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"Droves" is an exaggeration - Trump won 18-29 men 49-48 per the 2024 exit poll, which is about the same margin he won the electorate as a whole by. He does better with the middle-aged than the young among white men and women, though not among ethnic minorities. The gender gap is only marginally higher for the young than the middle-aged and only marginally higher in 2024 than 2020 - the massive youth gender gap reported e.g. here didn't show up at the ballot box. What did happen is that Trump lost the youth vote (of both sexes) less badly than the Republicans normally do in a close election.
The place where right populism really is an old man's game is the UK. Reform's vote is younger than the Conservatives, but not by much.
My read is that the MAGA is in the middle of the pack in terms of right-populist movements ability to appeal to young men. Looking at the exit polls for the 1st round of the Polish presidential election, the total right-populist vote (PiS+Confederation+Crown) is flat by age but the young voted for the kekkier right-populist parties whereas the old voted for the more traditionalist PiS. The 2024 French legislative elections showed the Left winning the youth, RN winning the middle-aged, and Macron's party winning the old. The same picture applies to the 2025 German elections.
SSCReader said it was 56%?
That's fine. I just have issues with calling that "greater problems attracting young people".
Depends on the exit poll. You can find 56% (Guardian), 52% or 49% depending on where you look. I took the high end because if that doesn't count as droves then neither does any lesser number. You could split it and say it is roughly 52% plus or minus 3 maybe.
Really we'd have to define the terms of what does greater problems and droves mean before any of the numbers can tell us anything. For me "droves" would have to be over 60% at least and consistently getting under 50% would be greater problems attracting X. But that's really just squinting at it and going off vibes. One could make reasonable arguments for very different numbers I am sure.
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My source is the CNN exit poll as reported on Wikipedia. I'm happy to defer to someone with a better data source.
The Catalist report has a reputation for being more accurate than exit polls, but the free online version doesn't include the sex/age crosstabs. Matt Yglesias did a Substack post based on what is presumably the paid version of the report and says that the big picture was a mostly-uniform swing apart from the big swing to Trump among Hispanics and (to a lesser extent) Asians.
I don't think we disagree here.
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