Did Covid lockdowns and school closures swing young people sharply right?

Two new polls offer powerful evidence the answer is yes.

Bright college years, with pleasure rife, the shortest gladdest years of life…

The words belong to “Bright College Years,” written by a Yale University senior in 1881, sung proudly (if drunkenly) by Yale students ever since. The song has stuck around because it rings true.

Not everyone goes to college, of course. But as David Zweig said in our interview on his smart new book on the disaster of Covid school closures, “Childhood is achingly brief, and they stole time from these kids, and they stole experiences.”

They — the Donald Trump-hating Democratic blob that includes the public health establishment, teachers’ unions, academia, and the media — sure did.

And two new polls strongly suggest people who were under 25 in 2020 have not forgotten or forgiven. The first poll has gotten some attention. The second, which provides even more powerful evidence of the shift, has not. It should.

(To find out what the polls are, and what they say, subscribe. Or wait a week.)

Last week, Yale released the results of a national survey that compares the views of about 2,000 people aged 18-29 with the same number of older adults. But the finding that received the most attention actually compared people within the younger group.

The Yale survey discovered that the youngest survey respondents - those 21 and under — were much more conservative than those just slightly older, aged 22-29.

As the pollsters wrote:

Asked whether they would vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the 2026 congressional elections in their district, voters aged 22–29 favored the Democratic candidate by a margin of 6.4 points, but voters aged 18–21 favored the Republican by a margin of 11.7 points.

In other words, 18 to 21-year-old voters leaned 18 percentage points to the right of those only slightly older. And for the first time in generations, the youngest voters said they favored Republicans overall — at least in this survey.

Young people so reliably lean left that a political cliche declares: If you’re 18 and a conservative, you have no heart. If you’re 65 and liberal, you have no brain. Not this time, though.

The Yale poll provoked articles with headlines like “Younger voters now tilting conservative” and, from Bloomberg News, “Will Gen Z's Pivot to the Republican Party Last?”

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(Bulldog, bulldog, bow wow wow!)¹

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But the Bloomberg article also noted that:

{S]ome Democrats are unconvinced the situation is as dire as indicated by the Yale Youth Poll… The Yale survey, veteran Democratic pollster Margie Omero told me in an email exchange, “seems like an outlier. Let’s see how the breakout [is] in the next poll.”

Omero pointed to youth polls fielded by the Harvard Institute of Politics, which has a much longer track record than the Yale poll. (Sigh, Harvard always has to stick its nose in somehow.) Those polls have consistently shown double-digit leads for Democrats among voters aged 18-29, Omero said.

She’s right. In 2019, the Harvard poll showed Democrats with a 39-23 percent lead in party identification among those voters. In 2023, Democrats remained well ahead, at 35-24. Including voters who leaned Democratic or Republican, Democrats had an even bigger lead — 47 percent to 30 percent, 17 percentage points.

But the newest Harvard poll came out just Wednesday.

It shows that voters aged 18-29 are now exactly split between Democrats and Republicans. The number of young voters who called themselves Democrats plunged by 11 percent to 24 percent, while Republicans remained at 24 percent.

Including leaning voters, the results were even more striking. Democrats had 36 percent of young voters, again down 11 percent, while Republicans rose from 30 percent to 36 percent.

In other words, the Harvard poll confirms the Yale results. The historic Democratic edge among young voters is gone.

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But there’s one more data point, and it’s arguably even more stunning.

Like the Yale poll, the Harvard poll stratifies by age. Harvard breaks respondents into two groups, 18-24 and 25-29. Harvard, like Yale, found that the youngest respondents were more conservative than older ones, though it found a less striking difference — the 18-24 group identified Republican in a 26-24 split. The 25-29 group was exactly 23-23.

That’s not the stunning part.

The stunning part is that in 2019, Harvard offered the same age breakdown. And back then, about twice as many 18 to 24-year-olds said they were Democrats as Republicans. 41 percent of respondents said they were Democrats, compared to 21 percent of Republicans. Democrats had a 20 percentage point lead among the young.

Flash forward six years, through Covid and lockdowns and insane mask and distancing rules at colleges that ruined both the 2020 and 2021 academic years at most schools. And mRNA vaccine mandates for college students — and for many young people who weren’t college students too.

Those 18-to-24 year olds are now 24-to-30. And they aren’t overwhelmingly Democratic anymore. They don’t even lean Democratic.

They have felt the well-meaning boot of the public health authoritarians on their necks and they are suspicious of government. (They don’t seem to care about climate change nearly as much as they once did, either.)

The kids can’t get those years back, but they can punish the Democratic blob that took them. And they are.

1. The Yale football fight song, since this piece seems to have gone weirdly Eli-centric.