Youth Move Right: College Voters Favor GOP by 12

“Everything we’ve seen for the past, even decade, people like myself, young, white male – we’ve been completely demonized and almost hated and told that somehow we’re wrong, we’re racist or sexist,” he said.

Some liberals blame the emergence of young conservatives on the chronic use of smartphones and computers, where they say misinformation and disinformation run rampant.

“Technology is everywhere, right at your fingertips, with TikTok and all that stuff,” said Ryan Gaire, 19, the president of the College Democrats chapter at Binghamton University in New York. “You can just see blatant misinformation and it’s not called out anymore.”

Mr. Laffey, who was 14 during the beginning of the pandemic, said the lockdowns were when he started “waking up to American politics.”

“I was a normal kid in high school, played hockey my whole life, hung out with my friends, and that all stopped,” he said. “I started to realize, oh, who’s kind of pulling the strings here, what’s going on?”

“I think the one driving source was Donald J. Trump and his candidacy. If he was not the candidate, I don’t think we would have seen the massive switch in the youth vote that we did between 2016, 2020 to 2024,” said former Iowa state Rep. Joe Mitchell, 28, who was the state’s youngest state legislator and founded Run GenZ to help young Republicans running for office.

Mr. Mitchell said people were “yearning for authentic, genuine candidates,” who made them feel heard. Mr. Trump offered that, breaking the mold without fear of scrutiny or being canceled.

“We broke through the culture this election like we never have before.”

The party’s decrease in voter registration was measured in 30 states and the District of Columbia, where voters register with a political party; the 20 other states do not register by party.

“This is a generation that’s weathered pandemic isolation during formative years, entered an unstable economy, and faced skyrocketing housing and education costs — all while being told they’re not resilient enough,” said John Della Volpe, director of Polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. “What Gen Z needs isn’t another lecture, but genuine recognition of their struggles and leaders willing to listen before they speak.”

Mr. Gaire, the College Democrats president at Binghamton University, admitted that he was “pretty disillusioned” with how his party has campaigned over the last few years.

“When we talk about Gen Z shifting to the right and these kinds of things, even if I think the Trump campaign did do some good things in terms of reaching out to them … ultimately, it’s a failure of the Democratic Party,” he said.