Milan Singh

In the spring of 2025, a poll out of a New Haven college campus landed on the screens of people who get paid a lot of money to predict elections. The youngest voters, ages 18 to 21, said they favored the Republican in the 2026 midterms by 12 points. Their slightly older siblings, the 22-to-29 crowd, leaned Democratic by 6. Same generation. Opposite directions. The person who designed that survey was not a tenured professor or a network analyst. He was an undergraduate named Milan Singh, and the poll was his.

Today Singh is a writer and pollster based in Washington, DC, a fellow at The Argument, and the founder and director of the Yale Youth Poll. The work he does sits in an awkward, useful place: somewhere between the academic who wants the methodology airtight and the columnist who wants the finding to land. He is good at both, which is rarer than it sounds.

The Yale Youth Poll is the thing that put his name in front of a national audience. It is not a vanity project that lucked into a headline. It is a recurring, public, downloadable survey, complete with a data explorer that lets anyone dig through the crosstabs themselves rather than take his word for it. That detail tells you something about how he operates. He does not ask you to trust the conclusion. He hands you the spreadsheet.

That quote is the whole worldview compressed into one sentence. The political press loves a clean generational story: young people are the future, the future is progressive, therefore young people are progressive. Singh's numbers kept refusing to cooperate. More 18-to-22-year-olds called themselves liberal than in any older cohort, yes, but a stubborn 40 percent called themselves conservative too. The generation was not marching anywhere as a bloc. It was splitting, and the split ran right down the middle of the youngest voters themselves.

Cambridge to New Haven

He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which is to say he grew up surrounded by the assumption that smart and left-leaning were the same word. That is useful background for a person who would later spend his time poking holes in tidy narratives. At Yale he enrolled in Pierson College and studied economics, gravitating toward applied econometrics and industrial organization. The econ training matters. It is the difference between someone who reports a poll number and someone who knows what a confidence interval is hiding.

His writing started early and never really stopped. By his sophomore year he was a columnist for the Yale Daily News; later he ran its Opinion section as editor before returning to the column. Along the way he stacked up bylines and internships at a clip that would embarrass most people twice his age: researcher at Slow Boring, social policy intern at the Niskanen Center, a data science stint at Decision Desk HQ, plus work touching Blueprint Research and WelcomePAC.

The economist who keeps showing up in politics

Read across his published work and the range is the giveaway. Inflation. Housing. Artificial intelligence. Fracking. Gambling. Antisemitism in the electorate. Higher education policy. These are not the obsessions of someone working a single beat. They are the curiosity of someone who treats the economy and the electorate as the same puzzle viewed from two angles, and who is willing to write the explainer nobody else wants to write because the numbers are annoying.

His Yale thesis is the tell. While the polling drew the cameras, he was quietly writing up the impact of the 2018 to 2024 tariffs on U.S. manufacturing employment - a genuinely hard empirical question that resists slogans from either party. That is the through-line. Tariffs and turnout are both stories people tell themselves with too much confidence and too little data. Singh keeps choosing the data.

Why people listen

When the American Enterprise Institute wanted to understand why the youngest Gen Z voters were drifting rightward, it did not call a campaign consultant. It called Singh, and put him on its podcast to walk through the crosstabs. That is an unusual sentence to write about someone who was, at the time, still finishing a bachelor's degree. The reason is simple. He had the receipts and he was willing to say the unfashionable thing out loud, which in his case was often the deflating thing: the trend is real, but it is smaller and messier than the headline wants it to be.

There is a useful humility baked into how he frames findings. He is quick to tell you what a poll cannot prove, which is exactly why people believe him when he tells you what it can. In a field crowded with confident takes, the guy hedging in the right places stands out. He published more than 30 articles across The Argument, Slow Boring, the Yale Daily News, the Niskanen Center, and CommonWealth Beacon, and the consistent note across all of them is a refusal to oversell.

What's next

He graduated from Yale in 2026 and moved to Washington to keep doing the thing full time, writing about polling and politics as a fellow at The Argument. The Yale Youth Poll continues, including late-2025 work on the prevalence of anti-Israel and antisemitic views in the electorate - more uncomfortable terrain handled with the same insistence on showing the data. The bet he is making with his career is that rigor still has a market: that readers and editors will reward the person who counts carefully over the person who shouts confidently. So far the bet is paying.

The most interesting thing about Milan Singh is not that he is young and accomplished, which is true but boring. It is that his entire body of work is a quiet argument against the easy story. Give him a generation everyone has already labeled, and he will hand you back a spreadsheet that complicates the label. That is a useful person to have around.