The young men who helped get Donald Trump back into the White House are now realizing they made a massive mistake, according to a Harvard polling expert.
John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, told Joanna Coles on Tuesday’s episode of the Daily Beast Podcast that “they are turning against him,” referring specifically to young men aged between 18 and 29 years old.
“More younger people are concerned that Donald Trump is doing more harm to them than good. OK. That’s essentially what the report card looks like,” he told the Beast’s chief content officer.
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During the 2024 election, Trump won narrow margins in key battleground states after making an outreach to disaffected young men, using right-wing influencers and anti-woke rhetoric to secure their votes. “I believe younger people were responsible for putting Donald Trump in office to start with, specifically younger men,” Della Volpe said.
However, he also suggested that these voters feel they have seen no return on the campaign promises made by Trump regarding the economy and other domestic concerns.
“Younger people are quickly asking important questions like, ‘I thought this was going to improve my economic standing. What about me?’” said Della Volpe, who advised Joe Biden during his 2020 election campaign and worked with a PAC that tried to rally support for Kamala Harris in 2024.
The economy has gyrated wildly under Trump, and his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April has seen the cost of imports to the U.S. surge, with the price being kicked down to the consumer.
Coles said that she was “amazed” that this group didn’t draw conclusions from Trump’s first term, from 2017 2021. Della Volpe said that the 18-24-year-old subsection of the young voter group only saw Trump as president during the beginning of the pandemic and, therefore, couldn’t make a fully informed call on his abilities—or lack of.
“People in their later twenties and early thirties who do have that memory of Trump 1 were more likely to support Democrats, right? So what they’re concerned about is honestly the same thing all of us are concerned about,” Della Volpe added.
“It is asking for, demanding, some stability in their lives, specifically related to economics and finances. It’s really all about that. But I do think that younger people, just, you know, they have a different lens.”
Younger men specifically were drawn to Trump’s macho persona, Della Volpe later added. “They were looking for Donald Trump as someone who wasn’t defending the institutions, but someone who could use his strength to advocate for people who were economically anxious,” he explained.
“It was really about the strength of his persona, I think, different than some specific policies. That was what was attractive specifically around younger men.”
But after six turbulent months in the hot seat, young people are “clearly overwhelmingly dissatisfied,” the pollster added. “His approval ratings among younger people are in the 30s,” he said.
A report from Della Volpe’s team in late April found that more than four in 10 young Americans under 30 say they’re “barely getting by” financially. Fewer than one-third approved of President Trump.
Trump’s popularity during the 2024 election campaign surged among young Latino men. Harvard’s polling found that 52 percent of young Hispanics are still “struggling to make ends meet or get by with limited financial security,” significantly higher than their white (38 percent) or Black (45 percent) peers.
