I’ve never considered myself a MAGA enthusiast, but that changed on July 13, when a would-be assassin shot multiple rounds at the former president during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, narrowly missing Trump’s head, killing a man in the crowd, and injuring several others.
The next day, I put on the red “Make America Great Again” hat that had been stuffed in my closet and walked out my front door in Washington, D.C. My very liberal neighbors were probably appalled. I got more than a few dirty looks as I walked my dog. But for the first time since Trump entered the political scene, I didn’t care.
It wasn’t just the assassination attempt itself that galvanized me. It was Trump’s response to it. Like just about every other American that day, I watched on TV as Trump picked himself up off the stage, and, with blood dripping from his ear, made his Secret Service team wait before ushering him to safety. He wanted to reassure the crowd – and the country – that he was OK.
The image of Trump with his fist in the air immediately became the defining picture of not only the 2024 election, but of Trump’s political career. That day, Trump wasn’t the ego-driven, rash, loud-mouthed president I’ve always taken him to be. He was patriotic, courageous, and pretty freaking badass.
In the weeks since the shooting, I’ve heard from many young adults who might not be willing to wear a red MAGA hat in public, but are at least rethinking the Republican Party with Trump at its helm.
That shift has been a long time in the making. Even before the assassination attempt, young millennials and zoomers were starting to warm up to Trump for more practical reasons. They sided with him over President Biden in poll after poll when it came to issues such as the economy, the border crisis, and even the Israel-Gaza conflict. For the first time in decades, more Americans under the age of 30 identify as Republicans than Democrats, according to Pew research released in June.
This trend has been especially evident in Michigan. A March poll found that young Michiganders viewed Trump much more favorably than Biden, and when asked who they’d vote for if the election were held the next day, 48% said Trump and just 45% said Biden.
It turns out my generation isn’t that different from our parents and grandparents: We value stability and want more money in our pockets. Democrats have had four years to deliver both, and have instead saddled us with inflation that eats into our paychecks, interest rates that make buying our first homes all but impossible, and chaos on the world stage.
“I worry a lot about like the economy,” Saba Saed, a young Michigander who voted for Biden in 2020, told PBS in May. “Quality of life has, for the average person in the U.S., has kind of not been so well. I don’t think that housing is going to be affordable for a lot of people, and inflation is crazy. People are being overworked, but, like, not getting paid enough.”
To be sure, young adults tend to be much more socially liberal than older generations. But caring about social issues is a lot easier when you’re not also worried about paying for basic necessities such as gas and groceries. For example, Jordyn Dean, a 22-year-old graduate student at Western Michigan University, said she sides with the Democratic Party on cultural issues such as abortion, but she can’t deny the impact Biden’s economy has had on her prospects. “School has gone up. Everything’s gone up,” she said earlier this year.
We’ve been told for the past eight years that Trump will install some combination of the Fourth Reich and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” What Democrats seem to forget is that Trump had four years to do that, and he simply didn’t. Abortion is still widely accessible. Voting booths will still be open in November, just as they were in 2020 and 2016. And if voters really don’t want Trump back in office, they can do what they did last time and not vote him in.
“I think that many people say, well, you would rather Trump with the Muslim ban, whatever, whatever. Trump was president. I’m Muslim. As bad as he is in many ways, I still had the privilege of being very safe in here,” Saed explained.
Still, I don’t expect a mass exodus of young Michiganders from the Democratic Party. Especially with Biden out of the race and Vice President Kamala Harris set to take the top of the ticket, my peers will be more enthusiastic about voting blue than they otherwise might have been. A new poll this weekend, for example, found Trump and Harris in a dead-heat in Michigan.
But a slight shift in the sentiment of young Michiganders could make all the difference. And what I’ve seen and heard from young voters over the past few weeks marks a far bigger shift than Democrats would like to admit. We’re not guaranteed blue votes; Democrats forget this at their peril.
Kaylee McGhee White is the Restoring America editor for the Washington Examiner, a Tony Blankley fellow for the Steamboat Institute, and a senior fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum. She grew up in Detroit and graduated from Hillsdale College. Follow her on X at @KayleeDMcGhee.
