The new conservatives

 

By Andrea Widburg

It turns out that being raised around the fallout from crazy people may affect your political views. I say this because a new poll shows that there’s cause for optimism about the younger generation.

That’s actually not news to me. Four anecdotes explain why.

First, the fact that I was a child during the hippie era is one of the reasons I’m a conservative today. During my formative years, trips to Haight Ashbury exposed me to what happens when a society abandons the norms I still remembered from the pre-hippie era. We went from well-groomed, polite, nice-smelling people to wild-haired, filthy, stinking, scary people lying in their own filth. I was a Democrat because that’s how I was raised, but deep inside, I always knew where Democrat policies led.

Second, a decade ago, I found myself on a plane trip sitting next to an up-and-coming junior executive in his late 20s. He explained that his goal in life was to marry a woman who would be a stay-at-home mom for his children. He’d been raised by a single mother as a latch-key child and didn’t want to repeat that experience for his own children.

Third, at around the same time, I knew another young man, also in his late 20s, who’d grown up in a dysfunctional single-mother home. It was he who told me that his generation didn’t watch the news because they knew it was all lies. Instead, they followed video personalities and podcasters. Barron Trump helped his father with outreach to this demographic, which may have helped Trump win.

Fourth, about five years ago, a young woman I knew almost had her career at a very Democrat-oriented company blown apart by a “non-binary person of color” (“NBPOC”) who tried to undermine my young friend by claiming that my friend was failing to meet the NBPOC’s special emotional needs in the workplace. With a little coaching from me, my friend was able to ride out the problem without any harm to her reputation, but it was touch and go.

My young friend, furiously angry, said to two other friends, “I don’t believe in this transgender crap,” at which point both her friends shamefacedly admitted that they didn’t either. Sadly, none would dare to say that in public.

In other words, young people have been badly burned by the madness of Democrats. I saw the madness play out 50 years ago and didn’t like it, but these three young people have lived with the fallout from the Democrats’ escalating attacks on previous societal norms, such as stable family units and biological reality, and many are genuinely repulsed.

It's against this backdrop that I found it unsurprising that a poll of college-aged Americans showed that the younger ones are turning their backs on the Democrats. Living in the belly of the beast, as it were, especially if they’re actually attending college, they’re feeling a natural sense of revulsion.

The 2025 Yale Youth Poll summarizes its findings in a way that makes it sound as if young people are still aligned with the Democrat agenda, but the devil (as always) is in the details—and these details show that the younger the poll respondents, the more likely they are to be conservative:

Many college-aged Americans are now supporting the Republican Party over the Democratic Party, according to the Spring 2025 Yale Youth Poll released Tuesday.

The student-led survey found that when asked whether they would vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the 2026 congressional elections in their district, voters aged 18 to 21 favored the Republican candidate by a margin of 11.7 percentage points. Meanwhile, voters aged 22 to 29 favored the Democratic candidate by a margin of 6.4 points.

It’s not all roses, of course. The students all reflect the media’s relentless hostility to Donald Trump and Elon Musk, something you absorb with the air you breathe in America. However, showing some independent thinking, they dislike Joe Biden even more.

In the same way, they’ve absorbed decades of education telling them nothing is that bad about illegal immigration, and that everybody who comes here legally has the right to stay here, no matter whether they violate immigration policies (such as supporting terrorist) groups, but they also dislike the Ivies and think their endowments should be taxed. In other words, they’re a mixed bag, but moving in the right direction.

Young people, no matter how much they like the “rebel” pose, usually crave an essential stability. Today, they see that the Democrat party has destroyed that stability and is continuing ever further down that path. And of course, given the overwhelmingly leftist culture in which they swim, some have realized that the real rebellion is to be conservative.

Conservatives still have their work cut out to regain youth culture, but it can be done...and that’s good news.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/04/the_new_conservatives.html