You know the adage: Young people don’t vote. But that adage actually has some truth in it. Young voters have been underrepresented in almost every election since 1971, when the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18. While it’s true that young voters have periodically played decisive roles in certain elections, like in 2008, when young voters enthusiastically voted for Barack Obama, or in 2020, when they were a prominent part of Biden’s coalition, there has never been a youth voting bloc in the United States big enough to wield significant electoral power. Expanding the electorate has been the white whale of progressive politics for a long time. Young voters are progressive, the conventional wisdom goes, if only they would go to the polls.

In the past year, two marquee elections have upended that wisdom: the 2024 presidential election, when young voters shifted decisively to the right from previous years, and Zohran Mamdani’s historic mayoral primary win in New York City, where he not only won young voters decisively but convinced enough of them to turn out in higher numbers than any other age group. Mamdani is polling ahead of any other candidate in the general election by double digits, and will likely win in November. A few other mayoral races seem to be following suit. From a bird’s-eye view, the movement seems strong enough to raise the question: Could this be the beginning of a new, ascendant youth bloc? Or at the very least, are there lessons we can learn from the way young people turned out in these elections?

Here’s my irritation as an Xennial: We’re going to go from a gerontocracy that gets the vapours when anyone suggests housing has gotten unaffordable to people who never experienced a single-income household supporting a family of six with two cars – and no college degree.

People of my age were never given power, and so our story – pensions, vacation that rolled over – of things that were just standard doesn’t register anywhere in politics.

Younger generations understand the social contract is broken … they just don’t realize how high the starting point was.