Are kids, as the Who once said, alright? Well, not in the sense the Who meant. The kids are, on most measures, not alright. But, while politically they aren’t all right, more of them than most previous generations are. And more of them are getting that way.
We can confidently say that Gen Z got a lot more Republican over the last couple of years, thanks to a swarm of new, first-time young voters – specifically men of all races.
Pre-election polling captured this phenomenon, voter registration trends tracked it, and post-election exit polls suggest ballots reflected it. Add to this a recent report from the Democratic firm Catalist, which has produced some of the most definitive analyses of the 2024 election, and you start to get a pretty solid sense that young voters have shifted hard toward the Republican Party.
While the phenomenon is not as pronounced in Australia, there are signs that it’s coming down the pipeline. For much the same reasons.
The Gen Zs are, after all, the children of the Gen Xers. Like Gen X, who came of age in recession, quickly followed by ‘economic rationalism’ and mass unemployment, Gen Zs have been belted with the ‘New World Order’, 9/11, Forever Wars, Covid and ‘Build Back Better’.
It’s not quite so simple, though. There seem to be two cohorts of Gen Zers.
“Old Gen Z” – more Democratic, more progressive – and “Young Gen Z” – more Trump-curious and more skeptical of the status quo.
That internal split, roughly between those aged 18 to 24 in the latter camp and 25 to 29 in the former, hasn’t dissipated post-election; it is still showing up in polling and surveys. No cohort is monolithic, but a combination of factors – the pandemic, the rise of smartphones and newer social media, inflation, Trump – seems to be driving a wedge within Gen Z.
The political trajectory of Gen Z, and its internal fraction between ‘old’ and ‘young’ members, does two things. Each follows the other.
Firstly, they demolish the assumption that each successive generation is more left-wing than the last. Secondly, and as a consequence, they upend the assumption that a wave of younger voters will naturally benefit left-wing parties.
About a year ago, the Harvard Youth Poll, a public opinion project from that university’s Institute of Politics that has been recording young voters’ sentiments for more than a decade, tracked a major difference in the way voters under the age of 30 were feeling about Joe Biden and Donald Trump.
While Biden held a lead of 14 percentage points among adults aged 25 to 29, his lead among 18- to 24-year-olds was 10 points smaller. Support for Trump was higher among the younger part of this cohort by five percentage points in the March 2024 poll.
That dynamic remained true even after the Democrats switched to Kamala Harris as their standard-bearer. In the same poll conducted in September, the younger half of Gen Z voters continued to lag in its Democratic support compared to the older half.
They’re not being scared off by the Bad Orange Man occupying the Oval Office, either. Nearly half a year into the Trump presidency, Young Gen Z are more favourable to Republicans in Congress than Old Gen Z.
The same survey found Trump’s favorability is five points better with Young Gen Z than with Old Gen Z. And while both groups tend to be unaffiliated with either party, a slightly larger share of Young Gen Z, 26 per cent to 23 per cent for Old Gen Z, identifies with the GOP […]
Harvard’s poll isn’t the only one picking up this split in preferences. Yale University’s youth poll from April has tracked similar divisions in political identification and preferences, while other non-political polling from the Pew Research Center has tracked internal differences within Gen Z as well.
Young Gen Z is also turning back to the churches.
As I’ve reported before, young Gen Z men are holding on or returning to organized religion in rates high enough to slow down a decades-long trend toward religious dissociation in America.
They are outpacing older Gen Z and younger millennial men in identifying with a religion, per the Pew Research Center’s latest Religious Landscape Study. And in particular, among all Gen Z born between 2000 and 2006, a higher share, 51 per cent, identify as Christian than they did in 2023, when 45 per cent said so.
Which all has ramifications for the future, naturally. By 2030, Gen Z (Old and Young) will be the largest part of the electorate. The newest cohort of voters, voting for the first time in recent elections, were significantly more Republican than their predecessors. This cuts across other demographics: first-time black and Latino male voters shifted their votes to Trump.
Whether they’ll feel the same affection for Trump’s successor remains to be seen. But, on the evidence so far, the Democrats have a lot to be worried about.
