In this series, we look at how younger voters are likely to impact future elections and American politics going forward.
As we’ve written in these pages before, voters under 45 years of age will comprise as much as half of the voting electorate in November 2024 and on some issues, they are clearly different from their parents and grandparents. The Millennial and Plural (Gen Z) generations, who together make up almost all of this age cohort, rank climate change and abortion among their top three issues. Questions about those two issues were the ones the GOP primary candidates, minus former President Donald Trump, had the most difficulty answering in the debate and when they did, stated positions in complete opposition to the two generations’ point of view.
The producers at Fox News who orchestrated the show tried to include this critical age group in the debate, reaching out beyond their Boomer and Gen-X moderators to have a young Republican, Alexander Diaz, a Catholic University student and member of the conservative organization Young America’s Foundation, ask a question on climate change. One of the moderators, Bret Baier, then asked the eight candidates to raise their hand if they thought human behavior was causing climate change—the litmus test for any candidate hoping to gain the support of Millennials and Plurals.
The candidates refused to do so, choosing instead to first attack the moderators for posing such a question and then, in the case of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, attacking Mr. Diaz, presumably for not agreeing with him on the need to expand energy production instead. DeSantis, the candidate with the most support with GOP primary voters among those on the stage told the moderators, “We’re not schoolchildren. Let’s have a debate.” The rest of his answer attacked President Biden’s response to the wildfires in Maui, rather than respond to the question on climate change. Vivek Ramaswamy, the youngest and most Trump-like candidate in the debate, was more direct in his answer, “The climate change agenda is a hoax,” managing to draw boos from the partisan Republican crowd. After some sparring among the other candidates, former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley answered the question more directly saying she believed “climate change was real,” but then segued to attack China and India for their pollution, without conceding that all countries’ carbon emissions contribute to climate change.
All this occurred even though more than a third of voters under 45 cited addressing combatting climate change as their top personal concern in a Pew survey during the COVID-19 pandemic. In that same survey, 71% of Millennials and 67% of Plurals said dealing with climate change should be a top priority for America to ensure a sustainable planet for future generations.
The GOP primary debate on abortion was more muddled but still far from the attitudes of voters under 45. Former Vice President Pence insisted that the morality of the issue required banning any abortion of a fetus sufficiently developed to “feel pain,” even if it was politically unpopular. Most of the other more prominent GOP candidates on stage preferred to debate the issue in more antiseptic terms — debating whether there should be a national ban on abortions after either the sixth or fifteenth week of conception. Only Nikki Haley refused to get into that debate, arguing that there was no chance of finding a consensus in Congress that would enact a national abortion ban bill that any president would be able to sign. She also pointed out the political danger in pushing for one, given the recent defeats in both red and blue states of propositions to enact an abortion ban at the state level. But even her ideas on finding a consensus on the issue—banning “late term abortions,” “encouraging adoptions,” and giving doctors the right to refuse to perform the procedure if it violated their religious convictions—were far removed from the opinions of voters under 45.
In 2023, Pew found that 62% of all Americans believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases, while only 36% believed it should be illegal in all or most cases. Those ages 18 to 44 were even more supportive of keeping abortion legal in all or most cases (68%) while only 31% believed it should be illegal in all or most cases. Among those voters under 45 that identified with or leaned toward the Democratic Party, only 16% agreed with the Republican debaters’ stated position that it should be illegal in all or most cases. Instead, most of them (84%) believed abortion should be legal in all or most cases.
Even within the “pro-life” Republican Party, there is a clear generation gap. Pew found that 47% of 18- to 44-year-old Republicans, in contrast to 34% of those over the age of 45, believed that abortion should be legal in all or most cases. Similarly, a survey by young voter expert, John Della Volpe, found that almost half (44%) of Millennial and Plural Republicans believed that upholding women’s reproductive rights is “very important,” compared to a quarter of older Republicans, a 19-point difference. And only 34% of younger Republicans believed “reducing the number of abortions” is a very important priority, compared to more than half (51%) of Republicans over 45, a 17-point difference.
This split between younger and older Republican voters exemplifies the larger problem the party has in reconciling the attitudes of older and younger Republican identifiers. For instance, even though younger Republicans think protecting the environment (71%) is more important than protecting gun rights (59%) and securing our borders (56%) — two favorite Republican campaign topics — the candidates chose to ignore this segment of their party when they addressed this issue, just as they did with their abortion issue answers.
There is already evidence that these intraparty disagreements have negatively impacted the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes. In the 2022 midterms, Republicans ages 18 to 44 were less likely than younger Democrats to have voted (38% to 46%). Young Republicans were twice as likely as young Democrats to have voted for either the other major party or a third party (11% to 5%).
According to our projections, based on U.S. Census Bureau estimates, if Americans under 45 (Plurals and Millennials) vote at the same rate as they did in the 2020 presidential election, they will represent more than one-third (37%) of the 2024 electorate. If that generational cohort’s contribution to the electorate in next year’s presidential general election is the same as its contribution to the U.S. voting age population, it will comprise nearly half (49%) of the vote on November 5, 2024. Pew’s Validated Voter surveys indicate that over the past four biennial national elections (2016-2022), Plurals and Millennials have on average voted for Democratic rather than Republican candidates by a 1.76:1 margin (60% to 34%).
If the Republican Party and its eventual presidential nominee continue to advocate positions on issues such as climate change and abortion like those its wannabe nominee candidates expressed in the first GOP primary debate, they risk further alienating Millennial and Plural generation voters in 2024 and beyond.
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