LOST BOYS

Trump Voters Reveal Brutal Regret on Eve of Election

The president has destroyed the gains he made among young voters in less than two years.

Young men who voted for Donald Trump in the last election have revealed why they have now turned their backs on the president.

Speaking to The New York Times, young men who backed Trump in 2024 cited multiple reasons for regretting their votes, including the war in Iran, his handling of the economy and soaring gas prices.

Some of those Trump voters said their anger toward the president was so severe that they would not vote for any Republican candidate in Tuesday’s midterms, a widespread sentiment that could doom the GOP to an electoral wipeout.

Matthew Michels, 26, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, said he was not planning to vote at all on Tuesday because he hadn’t “seen enough pushback against some of the stuff Trump’s been doing from establishment Republicans” on issues such as the deeply unpopular Iran war and gas prices. “If I could go back, I would not cast a vote for him again,” he told the Times.

Malachi Bohlmann, a 25-year-old from Phoenix, Arizona, said he voted for Trump because of his vow to control the border and his foreign policy promises.

However, he now regrets his vote following the hard-line immigration tactics of ICE agents and the war with Iran. “I think the way that ICE has went about things hasn’t been the most humane way,” Bohlmann told the Times.

“When I was in the service, we talked about being able to be ready to strike at any given time to defend our people at any cost,” Bohlmann, an Air Force veteran, added. “I don’t like America attacking first.”

Bohlmann said he still planned to vote in the midterms but had not yet decided whom to support.

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One key reason Trump beat Kamala Harris in 2024 was his significant gains among young voters.

More than half (55 percent) of men between 18 and 29 backed Trump in the 2024 election, a 23-point shift from 2020, according to the Times’ analysis.

However, polls have frequently suggested that the president’s erratic second term and failure to deliver on promises to ease people’s financial hardships have caused the 80-year-old’s support among young people to crater.

Now, seven out of 10 men aged 18 to 29 disapprove of Trump’s job performance, according to an analysis of the final three New York Times/Siena University national polls.

Ranger Irwin, 22, of Las Vegas, Nevada, is one of those who believe Trump “didn’t follow through” on several of his promises.

“He really said he was going to be antiwar, and we’re in war in the Middle East again,” Irwin said. “The price of everything’s gone up; gas is getting ridiculous again.”

However, Irwin said he would still vote for Trump again if he could and planned to back Republican candidates in Nevada on Tuesday. “It’s not their decisions, it’s his decisions,” he said.

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Melissa Deckman, a political scientist and chief executive of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute, said people had read too much into Trump’s gains among young voters in 2024 and wrongly interpreted them as evidence of a historic shift toward conservatism among this demographic.

“I think a lot of people misread the results of 2024, viewing it as young men are suddenly becoming more conservative, that they’re sick of woke politics,” Deckman told the Times. “But a fundamental issue was the economy.”

In response, White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the Daily Beast: “President Trump is the unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party, and he is committed to maintaining Republican majorities in Congress.

“The choice has never been more clear: doubling down on President Trump’s winning, commonsense agenda or the Democrats’ extreme liberal policies and obstruction.”

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