How severe is the political pessimism of young Americans?

Somewhat buried in the pre-Thanksgiving conversation, Dartmouth College’s Brendan Nyhan offered an interesting observation in an essay for the New York Times.

“[T]he scale of the protests” targeting Donald Trump this year, he wrote, “is still not as large as one might expect, given the severity of the threat. During President Trump’s first term, millions of people protested when the situation was far less dire.” He offered one reason for that decline: “the lack of young people.”

Nyhan pointed to YouGov polling that showed less interest in October’s “No Kings” protests among younger Americans than older ones. He contrasted that with the protests that followed the killing of George Floyd in May 2020; then, younger Americans were more likely to tell YouGov that they’d participated in a protest.

I’ll note that this specific comparison is partly a function of interest. In 2020, YouGov polling shows that far more young people expressed agreement with the Black Lives Matter movement than did older people. This time around, older people — who are more likely to have lived through the Cold War struggle between democracy and autocracy — say they are more dissatisfied with the state of American democracy, the issue at the heart of the “No Kings” movement.

In his essay, though, Nyhan also points to another factor: a sense of hopelessness.

“The more persuasive explanation for the relative lack of young people in the anti-Trump, pro-democracy movement is that they are demobilized and demoralized. But it would be a mistake to blame them for this attitude. Older generations should instead recognize that the world we have created does not seem to offer a viable path to making change.”

This is almost certainly true. When Gallup reported that record numbers of young women expressed an interest in leaving the U.S., I noted that this was likely in part a function of feeling as though there was no means by which their frustrations could be addressed. Democracy depends on the idea that power jostles back and forth between interests. If you feel as though the system has excluded or marginalized you indefinitely, what’s the point of sticking with it?

Such a sentiment isn’t only detectable in protest apathy or an expressed (though generally not manifested) interest in emigrating. It’s visible in the prevalence of independent voter registrations among young people, in skepticism about the media as an institution and in the quick collapse of both Trump’s and Joe Biden’s approval numbers among the youngest Americans.

It’s also suggested by the broader contraction of young people’s engagement in politics.

I’m not referring to voting. Young people consistently vote less heavily than older Americans, for a number of largely structural reasons. (For example, young people often hold jobs that afford them less flexibility to cast a ballot and move more often, meaning that they need to re-register to vote and perhaps figure out where to do so.) But young voters were more likely to vote in 2024 than they were in 2008, once considered a high-water mark for young-voter participation.

But they voted more heavily still in 2020. And even with relatively higher voting rates in 2024, young people made up much less of the electorate than they do the adult population.

Again, though, that’s not what I’m talking about. Instead, I’m talking about other engagement with the political system.

The Cooperative Election Study is a national poll conducted around each federal election. It includes an evolving set of questions measuring how often respondents engaged in non-voting political activity: going to meetings, putting up a sign, participating in a protest, donating to a candidate.

On many of those metrics, young people — and older people! — indicated less participation in 2024 than they had in 2020 or prior years.

There were only two activities in which young people were more likely to report participating than older people in the 2024 survey: attending political meetings and attending protests. The percentage reporting participation in protests was down nearly 7 percentage points from 2020, the biggest drop among any of the three age groups. Meanwhile, the percentage of younger people who reported having engaged in none of the identified actions was up more between 2020 and 2024 than was the case among older respondents.

It’s worth noting that this was also true just among young people who identify as Democrats or Democrat-leaning independents. In 2020, only 44 percent of them indicated they’d engaged in none of the identified political actions (compared to 60 percent of young Republicans and Republican leaners). In 2024, more than half of young Democrats indicated that they hadn’t engaged in any of the activities (while young Republicans held steady at 60 percent).

It has been a disheartening political moment for young Americans (who are more likely, for example, to oppose the government’s approach to the war in Gaza), for young Democrats (who watched a Democratic president about whom they were often apathetic be replaced by Trump) and for young women in particular (given the revocation of Roe v. Wade, among other things). The response from older Democrats has often been something like “well, you should vote!” which isn’t wrong, as such, but is still clearly not going to be seen as sufficient.

There’s another interesting aspect to the numbers here that is worth pointing out. Remember: young Americans were least likely to express dissatisfaction with democracy in the U.S. in YouGov’s recent polling … perhaps in part because they don’t expect any better. Maybe that will change after the 2026 election, a point at which — should democracy actually be functioning normally — power is likely to jostle back toward the left.

Photo: A “No Kings” protester in October. (~jar{} on Flickr under Creative Commons license)