After Vice President Kamala Harris’ defeat in the 2024 presidential election, Democrats entered a full-blown panic about young voters. Donald Trump won 47% of voters under 30 Republicans’ best performance with that age group in decades. The Democratic Party’s response was to encourage its candidates to appear on podcasts aimed at young men and commissioning consultants to analyze how the left had supposedly lost the internet.

New data shows that young voters are turning on Trump and are expected to support Democratic candidates in large numbers once again this midterm cycle. But a closer look at the numbers shows that Democrats can’t assume young voters are back on their side for good.

The shift from right to left among young voters this midterm cycle is real and it is enormous. In the latest New York Times/Siena poll, voters under 30 now favor the Democratic congressional candidate in their district by 44 percentage points Two years ago, that margin was just 10 points. In the new Harvard Youth poll, 77% of young Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy— including 48% of young Republicans. That is undoubtedly a collapse of epic proportions for Trump, the MAGA movement and the GOP as a whole.

But Democrats would be mistaken to read too much into these shifts. Among young voters who prefer that Democrats control congress this cycle, 51% say their choice is motivated mostly by opposition to Republicans rather than support for Democrats.

Among young Gen Z independents supporting Democrats, the share is even greater: 70% say their motivation is against Republicans. These numbers make sense. The party in power typically performs worse during the midterms and in this case, Republicans have unified government. As prices soar and the war in Iran rages on, voters across age brackets seem to be ready for change Still, as much as Democratic operatives bemoan Americans who see the party as just the “lesser of two evils,” that sentiment seems widely held among young voters.

In the Harvard Youth poll, 74% of registered young voters disapprove of congressional Republicans, but Democrats fare little better, with 66% disapproval.

Though young voters trust Democrats more on every major issue the poll asked about, from “cost of living” to “free and fair elections” to “involvement in wars and conflicts,” more than two-thirds of under-30 voters are unhappy with the job Democrats are doing in Congress. To treat Democrats’ improvements with young voters as vindication for the post-2024 strategies, then, would be misguided. Democrats haven’t won young voters over — Trump has simply lost them. The medium has changed, but the message is still missing.

Harvard’s polling offers some clues about what a winning message could be. For the first time in the poll’s history more young Americans expect to be financially worse off than their parents versus better off.

Eighty-eight percent of voters say government corruption is important to their midterm vote, the second-most important issue overall. Healthy majorities believe artificial intelligence and corporate power threaten their financial security and support reforming our economy. These are not just partisan priorities.

Forty-two percent of young Republicans support a wealth tax and 39% support Medicare for All. Taken together, these findings suggest a generation increasingly skeptical of the political and economic system, regardless of which party controls Washington.

Democrats would be foolish to assume that frustration will continue to work in their favor in the long run without a meaningful reorientation. I saw some of the challenges of organizing young people firsthand as press secretary for Dream for America, a Gen Z-led organization founded partly in response to Turning Point USA. While Democrats have concentrated much of their recent outreach on digital media, Turning Point claims thousands of chapters across high schools and colleges. And that infrastructure doesn’t disappear when Republicans lose an election — it gives them a way to reach young voters long after the latest viral clip has been forgotten. That is a huge structural advantage that Democrats have failed to match in recent years.

Trump has handed Democrats an opening with Gen Z, but keeping these voters will require more than posting viral clips and opposing a deeply unpopular president. It will require giving young Americans something worth supporting. And it will require breaking free from the typical partisan cycle of winning power and failing to deliver real change. Without both a compelling new message and the infrastructure to consistently communicate and deliver on it, they risk watching the same young voters who abandoned Trump this year abandon Democrats should they regain power.

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