Gen Z Isn’t the MAGA Generation After All

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Last month, Democratic pollster and strategist David Shor confidently declared to the New York Times’ Ezra Klein that, based on his own proprietary research, young voters are “potentially the most conservative generation that we’ve experienced maybe in 50 to 60 years.”

This alarming pronouncement was not supported by any of the existing public data before or after the election. The national exit polls, which are far from perfect but do provide a significant long-term dataset, showed Kamala Harris winning 18-to-29-year-olds by 11 points—a notable erosion from Joe Biden’s 24-point margin with the same cohort according to the 2020 exits, but certainly not evidence of a generation poised to vote Republican for decades. And in those exit polls, Harris actually did ever-so-slightly better with the very youngest voters in the 18-to-24 group than she did with those ages 25 to 29. But it’s also worth remembering that the further you drill into subgroup data of any individual poll, the higher the margin of error and the less confidence we can have in the results.

Now a new, long-awaited report from progressive data firm Catalist should put to rest the idea that Gen Z voters are all right-wingers. In fact, they’re still the most leftist age cohort in the U.S. electorate—and there are signs Republicans are already losing them.

Unlike a run-of-the-mill public opinion survey, Catalist’s postelection analysis is painstakingly created from voter file and census data in all 50 states, making their conclusions about subgroups in the electorate far more robust than the crosstabs of (for example) the latest Trump approval poll. And far from demonstrating the grip that MAGA has on America’s youth, the Catalist report, titled “What Happened in 2024,” shows that Kamala Harris won 55 percent of the 18-to-29-year-old two-party vote (a measure that excludes support for third-party candidates), down from Joe Biden’s 61 percent in 2020.

While that 6-point drop is double the erosion of Democratic vote share in the electorate as a whole, it is hardly evidence that an entire generation has turned hard-right. After all, 2024 was the best Republican performance in the national popular vote since 2004, and shifts to the right happened across virtually all sectors of the electorate. The declines for Democrats among Black (4 points), Latino (9 points), and even Asian American and Pacific Islander voters (4 points) tell a pretty consistent story of a national environment that was more challenging across the board for Harris, and the only nonwhite subgroup that she made marginal gains with was elderly Black voters. The dropoff in support from young voters was indeed among the largest and most consequential of the 2024 cycle, with a particularly worrisome 9-point collapse in support from 18-to-29-year-old men.

And there’s no question that the youth gender gap is pronounced, according to Catalist—young women’s support for Harris was almost 17 percentage points higher than that of young men. But despite their supposed affinity for hard-right podcasters and their media diet of toxic manosphere figures, men ages 18 to 29—who are overwhelmingly but not exclusively Gen Z—are still the most progressive group of men in any age cohort. And if anything, had Kamala Harris eked out a win last year, we would be talking about why the GOP is getting blown out with young women. Trump captured just 37 percent of the two-party vote among women ages 18 to 29, while Democrats scored 46 percent of men 18 to 29. Given that women live longer and vote more reliably (they were 54 percent of the electorate in 2024 according to Catalist), this actually seems like a much bigger problem for Republicans moving forward than it is for Democrats.

To be fair to Shor, his claim in the Klein interview was specifically about voters under 26. I reached out to Catalist to see if they offered data for smaller age cohorts, and the firm replied that “we didn’t think the subcategory breakdowns at that level had enough statistical power” to include in the report. But there’s little in their findings that would make Shor’s outlandish claim about Gen Z being the most conservative generation in decades remotely credible—and it’s also worth repeating that no other publicly available surveys, including the national exit polls, back up his assertions about young voters.

Though Catalist doesn’t include results on microgenerations, it would not be surprising if voters ages 18 to 21 saw the most pronounced rightward shift of all, given the deep unpopularity of the Biden administration. Because they had the least to fear from COVID, they may have been the most frustrated by how long it took parts of the country to return to normal following the acute phase of the pandemic in 2021–2022, the most bitter about the years of schooling and socializing that were tragically lost, and the most susceptible to isolation-driven radicalization.

Additionally, the perception that the Biden administration was rolling out the red carpet for new arrivals from places like Venezuela while neglecting Black and Latino communities may have been particularly damaging with young men from these groups. The Democratic vote share among young Black men did drop 10 points between 2020 and 2024, from 85 percent to 75 percent. The collapse was even bigger for young Latino men, who gave Joe Biden 63 percent of the two-party vote in 2020 but gave just 47 percent to Harris in 2024.

But despite all this, the biggest red flag in the Catalist data is one for Republicans. Biden’s presidency presented a huge opportunity for the GOP. Even going back to the 2019–2020 Democratic presidential primaries, young people voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders by staggering margins in every single Super Tuesday state over Joe Biden, whose candidacy was essentially foisted on them by older Democratic partisans. And then as president, Biden presided over simultaneous inflation and immigration crises that invited the same anti-incumbent backlash that afflicted nearly every post-pandemic governing party or coalition on the planet. His bigger problem with young people was that he positioned himself as the august steward of a long-vanished bipartisan status quo when young people have been saying for years that the country is on the wrong track and needs radical change. As his approval rating plummeted, particularly in 2023–2024 when it was consistently hovering between the 30s and 40s, Republicans had a rare chance to stage a takeover of incoming voters whose partisanship has not yet hardened and who are particularly susceptible to picking the opposition party over an unpopular incumbent.

But even at a time of profound unhappiness with Democratic governance, the GOP made improvements with but ultimately still could not outright win the majority of young voters. As they have in every single national midterm and presidential election going back to 2002, Republicans did worse with young people than with any other age cohort, a phenomenon I wrote about in my 2020 book The Kids Are All Left. It’s not that Democrats have been doing increasingly better with young people in election after election, but rather that 18-to-29-year-olds have voted to the left of the overall electorate (by margins that have bounced around in keeping with national left-right shifts from cycle to cycle) in all national elections since 2002. Despite popular misconceptions, youth radicalism has not always been real. As recently as 2000, George W. Bush earned an even split with Al Gore among voters 18–24.

The hard truth for the GOP right now is that by pursuing such a divisive and disruptive agenda during the early months of Trump’s second term, they have probably squandered their best opportunity of the entire 21^st century so far to decisively capture a group of incoming voters, or at least build on the momentum they showed with them in 2024. That’s because according to a large body of research, including most recently a 2023 study by political scientists Yair Ghitza, Andrew Gelman, and Jonathan Auerbach, voters are most impressionable and ideologically malleable in their teens and early 20s, and after that, “voter preferences become consistent, and political events hold considerably less weight.” In other words, once partisanship is set, for most people it is set for life no matter what the party in power does.

Therefore even to the limited extent that Republicans made worrisome inroads with the very youngest voters last year, they seem to have already blown it. According to YouGov’s tracking poll, Trump is now almost 20 points underwater with voters under the age of 30, a finding replicated in poll after poll administered following the president’s disastrous tariff rollout in April. That’s almost certainly not just down to the economic uncertainty created by Trump’s tariff Calvinball, but also because Republicans remain on the wrong side of youth public opinion on nearly every conceivable issue.

For example, 59 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds in the Spring 2025 Harvard Youth Poll agree that “Basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it,” a number that is close to its all-time high in that survey. In fact, every single Trump administration policy that Harvard polled is underwater with young folks, from attacks on DEI to tariffs to DOGE. That’s not how you score enduring gains with a group of voters. Even on the issue that Democrats have spent the most time litigating in a circular firing squad since November—trans women in youth sports—polling from Yale University shows that people 18 to 29 are split virtually evenly on the issue. While young people are less supportive of trans women in women’s sports at other levels, they are still far to the left of Americans as a whole.

If you compare the spring 2025 Harvard Youth Poll to the Spring 2017 edition that captures a similar moment—a newly inaugurated Donald Trump coming into office on the heels of an Democratic administration that was unpopular with young people—you don’t even see consequential shifts on the issues that Democrats are currently twisting themselves into pretzels about. In 2017, 32 percent of respondents said that “recent immigration has done more good than harm,” a number that dropped just 2 points—well within the survey’s 3.21 percent margin of error—to 30 percent in 2025. That doesn’t mean young people want open borders, but neither does it suggest that they support the kind of lawless and cruel immigration enforcement that the Trump administration has put front and center in 2025.

And while the youth gender gap should concern Democrats, it shouldn’t lead them to reverse course on issues like trans rights and immigrant rights. Moves like that would only reinforce the perception that the party has no principles and exists only to serve elites whose chief interest is in preserving the economic status quo. Instead, the party must do much more to reach young voters with vigorous, affirmative defenses of its core priorities, and to build out a media operation that meets young people where they are, whether that’s on TikTok or YouTube or some platform that this middle-aged writer has never even heard of.

Ultimately, the Trump administration’s ineptitude and venality is giving Democrats a fresh opportunity to define themselves to young voters. They should not fall into the narrative trap, pushed by a certain subset of the center-left commentariat for months now, that the way forward with young voters is to move right on issue after issue.