Among the shocks of the recent US presidential election, one statistic stood out. Exit polls appeared to show a momentous political shift among young men, with one poll putting Donald Trump leading Kamala Harris by 14 points among men aged 18-29. This led some breathless commentators to declare that the ‘generation left’ thesis has been disproved – or even that an entire generation of men are now lost to the left and progressive ideals.

Making post-election snap judgments is a dangerous game. A clearer picture of an election’s lessons takes months to emerge as the results of more carefully calibrated follow-up polling come in. But the claim that young men are decisively moving to the right already looks like it’s on shaky ground. Other exit polls indicate a more slender lead for Trump among young men, while an extensive poll from just a month before the election put Harris 20 points ahead among young registered voters and 10 points ahead among young men.

When we dig further into the exit polls, a new narrative arises. Trump actually gained very few additional youth votes compared to 2020, while Harris lost several million young voters compared to Biden. It now seems that rather than young voters flocking to the right, the real story is that Democrat-aligned youth stayed at home. Young people’s attachment to Harris, as shown in pre-election polls, seems to have been light and grudgingly given. It certainly wasn’t strong enough to produce the high youth turnout seen in 2020.

But there’s also something else to consider. Even if young people had turned out for Harris, their support still wouldn’t have been interpreted as votes for the left. In fact, we’d likely now be talking about ‘generation centrist’. 

In 2016 and 2020, young people’s shift to the left was much more visible in the Democratic primaries than in the elections themselves. In 2016, for instance, there was a stark generational divide between those backing Bernie Sanders and those backing Hillary Clinton: Sanders won 72% of 17-29-year-old voters, and Clinton just 28%, with this division almost exactly reversed at the other end of the age scale (Clinton won 71% of over-65s to Sanders’ 27%). A similar pattern was visible in 2020. But in 2024, there was no Democratic primary. When the left isn’t given political expression, it tends to become invisible in polling.

We’ve seen a similar story play out in France. When the far-right leader Marine Le Pen beat rightwing centrist Emmanuel Macron among young voters in the final results of the 2022 presidential elections, the narrative set in that young people in France had firmly shifted to the right. But French presidential elections are held in two rounds, and in the first, leftwing candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon won a healthy plurality of 18-24 and 25-34-year-olds. This allegiance was repeated in this year’s legislative election, in which the victorious leftwing NFP alliance gained the largest youth support by far. 

The pattern seems clear: there’s no enthusiasm for the neoliberal centre, and when voting is reduced to a choice between centrism and the far right, youth turnout tends to drop, making the far-right youth vote appear to grow. 

This observation doesn’t mean we can be complacent, however. There could be a political shift underway, and we can’t trust that demographic change will save us. Indeed, the generation left thesis never suggested young people would naturally move to the left. My 2019 book of that name began by identifying a trend already in existence, and asked what this trend could tell us about contemporary class composition so we could act in the most politically effective way. 

The generational political distinctions that dominated politics at the time emerged primarily out of a divergence of material interests, in which generational differences in the pattern of asset ownership played a key role. But linking material interests to political views and actions is far from straightforward, because material interests we perceive and act on aren’t given – they’re formed. A person’s perception of their material interests is rooted in their sense of what is socially and politically possible, both now and in the future. Long-term economic stagnation, along with accelerating environmental crises, have made the future more uncertain than ever and, with young people generally more exposed to those risks, this produced, at least to some extent, shared experiences of declining life prospects.

Political expression doesn’t just reveal what already exists. It also helps to create what it expresses by making those experiences more comprehensible. In the second half of the 2010s, the left managed to give political expression to experiences of insecurity. But as the decade turned, that left was comprehensively defeated by a centrist restoration. Now, once again, the insouciant centre is in crisis, and political possibilities are reopening. There is a huge space for the left, and a massive potential to grow quickly if the appropriate political forms and expression are found. 

Those who took generation left as an accomplished fact rather than a political project now risk making a similar mistake by universalising a trend among some young men into a wider shift towards the far right. Doing so, they risk foreclosing the very real possibility of the left’s revival.

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