As the sun set on election day last November, the queue of students from Bethlehem’s Lehigh University stretched around the block. Some stood in line for hours to cast their ballots. For many, it was their first time voting.

In the eastern Pennsylvania town of three colleges and 22 schools, young people say they are inheriting a world that feels less stable and more divided than the one their parents knew — and they want to have their say in shaping it.

“They only had two polling spots and they didn’t anticipate the amount of young people that would be in line,” said 20-year-old Lehigh junior Tasfia Ahmad. “We knew what was at stake.”

A swing state, Pennsylvania was one of the few where the turnout of voters under 25 increased from 2020 to 2024. In Northampton County, which includes Bethlehem — and across the state — they swung to the right.

The shift in Bethlehem reflects a broader change among America’s youth. Less than a year into

Donald Trump ‘s second term, they are worried about the bitter political divisions that have seeped into their classrooms and ended friendships, and are uneasy about their future.

Liberty High School senior Brady Carvajal is one of them. His older brother introduced him to right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk’s podcast in his early teens, making him part of a nationwide contingent of young men who have gravitated towards male online influencers.

Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA who was shot dead on a Utah college campus in September, was an on-ramp for a generation of young conservatives — men in particular — speaking to their frustrations with the two main political parties. His organization has been widely credited with rallying support for Trump and for Christian nationalism in recent years.

Carvajal said he avoids discussing what he listens to or reads online. When he does “the tension definitely builds,” he said. “The lines have become easier to draw as people have become less moderate.”

Angel Castaneda, a 20-year-old architecture student, said he has noticed an uptick in right-leaning politics at Lehigh University. A member of the college’s young conservatives and president of Students for Life, a campus anti-abortion group, he said in the past he’d “had friends drop me for being conservative.”

Now, he said, attendance at his church has swelled — mostly with young men interested in a traditional values brand of conservatism.

They are part of a growing share of 18- to 24-year-old men identifying as Christian, with prominent figures on the right, including vice-president

JD Vance , converting to Catholicism as adults. “It really has to do with abortion, why men are going to church,” Castaneda said. “But they’re shutting women out. They believe women are inferior. That’s not what the church teaches.”

The gender divide is something 17-year-old Giada Watts has noticed in her class at Liberty High. She said many of the boys are interested in right-wing politics and influencers such as Andrew Tate, who she said preaches “disrespect towards women.”

This split was seen in last year’s election. A Times/Siena poll, conducted in six battleground states, including Pennsylvania, found young men aged 18 to 29 preferred Trump over Democratic candidate

Kamala Harris by 13 percentage points, while young women favoured Harris over Trump by 38 points — the largest gap of any age group.

Economic insecurity is a preoccupation of both genders. While Bethlehem — once one of America’s most prolific steel producers — has successfully navigated the decline in U.S. manufacturing, its young people are confronting an insecure future. The steelworks once provided reliable, well-paying jobs but “for my generation, that just didn’t exist anymore”, said 24-year-old Peter Capote.

Capote, a self-described “Reaganite Republican” who grew up just outside Bethlehem, said he feels left out of his home town’s post industrial economic boom.

“We’re getting priced out with housing, with food, with inflation in general. The difference between the winners and losers has become so blatantly higher than in the past,” he said.

His insecurity chimes with that of his peers. Nationally four in 10 young Americans under 30 say they’re “barely getting by,” while just 16 per cent report doing well or very well, according to a 2025 Harvard poll. Only half said they were confident that they would be financially secure, own a home or have children in the future.

At 17, Carvajal is already weighing how to balance saving for college with his monthly car insurance payments.

“Now that I’m an adult, I’ve been listening to a lot more about inflation and jobs rates,” he said. “I’m not sure I’m going to survive with this economy…I’ve always thought about, in the future, trying to own a house, how I’m going to be able to start a family . . . I don’t really know how I’m gonna be able to afford things like that in life.”

Carvajal’s school, Liberty High, is a legacy of Bethlehem’s prosperous past and was billed as one of the city’s “great achievements” when it opened more than a century ago.

Now the teenagers rushing through its halls reflect the region’s growing diversity and economic fragility. More than half of them qualify for free or reduced-price lunches, according to federal data. The school is nearly 50 per cent Hispanic — roughly five times the state average — and 10 per cent Black.

Carvajal’s father immigrated from Colombia at 18 and now works as a painter for the state. “He did it the legal way,” Carvajal said. “So he holds the view that people should do the legal process, just go through it, take the years it takes to get in.”

Immigration and how the U.S. should treat those without documentation divides Bethlehem students much as it splits the country as a whole.

In June, federal immigration officials arrested 17 undocumented migrants at a Bethlehem construction site, sparking waves of protests that rocked the city’s south side. The events mirrored scenes that have played out in cities around the country from Chicago to Los Angeles and Portland, Oregon, where masked ICE agents and national guardsmen have battled demonstrators protesting against deportation raids.

Carvajal has empathy for those who are fleeing poverty and violence in Central America, but said: “I don’t understand all these illegal border crossings.”

Evan Gray, a 19-year-old freshman at Moravian University, a private Christian college founded nearly half a century before Pennsylvania became a state, said a lot of the opposition to illegal immigration was down to fear of losing jobs to other workers.

“Young men have someone in their life with a blue-collar job,” he said. “They’re fearful that those jobs will be taken by these people.”

Still, Gray, a moderate Republican who grew up in a rural township outside Bethlehem, said he disapproves of ICE’s crackdown on law-abiding migrants.

Polina Dorman, 16, who described herself as “very left,” said she felt the border crises were exaggerated to cause division.

“People need help, [it’s] not that they’re causing destruction or that it’s one of the biggest issues that our country is having,” she said.

Dorman’s mother is Mexican and she has family along the southern border, so “it can be a little sensitive to me,” she added.

Her views are reflected across the country, with young voters largely opposed to the idea of removing immigrants who have arrived in the U.S. illegally. They also feel Trump’s deportation methods have gone too far, according to a New York Times/Siena poll.

Unease over some of the president’s policies is fuelling a drop in support for his administration among

Gen Z Trump voters across the U.S. A Pew Research report found that his approval rating among under 35s who voted for him had fallen by 25 percentage points since February — the largest decline in any age group.

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Castaneda is one of those who has changed his mind on Trump. “He hasn’t kept his promises,” the architecture student said. “He started a tariff war and now prices are going up. The government shutdown is stupid. I don’t know what he’s doing.”

“I’m very close to calling myself an independent,” he added.