On April 17, President Donald Trump spoke at Turning Point USA’s “Build the Red Wall” rally in Phoenix, an event designed to energize the Republican base for the midterm elections and marketed as proof of youthful conservative momentum. News coverage from the event described visible empty seats and a crowd older than advertised.
Still, the scene raised a perplexing question. If most college-age Americans lean left, what explains the young conservative mind?
Recent polling from the Yale Youth Poll found that 68% of voters aged 18 to 22 and 72% of voters aged 23 to 29 disapproved of Trump’s job performance. Democrats also held clear leads among those age groups. Whatever the noise online, the median young voter is not on the right.
On most American campuses, being a conservative is a genuine minority position. At Dartmouth, that reality is measurable: a 2025 survey of graduating seniors conducted by The Dartmouth found over two-thirds of respondents identified as liberal or very liberal, while about 11% identified as conservative or very conservative. Research has shown that conservatives sometimes exaggerate campus hostility, but they do not invent ideological asymmetry. At many colleges, the better description is imbalance, not oppression.
But imbalance can produce its own distortions. Much recent commentary explains young conservatism primarily through online media ecosystems and contrarian identity. The standard account goes something like this: grievance, recalcitrance, consumption of right-wing media, a taste for provocation. That is true about some students. Applied broadly, though, it becomes condescending and incomplete.
A meaningful share of young conservatives are still motivated by ideas, not merely backlash. Surveys consistently find that conservatives are more likely to favor smaller, decentralized government and private-sector solutions over new bureaucratic programs. Those views suggest a skepticism of concentrated power and a preference for decentralized or market-based solutions.
They also notice things many peers would rather ignore. Universities speak constantly about equity and justice while remaining among the most hierarchical and economically exclusionary institutions in American life. Tuition and fees at private colleges have risen dramatically over recent decades, even after inflation.
They notice, too, that progressive politics at its institutional worst can substitute moral performance for practical effectiveness. The question “Does this policy work?” is often outweighed by “Does supporting it signal the right values?” Critics point to administrative growth and a long decline of public confidence in higher education as evidence that values language alone cannot substitute for results. Skepticism toward that substitution is not callousness. It is a different standard of evidence.
Then there is the question of young conservative men, who are often mocked rather than spoken about seriously. Across much of the developed world, young men are moving right while young women move left. Analysts at the Brookings Institution and comparative researchers abroad have documented widening political gender gaps among younger voters.
Many young men feel left out of the main cultural conversation. That sentiment is especially common among those without college degrees. Young men now trail young women in higher education, and surveys show widening political gaps between the sexes. If one movement treats a young man as a problem and another treats him as a protagonist, the appeal is not hard to understand.
That helps explain the draw of groups like Turning Point USA. They often sell conservatism less as a governing philosophy than as an identity package: anti-elite defiance, masculine energy and the promise that your frustrations are real and someone else finally sees them.
But another faction of young conservatism is driven less by principle than by performance. In a left-leaning environment, being right-wing can feel rebellious. One can mistake provocation for courage and contrarianism for thought. To annoy a professor, scandalize classmates and call it bravery has always had a market. On some campuses, conservatism can become less an ideology than a personality brand.
Young conservatism, in other words, is not one thing. The serious policy skeptic is not the campus troll. The religious traditionalist is not the online reactionary. The civil libertarian is not the student who treats politics as content creation. Treating them as one type obscures more than it reveals.
At Dartmouth, as at many colleges, these tensions appear in miniature. The Dartmouth Review endures because minority viewpoints, especially when they feel culturally embattled, they often become louder and more cohesive than their numbers suggest.
The left should be careful. If every conservative student is dismissed as damaged, backward or cruel, progressives will simply confirm the story many young conservatives already believe: Elite institutions preach openness while practicing contempt.
Conservatives should be careful too. Permanent victimhood is not courage. Performative outrage is not depth. “Owning the libs” is not a political philosophy, and reactionism is not discourse.
Most college students still lean left because education, pluralism and reality often push them there. But, importantly, the young right persists because some of its critiques are legitimate, some of its identities are attractive and some are responding to neglect others would rather deny.
If we want to understand the conservative college student, the starting point is simple: Take the ideas seriously before reaching for the psychology. Then argue with those ideas honestly.
Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.
