My colleagues at CIRCLE (The Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement) have already produced an incredible body of analysis of the 2024 youth vote. Overall, they find that youth turnout was higher than in past decades but lower than in 2020, and young adults supported the Democrats, but much more narrowly than previously.

I recommend all their work, but I’d like to discuss one pattern. It appears that being working-class predicted support for Donald Trump when holding race and gender constant, with the exception that young women of color supported Harris by the same amount, regardless of their social class. These trends are stronger for older Americans but still evident among the 18-29s.

(I interpret education as an indicator of social class. Especially for younger people, income is much less revealing. An MBA student might earn less current personal income than a mechanic of the same age.)

Young adults who have not attended college favored Trump by two-to-one, whereas those with postgraduate educations preferred Harris by 14 points. Nearly half (42%) of young Latinos without college experience chose Trump. Thirty-four percent of all young Black men favored him, a pretty remarkable increase that may also be related to social class.

I would be reluctant to explain this pattern by citing any specific policies of the Biden Administration or proposals of the Harris-Walz campaign, nor by criticizing the candidates or their rhetoric. This is because the same pattern–working-class voters supporting the right–has been evident recently in France, Germany, and the UK–the other democracies that I’ve studied–and was already strongly present in the USA in 2022.

My pet theory is that liberal or progressive parties prefer to regulate, because they can shift the costs to private entities and local governments. The regulated organizations then pass mandates on to workers and consumers, and the rules that originate in legislation are mixed together with all the things that companies require or prohibit for their own profit. The same department that tells workers not to use polluting chemicals also warns them not to take unauthorized work breaks. As a result, regulation that has social benefits looks like corporate monitoring, and progressives sound like the nation’s HR department or legal office. It doesn’t help that almost all Democratic elected officials are, in fact, lawyers or former managers.

My preferred alternative would be to spend public money to benefit workers, because that is a more direct and transparent way to achieve public purposes. However, the Biden Administration and congressional Democrats did authorize $1.9 trillion of new spending on green manufacturing (and microconductors) and reaped no apparent political gain.

Perhaps contingent factors interfered, such as the pandemic and the end of pandemic-related benefits, global inflation, and Joe Biden’s inability to make the case when it mattered. But the failure of nearly $2 trillion to move working-class opinion requires reflection. Unless something changes fast, the formative experiences of our rising generation will not incline them to progressive values.

See also: why “liberal” can sound like “upper-class”; a trillion here, a trillion there, and pretty soon, you’re talking real money; and class inversion as an alternative to the polarization thesis