The News
Young people in the US typically swing progressive. But in 2024 the demographic was almost evenly split between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, and Europe has seen a similar rightward shift.
One possible explanation is a global protest vote against inflation: Many incumbents were voted out in 2024 as prices soared. But Derek Thompson argued in The Atlantic that the pandemic also reduced physical-world socialization, pushing young men, in particular, into online echo chambers.
Young people who experience pandemics “have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership,” Thompson argued, which, because one’s political ideology tends to solidify around age 20, could persist for life.
SIGNALS
Trump capitalized on waning trust in US government
The COVID-19 pandemic is officially over, but it lingers in debates over education, inflation, and crime — all of which were top voter issues in last year’s US presidential election. The former Biden administration did not order a post-hoc investigation into its handling of the pandemic or institute changes to react to it, a government accountability expert told The New York Times before the election, adding “the administration basically left the impression that it accepted that the government had failed, but just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.” Donald Trump, meanwhile, capitalized on that mistrust, a success underscored by last week’s confirmation of vaccine skeptic and long-time critic of US medical institutions Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as Trump’s health secretary.
The pandemic may have been a missed opportunity
The pandemic saw most citizens around the world do “as they were told for longer than we might have expected,” David Runciman, a politics professor at Cambridge University, argued in The Guardian, indicating that society’s ability to act collectively in the interest of a greater good may be more robust than some experts had thought. Indeed, some academics and activists had hoped the reaction to the pandemic might spark a wider response to other global crises like climate change. But it just hasn’t happened, Runciman wrote. “Political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities,” The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson pointed out, with one Harvard Political Review analysis concluding young Americans in 2024 were “more jaded than ever.”