The Myth of the Gen Z Red Wave

The Atlantic

4 hours ago

Are the kids all right-wing? Donald Trump won the 2024 election thanks in part to increased support from young voters. Some experts see this as a sign of a generational sea change. As the prominent Democratic data scientist David Shor pointed out in a recent podcast conversation with the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, 75-year-old white men were more likely to support the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, than 20-year-old white men were. 'Young people have gone from being the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers, and maybe even in some ways more so, to becoming potentially the most conservative generation that we've experienced maybe in 50 or 60 years,' Shor said.
If Shor is right—if Gen Z (now ages 12 to 30) is durably to the right of previous generations—a significant part of the Democratic coalition is gone. Luckily for the party, however, he probably isn't. The best available evidence suggests that the youth-vote shift in 2024 was more a one-off event than an ideological realignment.
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The Cooperative Election Study, one of the largest politically focused surveys of Americans, goes back to 2006 and just released its 2024 data. Those data aren't perfect—they have yet to be validated against the voter file, meaning they are based on self-reported voter turnout. But they are still a much better source for studying generational shifts than data from just one year, like Shor's. The CES is also more comprehensive than the average election poll, asking about voters' ideological self-identification, party affiliation, and views on specific issues.
Consistent with other reports, the CES data show that young adults (ages 18 to 29) voted for Trump in 2024 at a much higher rate than they did in 2020. The trend was especially pronounced among young men, whose support for Trump increased by 10 percentage points since 2020, compared with 6 points for young women. Although some recent polling suggests that 18-to-21-year-olds were more likely to support Trump than 22-to-29-year-olds, the CES data show the younger and older subgroups voting for Trump at near-identical rates in 2024. Young adults were also more likely to vote for Republican House candidates than in 2020, though the change was not as large as in the presidential race.
But voting for a Republican candidate isn't the same as identifying as conservative. Here is where the CES data cast doubt on the notion that Gen Z is an especially right-leaning generation. According to my analysis of the CES data, young adults have actually become less likely to identify as conservative in surveys during presidential-election years since 2008. The trend is not due to increases in the nonwhite population; fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 (29 percent) than did in 2016 (33 percent).
What about young adults' positions on specific political issues? For the most part, they are more liberal than previous generations. (No single definition of generational cutoffs exists. In my research and writing, I define the Millennial generation as being born from 1980 to 1994, and Gen Z from 1995 to 2012.) In the 2024 CES survey, 69 percent of young adults supported granting legal status to undocumented immigrants who have not been convicted of felony crimes and who have held jobs and paid taxes for at least three years, up from 58 percent in 2012, the last year all 18-to-29-year-olds were Millennials. Also in the 2024 survey, 63 percent agreed that 'generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class,' up from 42 percent in 2012. Support for legal abortion among young adults rose from 46 percent in 2012 to 69 percent in 2024, though the question was worded somewhat differently in those two years. Only one belief shifted in the conservative direction: 62 percent of young adults in 2024 supported increasing border patrols at the U.S.-Mexico border, up from 45 percent in 2012.
From the May 2023 issue: The myth of the broke Millennial
The trend looks different if we look at data on partisanship rather than ideology. The Democratic Party has steadily been losing market share among young adults since 2008, mostly because young people have grown likelier to identify as independents; Gen Z is only slightly more Republican than Millennials were at the same age. These young independents tend to vote for Democrats, but, given their lack of party affiliation, their votes are more likely to swing from one election to the next. Indeed, most of the change over the past two elections appears to have been driven by young independent voters breaking for Trump in 2024 when they didn't in 2020.
Given that young voters have not become more likely to identify as conservative or hold broadly conservative political opinions, Gen Z might not be the disaster for Democrats that Shor and others are predicting. The 2024 election might have been an anomalous event in which young people's deep dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the inflation that hit their just-starting-out budgets, drove them to want change.
Another distinct possibility is that, going forward, Gen Z will vote for whichever party is not currently in office. Gen Z is a uniquely pessimistic generation. In data I analyzed for my book Generations, Gen Z high-school seniors were more likely than previous generations at the same age to agree with the statements 'It is hard for me to hold out much hope for the world' and 'I often wonder if there is any real purpose to my life in light of the world situation.' Young Americans today are also unconvinced that their country is anything special: Only 27 percent of high-school seniors think the U.S. system is 'still the best in the world,' down from 67 percent in the early 1980s, according to a long-running national survey.
If young people's attitudes persist as they get older, Gen Z might never be pleased with how things are going in the country. They'll want to 'vote the bastards out' in the next election no matter which party is in power. Compared with the idea of a new and persistent conservatism in young voters, a generalized pessimism bodes better for the Democrats in 2026 or 2028. But if Democrats regain power, Gen Z might turn on them once again, repeating the cycle in an endless loop of political dissatisfaction.