Young voters are leaning Republican as Dems try to sell themselves as the ‘cool’ thing

Here’s a thought.

What if the kids are all right?

New polling shows young voters in the US are shrugging off their habit of voting left and actually thinking of voting Republican in November.

In almost equal numbers to their Democrat-voting contemporaries.

All this despite the daily diet of Democrats trying to throw everything at young voters to woo them.

Anyone who gets daily messages in their inbox from the Biden- Harris campaign will know how hard they are trying to make voting Democrat “cool” to young voters.

In the past few days alone this has included “direct messages” from George Clooney, Julia Roberts and — er — Jimmy Kimmel.

Which suggests the Biden-Harris campaigns idea of what the youth are after might be ever so slightly off.

Close in the polls

Of course, this isn’t to say that a young voter has to be a Republican to be all right.

But it does suggest that voters in the 18-to-29 age-bracket might actually be thinking for themselves.

In particular they may be seeing through the vast fogs of leftist propaganda that gets pumped out from this country´s educational institutions, media, Hollywood and more.

A new Siena poll out this week shows that among the youngest voting age-bracket in this country President Biden has only a 2-point lead over former President Donald Trump.

While a new Quinnipiac survey actually has Trump ahead by 1 point among registered voters between the ages of 18 and 34.

That is a pretty startling turnaround in just four years.

In 2016 Hillary Clinton won the young vote by 19 clear points.

And in 2020 Biden won it by a stunning 24 points.

So what happened?

One possibility is that this is the first result in polling of a trend many of us have noticed.

There is an expectation that young voters must vote left because we see and hear the screaming, camping protestors on privileged Ivy League campuses.

These people seem to act like automatons — all repeating whatever far-left orthodoxy they are expensively educated to chant that week.

But these people are not representative.

Most people in this country do not go to Ivy League campuses.

Thank God.

And while much attention is paid to these privileged kids in privileged institutions, they do not represent their generation any more than they represent this country.

Rejecting conformity

What is more, a lot of students and other young voters absolutely hate this stuff.

They hate the demand to conformity.

They hate the presumptuousness of these people.

And they hate the way in which the culture tells them that there is only one way to think or vote.

Young people are meant to rebel.

And if the orthodoxy is conservative then they are likely to vote against conservatives.

But the opposite is also true.

If the orthodoxy is blindly leftist then it is likely that a lot of younger voters are going to rebel against that. They might express that by becoming more conservative or right-wing.

Or they might express it in the most “screw-you” way possible: which is to vote Trump.

What better way to kick all those privileged dolts where it hurts than to tick that box in November?

But there are other reasons, too.

While Biden is offering up Roberts and Kimmel, the Trump team is playing a cannier ground game.

In particular Trump is starting to make serious use of TikTok.

This week he posted to TikTok a meeting with the social-media influencer Logan Paul.

This is a man who has over 27 million followers on Instagram alone.

By contrast, Kimmel’s unfunny nightly lecture on ABC struggles to get 1.7 million views a show and he has just 4 million followers on Instagram.

In 2016 Trump famously broke through the media by speaking to the public through Twitter.

That company — like other tech platforms — famously could not forgive itself for accidentally helping that win.

In the following years, they tried to make up for it by banning conservative accounts and eventually Trump’s own account.

It took Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform to lift these biased levers off the platform.

But perhaps Trump is seeing TikTok as this cycle’s Twitter.

He’s certainly changed his tune over the platform, reversing his earlier support for banning the platform.

Perhaps he knows that whether or not it is a piece of Chinese Communist Party malware (it is), it could still be helpful to him in November.

Getting kids in the tent

There’s plenty else to play into if Trump wants to really lean into the youth vote.

His announcement this week that he would get rid of tip taxation is one move that will be hugely popular with young people in the restaurant and bar industries among others.

But he could do more of this.

The Democrats may talk about the cost-of-living crisis.

But the hole in everyone’s pocket from any trip to the grocery store has only grown in the past four years.

It is the same with the housing market.

Democrats may make noises about making it easier for young people to get onto the housing ladder.

But perhaps young voters have noticed here — as they have in Europe — that the housing shortage in cities like this one might just have something to do with millions of undocumented people moving into the country every year through a border that Biden hasn’t bothered to secure.

Will it amount to anything come November?

Well, the polls currently show Trump’s share of the young vote going up and Biden´s tumbling down.

So a mini-revolution looks possible.

No Republican has won this age demographic since 1988.

But in Europe, where there were elections last week, the youth vote has already drifted noticeably right.

In France, in particular, the young Jordan Bardella (28) trounced the centrist incumbent Emmanuel Macron to top the polls.

All pushing Macron to announce a snap general election.

We’ll see.

There’s plenty of time.

But there would be a certain poetry to it.

Pollsters are always saying not to take any voters for granted.

Perhaps the Democrats just did.