Since ours is a base-10 number system, and since tomorrow, Tuesday, marks the 100th day of Donald Trump’s second administration, it’s only natural that both the president and his enemies in the mainstream media would focus on it.

Trump, for his part, will be visiting a suburban Detroit community college to commemorate the event. At first, this might seem an odd place for such a celebration, given the strong historical tendency for young people to lean left. But a closer look at some of the numbers makes clear that this is by design.

First, a recent Yale Youth Poll shows a remarkable shift rightward among college-age voters. Buried with its findings is this tiny morsel: “Our results put the generic ballot for 2026 at D+1.6 with voters overall. Among voters 18-21, the generic ballot was R+11.7; among voters 22-29, it was D+6.4.”

It’s hard to believe, but, yes, according to the Yale poll, the college-age cohort — those age 18-21 — now favors Republicans by nearly 12 points. Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk calls it “the biggest generational shift in memory.” He notes:

This is an incredibly bullish empirical data point. This is your future. This is what is coming next. It is easy to believe that, oh, the next generation is nothing but a bunch of leftists, a bunch of communists, a bunch of Marxists. No, no, no. The work that we have been doing in the trenches, the harvest that we have been waiting for is here. And the Yale Youth Poll is further proving that this was not just a one-time Trump phenomenon in November. It is a bottom-up, youth-led, campus-focused, right-wing revolution.

Time will tell whether the Yale poll is an odd outlier, but those findings should be keeping the Democrats up at night. Think about it: This voting bloc came of age politically not under the hopey-change bromides of youthful Barack Obama but under the disastrous decrepitude of Joe Biden, so all they know of the Democrats is utter failure and cynical inauthenticity. To these people, the Democrat Party is deeply damaged goods. On the other hand, Trump is first and foremost authentic. What you see is what you get. No one is ever left to wonder where he stands on the important issues of the day. Just ask him, and he’ll tell you. Trump is also The Great Disruptor, and while the markets would much rather have a more moderate occupant of the Oval Office, young people tend to appreciate those who challenge the status quo.

Second, Trump is visiting Macomb County Community College, and Macomb County is the birthplace of the Reagan Democrats, the blue-collar types that the Gipper so effectively courted more than 40 years ago. Trump, the McDonald’s-munching blue-collar billionaire, has since dramatically remade the political map, and he wants to keep making inroads into traditional Democrat territory.

We should tap the brakes, though. According to the latest Harvard Youth Poll, just 15% of young Americans say they think the country is headed in the right direction, with 51% of those under 30 saying we’re on the wrong track and 31% unsure. So there’s still plenty of work to do.

But as J.T. Young writes at The Hill: “Over the last three years, Republicans have made notable gains with many demographic groups — from 27 percent to 36 percent among Hispanics and from 12 percent to 17 percent among Blacks. However, their improvement from 33 percent to 39 percent of young voters is especially significant. Not only has this been a particularly strong Democrat bloc historically, but age cohorts exhibit a pattern of becoming more conservative over time.”

Reason’s Robby Soave points to some other reasons why young people — Gen Zers in this case — have shifted rightward. “There should be no doubt that the Democratic Party’s prominent association with some of the worst policy choices of the last 10 years — from the perspectives of young people — is radicalizing Gen Z in a rightward direction. The Democrats, for instance, are the party that was much more closely associated with COVID-19 lockdowns, mandates, and importantly, school closures, which significantly disrupted the social lives of young people and clearly had severely negative consequences for their mental health and future prospects.”

Elections, it seems, have consequences. And so do ruinous policies.