How COVID Pushed a Generation of Young People to the Right

Research suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific and political authorities.

Young man sitting in the back of a pickup truck, checking his phone, with a Trump campaign sign and the American flag behind him

Photograph by Zack Wittman

February 18, 2025, 7 AM ET

Young man sitting in the back of a pickup truck, checking his phone, with a Trump campaign sign and the American flag behind him

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For decades, America’s young voters have been deeply—and famously—progressive. In 2008, a youthquake sent Barack Obama to the White House. In 2016, voters ages 18 to 29 broke for Hillary Clinton by 18 points. In 2020, they voted for Joe Biden by 24 points. In 2024, Donald Trump closed most of the gap, losing voters under 30 by a 51–47 margin. In one recentCBS poll, Americans under 30 weren’t just evenly split between the parties. They were even more pro-Trump than Boomers over 65.

Precisely polling teens and 20-somethings is a fraught business; some surveys suggest that Trump’s advantage among young people might already be fading. But young people’s apparent lurch right is not an American-only trend.

“Far-right parties are surging across Europe—and young voters are buying in,” the journalist Hanne Cokelaere wrote for Politico last year. In France, Germany, Finland, and beyond, young voters are swinging their support toward anti-establishment far-right parties “in numbers equal to and even exceeding older voters.” In Germany, a 2024 survey of 2,000 people showed that young people have adopted a relatively new “gloomy outlook” on the future. No surprise, then, that the far-right Alternative für Deutschland has become the most popular party among Germans under 30. Like most interesting phenomena, this one even has a German name: Rechtsruck, or rightward shift.

Read: Why the COVID deniers won

What’s driving this global Rechtsruck? It’s hard to say for sure. Maybe the entire world is casting a protest vote after several years of inflation. Last year was the largest wipeout for political incumbents in the developed world since the end of the Second World War. One level deeper, it wasn’t inflation on its own, but rather the combination of weak real economic growth and record immigration that tilled the soil for far-right upstarts, who can criticize progressive governments on both sides of the Atlantic for their failure to look out for their own citizens first.

There is another potential driver of the global right turn: the pandemic.

Pandemics might not initially seem to cash out in any particular political direction. After all, in the spring of 2020, one possible implication of the pandemic seemed to be that it would unite people behind a vision of collective sacrifice—or, at least, collective appreciation for health professionals, or for the effect of vaccines to reduce severe illness among adults. But political science suggests that pandemics are more likely to reduce rather than build trust in scientific authorities. One cross-country analysis published by the Systemic Risk Center at the London School of Economics found that people who experience epidemics between the ages of 18 and 25 have less confidence in their scientific and political leadership. This loss of trust persists for years, even decades, in part because political ideology tends to solidify in a person’s 20s.

The paper certainly matches the survey evidence of young Americans. Young people who cast their first ballot in 2024 were “more jaded than ever about the state of American leadership,” according to the Harvard Political Review. A 2024 analysis of Americans under 30 found the “lowest levels of confidence in most public institutions since the survey began.” In the past decade alone, young Americans’ trust in the president has declined by 60 percent, while their trust in the Supreme Court, Wall Street, and Congress has declined by more than 30 percent.

Another way that COVID may have accelerated young people’s Rechtsruck in America and around the world was by dramatically reducing their physical-world socializing. That led, in turn, to large increases in social-media time that boys and girls spent alone. The Norwegian researcher Ruben B. Mathisen has written that “social media [creates] separate online spheres for men and women.” By trading gender-blended hangouts in basements and restaurants for gender-segregated online spaces, young men’s politics became more distinctly pro-male—and, more to the point, anti-feminist, according to Mathisen. Norwegian boys are more and more drawn to right-wing politics, a phenomenon “driven in large part by a new wave of politically potent anti-feminism,” he wrote. Although Mathisen focused on Nordic youth, he noted that his research built on a body of survey literature showing that “the ideological distance between young men and women has accelerated across several countries.”

Read: The not-so-woke Generation Z

These changes may not be durable. But many people’s political preferences solidify when they’re in their teens and 20s; so do other tastes and behaviors, such as musical preferences and even spending habits. Most famously, so-called Depression babies, who grew up in the 1930s, saved more as adults, and there is some evidence that corporate managers born in the ’30s were unusually disinclined to take on loans. Perhaps the 18-to-25-year-old cohort whose youths were thrown into upheaval by COVID will adopt a set of sociopolitical assumptions that form a new sort of ideology that doesn’t quite have a name yet. As The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum has written, many emerging European populist parties now blend vaccine skepticism, “folk magic” mysticism, and deep anti-immigration sentiment. “Spiritual leaders are becoming political, and political actors have veered into the occult,” she wrote.

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