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They work stocking shelves despite having a college degree. They can’t afford a plane ticket home for Thanksgiving or even a meal at the fast-food chain where they work. They pay $90 to fill their pickup’s gas tank , vastly more than they did a year ago.

Young voters cited those economic pressures in turning on President Trump’s party Tuesday, and along the way positioned themselves as a potential new force in American politics. Their frustration, underlined by a sense that the traditional milestones of adulthood have moved well out of reach, helped drive the sharpest political realignment of any age group.

“The Democrats are finally hearing our voices and starting to cater and campaign on issues that actually affect young people and working-class Americans,” said 23-year-old Gavin Jacobsen , who cast his first ballot this year, voting for Democrats across the board by mail in rural Jackson, Minn., where he grew up. Until this year, he said no candidate or party represented him.

Americans ages 18 to 29 swung toward House Democrats by more than 20 percentage points compared with 2024, according to the AP Voter Poll by SSRS. The shift was sharpest among young adults without a college degree as well as white and Hispanic men under 30—groups that helped return Trump to power two years ago.

Youth turnout matched levels for the 2022 midterms at 27%, according to a preliminary estimate by Circle at Tufts University, a center that studies youth voting. While 16% of young 2024 Trump voters flipped directly to a Democrat, many others simply stayed home.

“I cannot imagine a future election in which campaign managers and politicians don’t have young people in mind,” said Circle Executive Director Leela Strong .

Many of Jacobsen’s friends back in Minnesota are Trump supporters who told him they sat out the midterms because of the president’s unmet promises.

Jacobsen’s vote was motivated by his roughly $120,000 in student loans and by his family’s struggle to get by. His father, a high-school teacher who coaches three sports for extra income and his stepmother, a dental hygienist, couldn’t rationalize the $500 ticket to fly him home from where he is in school in Los Angeles this year for Thanksgiving.

“In the richest country in the world, my parents are working multiple jobs and can’t afford to eat with their son,” he said. “That’s a huge problem.”

Jacobsen worries about finding a job when he completes his sports business graduate program in June, especially after watching his roommate struggle to land a full-time job in the five months since he graduated.

“Unemployment rates for Americans under 18 to 29 are still roughly 1 percentage point higher than prepandemic levels, averaging 7% so far in 2026. Wage growth for early-career workers ages 16 to 24 has decelerated to its slowest pace in over a decade, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.

“Young people are feeling that the ground has shifted out from under them,” said University of Michigan economics and public-policy professor Betsey Stevenson . “The economy has not been trustworthy in delivering a predictable path.”

Young men’s economic prospects have trailed women’s in recent years amid declining male college enrollment, the automation of blue-collar work and job growth largely concentrated in female-dominated fields such as healthcare. Republicans tapped that anxiety to pull young men rightward in 2024. On Tuesday, Democrats reversed that momentum with an economic pitch of their own.

“Young men are the new swing voters in American politics,” said Richard Reeves , president of the American Institute for Boys and Men. Democrats focused this time on this group’s stalled economic progress rather than on cultural debates that cast men as the problem in American society. “They focused on the issues young men care about,” Reeves said.

Joshua Evans , a 26-year-old in Kannapolis, N.C., who voted for Trump in 2020 and 2024, skipped Tuesday’s election because he feels so let down by Republicans’ failure to use their control of the White House and Congress to make good on their campaign promises. “The Republican party took for granted their base of young Gen Z men,” he said.

Evans took on more than $40,000 in student loans for a journalism and communications degree, but hasn’t been able to find a job in his chosen field. He now stocks shelves at a big box retailer for $21 an hour, and puts close to $1,000 a month toward his debt. He rents a house with his sister, and views his dreams of eventual homeownership as out of reach. He didn’t “expect to become a millionaire” under Trump, he said. But he did expect the president to work to bring down gas and grocery prices. Instead, Evans watched the war in Iran push them higher.

Evans still considers himself a Republican. But he hasn’t decided whether to vote for one in the next election either.

Half of voters under 30 said they were financially worse off than two years ago, according to the Voter Poll, a higher share than any other age group. Young voters were more likely than their elders to say they had suffered hardship because of inflation and more likely to blame rising prices on Trump’s policies.

Just 42% of under-30 voters who supported Trump in 2024 now approve of his job performance and nearly one in five young Trump voters said their vote on Tuesday was to express opposition to the president.

Beyond inflation, Democrats tapped into a newer source of anxiety among young voters: the physical and financial footprint of the artificial-intelligence boom . Some young people see data center build-outs as driving up energy costs and competing for land that houses could be built on, and as symbols of diminishing prospects for finding high-earning jobs.

Xavier Sepesi, an 18-year-old college freshman and bank teller in Kansas City, Kan., cast his first vote ever for Democrats after seeing his local race polarize around data centers. “I don’t see them benefiting us as a community or the planet at all,” said Sepesi.

Sepesi, who is Hispanic and lives in a diverse working-class neighborhood, watched friends and bank customers grapple with the deportation of loved ones under stepped-up immigration enforcement. While his own family wasn’t directly targeted, seeing families separated reinforced his decision to back Democrats. “I just don’t think that was right,” he said.

In the suburbs north of Columbus, Ohio, Grayson McCartney, 19, and Abby Brookover, 18 also voted for the first time on Tuesday, for the Democratic ticket. McCartney, who works at Arby’s, would like to attend college but can’t imagine how to afford it. He is also trying to save to rent his own apartment so he can move out of his dad’s house, but prices are beyond his reach.

“I can barely even get fuel for my truck to make it to work there and back,” he said. McCartney would like to see elected officials provide more financial support for young people to attend college, and to offer more loan forgiveness.

Brookover, who is paying her own way through the local university, Ohio Wesleyan, with a scholarship and a loan, said she remembers better times under the Obama administration, when her parents weren’t struggling as much as they do now.

“The spike in gas prices, the spike in food. It’s so expensive. We can’t eat at Arby’s anymore,” Brookover said.

If Democrats fail to make improvements on the economic issues young people care about before the next presidential cycle, the youth electorate, especially men, could desert them just as quickly.

“The very swinginess of this group should make everyone cautious,” Reeves said. “You don’t win them permanently. You have to keep winning them.”

Write to Rachel Wolfe at rachel.wolfe@wsj.com