Initial estimates of turnout data show more than one-quarter of young adults voted in the 2022 elections, the second highest midterm turnout rate in the past 30 years.
While votes are still being counted and the data will be refined, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement projects 27 percent of people ages 18-29 voted in the midterms, trailing just 2018’s 31 percent.
“We’re seeing that the 2022 election .. is part of a continuing engagement among Generation Z and millennials,” said Abby Kiesa, deputy director of CIRCLE, which is housed within Tufts University’s Tisch College of Civic Life.
Young voters went heavily for Democrats (63 percent of them voted for Democratic House candidates), possibly serving as the difference-makers in a number of key battleground elections.
In those states – Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin – the youth turnout was higher, reaching an aggregate of 31 percent. (Arizona was excluded from this subset because not enough data was available.)
“Young people's strength in numbers led to powerful influences in key races around the country,” Kiesa said.
For example, 70 percent of young voters cast ballots for Democrat John Fetterman, who narrowly defeated Republican Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s Senate race. Voters a little older (ages 30-44) gave Fetterman 55 percent of their ballots, while voters older than 45 mostly preferred Oz.
Earlier in the cycle, CIRCLE had determined which races youth voters could most heavily influence. Topping that list was the contest for governor of Wisconsin, where Democrat Tony Evers was seeking reelection. Evers defeated Republican Tim Michels by less than 4 percentage points. Again, older voters preferred Michael, but Evers won 70 percent of the 18-29 vote.
In North Carolina, where Republican Ted Budd won a narrow Senate victory over Democrat Cheri Beasley, the youth vote was more evenly distributed (52 percent for Beasley and 44 percent for Budd, accounting for 14 percent of all voters).
According to Kiesa, 8.3 million people turned 18 and became eligible to vote between the 2020 and 2022 elections, and 46 percent of them were people of color.
“They are trying to figure out this election system with less experience in systems of power,” Kiesa said.
CIRCLE also found that the partisan split among young voters (63 percent for Democrats, 35 percent for Republicans) was about the same as in 2020, when comparing votes for House candidates but the gap was slightly narrower than the last midterm elections (67/32 in 2018). Those midterms, following the election of Donald Trump, saw a big jump in the partisan divide compared to most prior elections of the past three decades. For example, in 2016 youth voters were split 55/40.
While young people supported Democrats regardless of the voters’ race, that support was strong among people of color: 89 percent of young Black voters supported Democratic House candidates, compared to 68 percent of young Hispanic voters and 58 percent of young white voters.
This is a change from 1998-2014, when young white people mostly voted for Republicans, according to CIRCLE Director Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg.
“We think that’s partially related to the issues,” she said, pointing to gun violence in 2018 following the Parkland, Fla., school shooting and abortion rights this year. “Issues always drag young people to the polls.”
Young people are increasing their political activism beyond voting at a higher rate, according to CIRCLE. Researchers have seen increases in members of Gen Z and millennials encouraging others to vote, donating money to political campaigns, attending demonstrations, convincing others to register to vote and volunteering on campaigns.
“There is a continuation of a trend of engagement extending beyond the ballot box,” said CIRCLE’s election coordinator Ruby Belle Booth.
CIRCLE calculated the “day after” voter estimates by analyzing vote totals, the National Election Pool Survey’s data on youth voters and Census Bureau data.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.