The New Partisan Divide Is Old Gen Z vs. Young Gen Z

Politico

26-04-2025

New data out of
Yale's Youth Poll
broke the internet last week when it revealed a partisan split within Gen Z. Given a generic Democrat vs. Republican ballot for 2026, respondents ages 18-21 supported Republicans by nearly 12 points, while those ages 22-29 backed Democrats by about 6 points.
It was a stunning gap that undermined the longstanding notion of younger voters always trending more liberal. On the contrary, today's youngest eligible voters are more conservative than their older counterparts: According to the poll, they are less likely to support transgender athletes participating in sports, less likely to support sending aid to Ukraine and more likely to approve of President Donald Trump. Fifty-one percent of younger Gen Zers view him favorably, compared to 46 percent of older Gen Z.
That split might seem surprising, but it's only the latest example of an emerging dynamic I've noticed developing over the last few years: It's increasingly clear that there are actually two different Gen Z's, each with a particular political worldview.
Since just after the 2022 midterm elections, I've held listening sessions — open-forums for discussion — with teens and young adults across the country to find out how young people think and feel about politics. I've traveled to high school and college campuses, community centers and even homes. And
as I've written before
, these conversations with young people illuminated the distinctions between Gen Z 1.0 and Gen Z 2.0.
Gen Z 1.0, the older segment, graduated high school and tasted independence prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Their coming of age coincided with Trump's first term in office and the rise of anti-Trump resistance movements for racial justice and gender equity. Social media apps like Instagram and Snapchat, with all their filters and made-for-social media aesthetics, were commonplace — but TikTok wasn't yet the massively popular platform it is today.
Fast forward to 2020 through today, and those in Gen Z 2.0 came of age under different circumstances. They graduated high school during or after the start of the pandemic, which disrupted their K-12 experience. When many in this cohort began college, it was largely on Zoom, or in a campus environment that barely resembled pre-pandemic times. The political situation was also starkly different: With President Joe Biden in office, Trump and his MAGA movement felt like the counterculture — especially for young men, who swung hard to the right.
Indeed, gender played a prominent role in shaping the youth vote in 2024. An analysis by Blue Rose Research found a 20-point gender gap in Democratic support between men and women ages 25 and younger — the largest such gender gap in any generation by far. 'It's normal to see women supporting Democratic candidates at like a five- to 10-point higher rate than men do,' said Ali Mortell, Blue Rose's research director. 'Among the youngest cohort of Gen Z, it's north of 20 points. So this is really jarring, and I think, caught the Democratic Party somewhat flat-footed.'
That gender gap has attracted a lot of media attention, but the headlines gloss over some important nuances. While young men turbo-charged Trump's success in November, they're not the only Gen Zers shifting right. Despite the overall gender gap, the Yale poll found that, while women ages 22-29 have a net-negative favorability of Trump, those ages
18-21 are more supportive of him
, roughly split between a favorable and unfavorable view of the president. Young white women in particular are trending more conservative. Data from Tufts University's Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) shows that, while women of color ages 18-29 overwhelmingly supported former Vice President Kamala Harris,
young white women were split between Harris and Trump
, 49 percent to 49 percent. That's a huge jump from 2020, when, according to CIRCLE's data, young white women voted for President Joe Biden over Trump by a 15-point margin.
That could be in part because some of the most formative experiences separating Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0 cut across gender — the most obvious being the pandemic. 'We've definitely been cognizant that there feels like there's a change between the kids who got through high school before and after Covid,' said Jack Dozier, the 19-year-old deputy director of the Yale survey. 'There is a huge variation that came up between just the college-age young adults, and then the young adults who are over 22.'
In my own research, I started to hear about Covid's impact in conversations with young Americans in 2022. Throughout history, young people haven't liked being told what to do, and for many younger Gen Zers, the pandemic restrictions chafed against their youthful discomfort with authority. At first, they expressed annoyance with what they saw as prolonged social distancing on campuses that impacted the student experience. As one 20-year-old told me in a listening session at the end of March: 'The adults don't have it all together, and they don't have my back.' When students finally went back to school, they complained about the policing of their behavior — not just regarding Covid protections like social distancing and masking, but also broader issues around language. Our national online discourse, these young people said, had adopted an overt political correctness and cancel culture – the tendency, particularly in online spaces, to denounce others for controversial statements or action. Many young people perceived this as promoted by Democrats — those in control, not just in D.C., but in pop-culture and on social media.
As recently as late March, I checked in with a number of Gen Zers to see how they felt about cancel culture. Asked if it has been a net-positive or net-negative for American politics,
young adults told me
that, while there should be some social practice to hold people accountable for their words and actions, cancel culture limits freedom of speech and has the potential to radicalize those with already controversial opinions.
Beyond the impact of the pandemic on these younger Gen Zers, Dozier said the schism within Gen Z might stem from how young those in Gen Z 2.0 were during Trump's first term in office.
'In Trump's first presidency, these 18-year-olds were only nine or 10 years old, at least when the campaign started,' he said. 'We found that there's a potential causality from the reasoning that these 18- to 21-year-olds just don't quite remember the impacts of the first Trump presidency, whether that be in global isolationism or in a change in American politics.' Put simply, older Gen Zers had a sense of what they were getting themselves into by voting for Trump; younger ones didn't.
Meanwhile, news consumption has dramatically changed over the last few years. Dozier called the online landscape for Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0 'a whole different world of media.' Similarly, Ali Mortell, the director of research at the Democratic Blue Rose Research, credited Gen Z's rightward movement to a 'radical shift in the digital media environment,' adding that 'TikTok has exploded as a platform.'
While TikTok was around during the 2020 election, it really gained in popularity over the past five years and has become a go-to source for news and politics for young voters especially. When I conduct listening sessions with members of Gen Z, I ask where they get their news. TikTok is always at the top of the list. And while its mysterious algorithm feeds users' varying content, on the whole,
an internal review of the platform ahead of the 2024 election
found twice as many posts in support of Trump as those in support of Biden, signaling a mood shift on the app frequented by young voters.
'Young people are not only consuming digital media content, non-traditional sources at much higher rates than older generations, but they're increasingly getting their news from non-political, non-traditional sources,' Mortell told me. But she took it one step farther: 'We are seeing this very clear relationship between defection away from the Democratic Party and TikTok consumption.'
The rapid onset of TikTok encapsulates the head-spinning pace of change younger Gen Zers have experienced. There are cleavages within every generation, but perhaps none more so than Gen Z, which has grown up amid the fastest speed of technological and political change in recent memory. When it comes to their politics, time will tell if the rightward shift sticks. Until then, anyone trying to understand this generation's politics will need to figure out just which Gen Z they're asking about.