President Donald Trump’s losing the youth vote to a rising politician who has arisen out of left field, according to a new report.
Young Gen Zers who supported Trump in hopes he could ease their sense of institutional distrust linked to the Covid pandemic are now turning toward municipal government for their potential leader, The i Paper reported Thursday.
“Outsider candidates are having a moment because they’re appealing to the fact that so many young people feel like everything around them is broken,” said Gen Z analyst Rachel Jafanza. “They want something new.”
Political scientist David Schultz argued a 2024 youth shift toward Trump appears to reflect a temporary frustration rather than a lasting realignment, particularly as Trump’s second term has been marked by broken campaign promises and an unpopular war with Iran.
TikTok creator Clarkson Lawson, who built a following posting pro-Trump content after the pandemic, now describes his politics as center-left, saying many of his earlier views “didn’t hold up to debate.”
“I didn’t really start posting about politics until after Covid,” he told The i Paper. “Trump’s messaging of ‘institutions are bad, they all need to be burned down’ really resonated with me.”
Now, the youth realignment that helped deliver Trump the White House looks less like a permanent shift and more like a coalition in search of its next outsider.
Vice President JD Vance, 41, is widely seen as Trump’s heir apparent, but that’s not the politician named in the report.
It’s New York City’s 34-year-old mayor Zohran Mamdani.