. We slowly become more like our friends and more like the environment we're immersed in, and for the final formative period of their lives, young adults are saturated in a wholly left-wing environment.
So besides ordinary politics, how do we build a society where young people more naturally become conservative? We can do it by reshaping incentives so "conservatizing" life events are easier to achieve, and to achieve earlier, while making liberalizing life events less necessary for success.
Thankfully, the colleges themselves are doing some of the work for us. As they continue to hike costs, degrade standards, and retreat further and further into identity politics at the exclusion of all else, they destroy what once gave them prestige and made them economically desirable. Many schools are still struggling with continued drops in enrollment in the post-pandemic world.
Conservatives should continue to promote and incentivize trade schools, which provide useful job skills without the propaganda or expense. We should work to repeal gatekeeping occupational licensing laws, so that more people can embark on careers or start companies without wasting years of their lives and taking on debt that will block or delay them from having children or buying a house.
Then on the campuses themselves, we must keep fighting to break open the ideological echo chamber. Instead of mindlessly funding woke departments and diversity bureaucracies at state schools, conservative legislatures can defund them (and send the money to trade schools instead). The freedom of speech of conservative college students must be protected and expanded. That is why going onto campuses, no matter how hostile the crowds might be, is so critical. The Left suffocates thought on campus for the same reason it does so on social media: because ideas that are never heard are eventually never thought. It's not enough for students to know, intellectually, that competing ideas exist. They must hear them spoken aloud, in a real marketplace of ideas, and with confidence.
This is an uphill battle, and after any disappointing election, it can often feel like an impossible one. But real victories are already being won. Our job is to identify strategies that are already working, and to work harder on reaching even more people with a message of freedom, opportunity, and courage.
Charlie Kirk is the founder and president of Turning Point USA, and host of the nationally syndicated radio show and podcast, "The Charlie Kirk Show."
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
