As Donald Trump’s presidency shoulders on, a curious thing is happening with the youngest cohort of American voters: Gen Z’s support for the president is crumbling, but they’re not swinging in favor of the Democrats — yet.
It’s an amplification of a more general trend in American society right now. Across every age cohort, tracking surveys are showing Americans are much more dissatisfied with how Trump is doing his job this summer compared to their feelings at the start of his term.
Among those aged 18-29, this swing is particularly dramatic — a 27 percentage point drop over the last six months, according to CBS News/YouGov polling, taking the president from a positive 55 percent approval rating among Gen Z in February to 28 percent in July.
At first glance, these polls suggest an answer to one of the open questions from the 2024 presidential election: Was the rightward lurch of young voters a one-off? Depending on the data source, Gen Z voters shifted anywhere from 6 points toward Republicans to 21 points in the 2024 general election, becoming much more Trumpy since 2020. A majority of Gen Z approved of Trump as he began his presidency. And now, these ratings suggest the youth might be experiencing some buyers’ remorse.
That might be true. But recent data from the Pew Research Center, and trends among the youngest American voters, complicate this picture. Just because the youth are souring on Trump doesn’t seem to suggest a rapid swing back to his opposition. Instead, it paints a worrisome picture of frustration and disengagement for both parties, as well as a reminder about the perils of relying on young voters to power political change.
The youngest cohort of Americans is still more Republican than their predecessors
Before we begin to look at data, some caveats. Polling of Gen Z people, in particular, tends to be especially noisy because of how hard it is to reach and form a good sample of respondents. It’s expensive and hard to reach young Americans. As opposed to polling Americans by race, partisanship, or income, you can’t really pinpoint where these folks are geographically, and it’s hard to get them to pick up a random phone call or respond to a text.
This introduces the problem of non-response bias, which is amplified by partisanship and political engagement — less engaged youth, or more conservative youth, might be less likely to respond to pollsters, or to answer truthfully.
Because of all of this, high-quality data that’s focused just on this set of Americans tends to come in less frequently than for other segments of the electorate. And when we do get numbers from big national polls, age subgroup samples in the crosstabs of those polls (the smaller, more specific categories of respondents) tend to be pretty small, making it easy to overread small percentage point movements or be shocked at drastic swings. As in election years, it tends to be smarter to look at averages, or overall trends, as opposed to month-to-month swings.
With that out of the way, what does the data show? Is the pro-Trump shift of 2024 durable among Gen Z? Is it holding steady this year? The answer is… sort of.
While Trump and his party are viewed more unfavorably now than they were at the start of his presidency, there’s still a significant share of Gen Z voters who trust him and the GOP over Democrats on a variety of issues. In a July survey by the Democratic-aligned Navigator research project, which included an oversampling of young voters to get a better sense of their views, Gen Z respondents were about evenly split between the parties on issues like immigration, Middle East foreign policy, and inflation. Democrats only had tiny advantages on jobs, taxes, and tariffs — though they had stronger support on issues like health care and the environment.
It’s the latest sign of something more durable about young Americans right now: 18- to 29-year-olds today are more Republican than in past years. According to the Pew Research Center’s National Public Opinion Reference Survey, which tracks changing attitudes and partisanship across the electorate, today’s 18- to 29-year-olds are much more evenly split between the two parties than in 2020. Five years ago, Democrats could rely on about an 18-point advantage in party affiliation. Today, that margin has shrunk to 6 points. Compare that to the 27-point advantage Democrats had among millennials seven years ago, and the shift becomes drastic.
These numbers suggest a level of durability to the Republican lean of young Americans now, Jocelyn Kiley, the director of politics research at Pew, told me.
“This movement that we’ve seen among this youngest group in a less Democratic direction, that shift that happened from the prior years to last year, seems to have held. There’s no evidence that it’s attenuating,” Kiley said. “This group is now fairly evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats, and that is not the way that millennials [behaved].”
And more importantly for the future, “at least in our data, there’s not a suggestion of a movement back to the Democratic Party among 18- to 29-year-olds,” Kiley told me.
What is driving this (essentially) toss-up status for young Americans is more of an open question. But there are some theories.
Voters’ remorse doesn’t necessarily mean a Democratic advantage, or a Republican lock
Underlying these swings is the particular wild-card status of the youngest, newest members of the electorate, Kiley told me: those who first voted in 2024 or who are just entering the electorate this year, and who are having their political views shaped right now by the omnipresence of Trump and his political movement.
“Many millennials came of age during Barack Obama’s presidency, or Obama’s first election. Today’s 18- to 29-year-olds are coming of age in a very different political moment and that’s certainly a factor in partisan identification. Many of these 18- to 29-year-olds don’t have a clear memory of a time before a Trump presidency,” she said.
Kiley echoed what Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, told me: The youngest voters feel particularly unmoored from political parties and pessimistic about politics, making them more likely to either vote out the party in power or disengage from politics.
“The biggest story for partisanship is the enormous segment of Gen Z who identify as independents, who don’t affiliate with either party, and I think that really does point to them being much more up for grabs than previous generations,” Twenge, the author of the book Generations: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—And What They Mean for America’s Future, said.
Twenge recently took a look at data from the national Cooperative Election Study and found that though Gen Z voters did swing drastically toward Republicans last year, they aren’t necessarily strong ideologues with strong corresponding conservative beliefs. This dynamic raises a conundrum for Trump and Republicans; though they were able to benefit from youth discontent with the Biden years and gain some degree of trust from new young voters, they can’t count on these voters remaining in their coalition or coming out to vote for them again in midterm elections. Republicans might be making policy decisions that turn Gen Z away. And at the same time, young voters continue to be disillusioned with the Democratic Party.
Twenge said that Gen Z seems inherently pessimistic, but, “Is it going to promote activism, or is it going to promote nihilism?” she asked. “I think it remains to be seen which one is going to prevail.”
This suggests Democrats might benefit from better engagement, listening, and responding to what young voters are communicating. Gen Z wants a better economic vision, elevation of young people and the phasing out of older party leaders, and, at least among young men, better inclusion within Democratic political movements specifically.The alternative is something Twenge has argued before: Gen Z is just never satisfied with how the status quo is working with either party, and reacts against whichever party is in power. This might be a boon for Democrats next year — but it could doom them in 2028 or beyond.
Source: vox.com
