Economy and lingering pandemic effects among factors driving young men to the GOP

By the time election results from Ohio started to roll in at 7:30 p.m. on Nov. 5, Drew Belcher had been in Cleveland for hours.

The sophomore political science major had made the four-hour drive from Oxford with a handful of other Miami University students, leaving at noon after their morning classes. All of them were members of the university’s branch of College Republicans, which Belcher serves as the membership and events director for. They spent election night across the state at a watch party for Bernie Moreno, a Republican businessman and Colombian immigrant who successfully defeated incumbent Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown last week.

As other states began reporting their results early in the evening, Belcher saw the signs of former President Donald Trump’s eventual victory. Virginia, which had been considered a safe state for Vice President Kamala Harris, leaned red for much of the night, even though it eventually swung back toward Harris with 51.8% of the vote.

“I saw a headline that Harris’ campaign stopped fielding questions, and they’re clearly nervous about this,” Belcher remembers. “... I think by about 10:30 or so, I’m like, there’s no way Harris can come back from this.”

Belcher was right. Trump swept all seven swing states, winning 312 electoral votes, and he’s on track to win the popular vote once all states finish counting.

Young men like Belcher were one key demographic in securing Trump’s victory. Exit polls show that 48% of men ages 18-24 voted for Trump, while 46% voted for Harris. In 2020, just 36% of men in that age group had backed Trump, while 56% supported President Joe Biden. It’s an important shift among voters who have grown up under three Trump campaigns in a row.

A pandemic shapes young voters

Belcher grew up in a Catholic household, and politics was never a big discussion in his family. He always had an interest in history, so his focus on politics came as a natural shift.

When the COVID-19 pandemic rocked the economy and caused state lockdowns across the country, Belcher said it was an activating point for himself and other young people who felt like the response was an example of government overreach.

“I was much too young to really care about [politics] in the first place, until some of these things like COVID started becoming actually real and tangible, seeing the effect of government leadership and its influence over your life,” Belcher said. “Up until then, I had no real care for really getting into the nitty gritty of politics.”

In Ohio, Republican Governor Mike DeWine declared a state of emergency on March 9, 2020, after three residents tested positive for COVID-19. In the following week, he asked colleges and universities to move instruction online, shut down K-12 schools, prohibited mass gatherings, banned visitors at nursing homes and closed the dining rooms of bars and restaurants across the state.

DeWine’s efforts aligned with many other state governors trying to limit the spread of the virus as healthcare providers struggled to respond to a global health crisis. Then-President Trump urged states to reopen quickly and encouraged people to protest social distancing restrictions, citing economic damage and skyrocketing unemployment rates.

Spencer Mandzak, a senior public administration major at Miami and chairman of the Ohio College Republicans Federation, said he started to pay attention to politics in 8th grade during the 2016 election. He decided to go to college for public administration later in high school as he started to align himself with the GOP on issues like the economy and foreign policy.

Mandzak’s parents are moderate and voted for Obama, and he says he’s the most conservative person in his immediate family. Like Belcher, Mandzak thinks the pandemic was a key motivating factor for many young people embracing the Republican party.

“COVID was very very important for getting the younger generations involved in politics, knowledgeable in politics on all sides,” Mandzak said. “That really revealed to people that what goes on in the White House or at the State House in Columbus does have a real effect on our lives.”

Economy, economy, economy

The pandemic may have introduced young voters to politics, but Belcher and Mandzak agree that the economy has been the driving force behind Trump’s reelection.

“I think, very simply put, the economy was better when he was president,” Mandzak said. “I think … before COVID, he brought in more jobs. The economy was better, interest rates were lower, inflation was lower.”

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Consumer Price Index for urban consumers increased an average of 1.95% per year from 2017 until 2020. Inflation increased to 3.6% in 2021 and 6.2% in 2022 before beginning to cool. According to CBS, rent prices jumped more than 30% nationally between 2019 and 2023.

Unemployment now sits at 4.1%, down from 6.4% when Biden took office, and some economists have said a supply shortage caused by the pandemic and the Russia-Ukraine War are more directly responsible for inflation than policy. Still, voters are broadly dissatisfied with the economy under Biden. An exit poll by ABC News found that 67% of voters think the economy is in bad shape.

Economic pressures drove voters across most demographic groups to the right, said Anne Whitesell, an assistant professor of political science at Miami University.

“Americans in general have a tendency to kick out the party in power when they don’t … like what’s happening and then bring in the other party,” Whitesell said. “I think in that sense, it’s not particularly surprising given how upset people have been about particularly the economy and inflation, that people respond by kicking out the party in power.”

Even among women ages 18-24, 61% of whom backed Harris this year, Democratic support for the presidential candidate was down by 6%. Whitesell said abortion rights may have been a driving factor for most women still sticking with the Democratic party, though.

“For young women, this is about voting for their own bodily autonomy … The immediacy of that issue, the way that that issue can affect you, hits much closer to home than it does for young men,” Whitesell said. “I think that that explains a lot of the gender divide.”

Jonah Hendershot, a junior sales management major at Miami, would’ve told you he was independent if you asked him a year ago. Since then, though, he’s come to identify as a Republican, and he backed Trump and Moreno this year.

Hendershot remembers listening to Trump during the 2016 Republican primary debates and liked the party’s “you make who you are” attitude, he said. As Hendershot began looking into the 2024 election, everything came down to prices and the economy for him.

“[The economy] wasn’t as good as it was under Trump,” Hendershot said. “I remember gas prices being much cheaper. I mean, the stock market was always fine, but it seemed as for the regular working-class person who didn’t have all their money invested in stocks, everything was much more expensive.”

Inflammatory statements not a barrier

Trump’s rhetoric has been consistently inflammatory since launching his presidential campaign in 2015. During his 2024 campaign, he said immigrants who enter the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country” and that “in some cases they’re not people.” He also vowed to “root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country,” according to reporting from Reuters.

For politicians on the left, Trump’s comments fueled arguments that he didn’t have the character to be president. In October of 2016, Access Hollywood released a tape of Trump saying that he could “do anything” with women and they would “let you do it” if you’re famous, including “grab ‘em by the [expletive].” Even Republicans called on him to step aside after the tape released, though he went on to win the presidency less than a month later.

For Mandzak, Trump’s inflammatory comments during debates served as an entry point into politics, even if he didn’t agree with what Trump was saying.

“Watching him say shit like when the moderator was like, ‘You often call women ugly,’ and he was like, ‘Only Rosie O’Donnell,’ I think it’s stuff like that that gives him that personality of more than just a politician,” Mandzak said. “I think him doing comedic things as someone running for president definitely is an appeal to some people.”

Beyond the rhetoric, Trump has also faced a slew of criminal indictments since leaving office in 2020. He repeatedly claimed without evidence that the 2020 election was stolen, rhetoric which his opponents say led to the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6. The insurrection led to seven deaths and hundreds of injuries among both Capitol Police and rioters, according to a bipartisan Senate report.

Belcher and Hendershot both condemned the violence on Jan. 6, and Belcher said Trump never had a substantial claim that the election was stolen. For Hendershot, Trump’s tweets telling people to “stay peaceful” were enough to distance himself from the violence.

“If you’re gonna protest, make it respectful,” Hendershot said. “It was almost trashy, the way they did it. Like, don’t come in there with your pitchforks. They looked exactly like what some of the Democrats were trying to paint — it wasn’t really good for the Republican party at all.”

Ultimately, though, as he looked toward the next four years, Hendershot said Republican politicians weren’t the ones involved in the riots directly. He saw his choice on Election Day as between four more years of inflation or a return to the economy under Trump, and he voted for the latter.