Dear Young People, I Also Voted Wrong the First Time
- john raymond
- 1 minute ago
- 4 min read
I know the feeling many of you are trying to name. The embarrassed silence. The defensive reflex. The creeping realization that you were not merely “disappointed,” but wrong—and that your wrongness had consequences for yourself as well as for other people. If you voted for President Trump or you gave him the benefit of the doubt and now feel that doubt curdling into anger, I am not here to sneer at you. I am here to tell you something simpler and harder: I did it too.
I voted for George W. Bush in the 2000 election—the 1999–2000 cycle. It was a foolish thing to do, the kind of mistake young voters make when they confuse a pitch with a plan, a posture with a moral compass, and confidence with competence. I did not have a fully developed model of power yet. I did not understand how a movement can treat the country as a stage set, then bill you for the fire when they set it all aflame.
And here is the part you need to hear without the usual sanctimony: you do not become an adult because you avoid every mistake. You become an adult when you update your beliefs—when you admit mistake, trace the mechanisms that produced it, and refuse to repeat it.
The reason I can guess your internal life is we have external measures: polling shows young Americans have turned sharply against President Trump in his second term. In the Economist/YouGov poll conducted February 6–9, 2026, only 25% of 18–29-year-olds approved of President Trump’s job performance, while 67% disapproved. Harvard’s Youth Poll, fielded November 3–7, 2025, put President Trump’s approval among 18–29-year-olds at 29% overall (32% among young men, 26% among young women). That is not a “kids these days” mood swing. That is a broad rejection.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Pew’s late-January 2026 national survey (fielded January 20–26) found President Trump’s overall approval at 37%, and Americans saying—by more than two-to-one—that his administration’s actions have been worse than they expected.
CBS’s longitudinal analysis of 2025 polling described a steep drop among 18–29-year-olds from the early “honeymoon” period into mid-year. Beyond toplines, even the softer, human evidence is pointing the same direction: Navigator Research focus groups of 2024 Trump voters who now express regret describe feeling “duped,” embarrassed, and surprised by what the term has actually looked like in practice.
Call it buyer’s remorse. Call it political maturation. Call it the end of a fantasy. The label does not matter. What matters is that the update is real.
Now we have to talk about the mechanism—because if you do not understand why you voted wrong, you are not finished voting wrong.
The first mistake young voters make is thinking voting is a personality test. It is not. It is threat modeling. It is institutional engineering. It is deciding who gets leverage over the bureaucracy, the courts, the security state, and the information environment. When you do not understand that, you overweight aesthetics—“strength,” “authenticity,” “trolling the right people”—and underweight structure—appointments, enforcement, normalization of lawlessness, and the slow poisoning of shared reality.
That is why the Raymond Method matters here, even in a personal essay:
Pillar One—Regime Security—says the central question is never the campaign slogan; it is what preserves the leader’s power.
Pillar Two—Asymmetric Warfare—says you should expect misdirection, chaos, and narrative sabotage as tools, not byproducts.
Pillar Three—the Byzantine Traitor-General paradigm—says a system can be defeated from within by enablers who wear the uniform while serving the wrong cause.
In that world, “I didn’t think he’d go that far” is not a defense; it is the predictable result of treating an asymmetric actor like a normal one.
If you voted for President Trump, you were not uniquely stupid. You were predictably targeted. Movements like his recruit first-time voters by selling a simplified story: your pain has one villain, your anger is proof of your clarity, and your vote is a brick through a window. Then you learn—too late—that when you throw bricks at institutions, the only people with helmets are the ones in power.
This is where my old Bush vote becomes useful. The value is not confession-as-performance. The value is instructional: I can tell you what it feels like to wake up after the fact and realize you were used.
I can also tell you the one thing that does not work—self-pity. “I was young” is an explanation, not absolution. You do not get to dissolve the consequences into a coming-of-age narrative and move on unchanged. You have to become the kind of person who does not need to be protected from your own fucking votes.
So here is the constructive takeaway. The moral failure is not making an early mistake. The moral failure is refusing to correct it. You correct it by doing what most people avoid: you make your beliefs legible. You demand evidence. You learn to separate “policy” from “performance.”
Most importantly, you stop treating politics as theater and start treating it as governance. You show up in the elections that do not come with fireworks. You also pull your friends out of the algorithmic trap that feeds them grievance and calls it insight. You do the unglamorous work of democracy, because the alternative is letting the most shameless people in the country destroy your future.
If you are young and you voted wrong the first time, you are not condemned. You are responsible.
That is not an insult. It is an open door to a better world.
Walk through it.