The youth will not save us. It will be weeks—months!—before the Democratic Party finishes the autopsy of this destroyed coalition, but one thing is already clear: Gen Z, particularly Gen Z men, is a whole lot more right-leaning than a lot of us thought. A Tufts University analysis of voter surveys found that 56 percent of men between the ages of 18 and 29 voted for Trump. Biden won that same demographic by 6 points last cycle. Other exit-poll analyses depict a more complicated picture, with young people voting for each candidate at relatively equal margins, but that is still a far cry from the overwhelming numbers put up by young people for Obama, Kerry, and Gore. It was a rude awakening for many Democrats. The assumptions that they long held about the denizens of America’s future—that they would reflexively vote left, no matter what—were simply not true in 2024. And for some millennials, that amounts to a betrayal.
“Gen z gotta be the worst generation of all time,” wrote one aggrieved Kamala backer on Twitter, in the aftermath of her defeat. “Can’t read, can’t write, can’t add, can’t fuck, can’t joke, can’t dance, can’t dress, can’t drink, can’t smoke, can’t not elect a fascist conman.”
Others took a slightly different tack, adopting the language of generational warfare—targeting, for the first time, the zoomers in their wake, rather than the boomers in the distance. “Crazy how Millennials were the only ones to learn how to use computers and we apparently are also the only ones who learned to see through disinformation,” added Dylan, an additional member of the social media commentariat, clearly horrified by the disfiguration of his caucus.
A third poster put it more succinctly: “Zoomers going right is one of the most depressing things about this election. … For now it’s hard to feel like we aren’t gonna be locked in hell for the rest of our lives.”
It went on and on like this in the hours after Trump’s second ascendancy. There is always a search for a scapegoat after a decisive political defeat, because in those moments, every decision a losing candidate made is naturally magnified as the reason for their downfall. And it is true that the media has long believed that the youngest voters in the country would naturally be just as progressive as their predecessors. Gen Z will “change the world,” said Time in 2018, while a Newsweek contributor claimed that the up-and-coming generation was “uniquely dangerous to Republicans.”
That optimism was obviously misplaced. The conservative movement, at least within its terminally online meme-wars wing, has largely become the party of men who feel as though they’ve been marginalized by a society turned against them. And that includes young men. (A tweet last week by Stephen Miller, one of the wormiest members of the first Trump regime, calling Zyn-puckered boys to the polls en masse was a particularly unseemly omen of what was to come.) But frankly, from my vantage point, this realignment hasn’t taught me anything I didn’t already know about young people—and it especially hasn’t caused me to believe that Gen Z is uniquely corroded or propagandized or even all that materially different from the fresh-faced millennials we once were. The election of Trump reminds me that members of the youth, regardless of generation, are idealistic, impulsive, and uniquely susceptible to messaging that heralds them as a force that can change the world. That was certainly true when I watched Obama blow out McCain under the aegis of the artist Stephen Fairey. And I imagine that that was also true of the boys mainlining a noxious YouTube diet of Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro, who have drilled into them the idea that a vote for Trump is a vote for an assertion of their dignity—that they may remake America in their image, that the world will once again lie at their feet. It is a grim, faulty promise, but a promise nonetheless.
What exactly did the Harris campaign promise those same young men? Progressive youth voters have made clear their aversion to the brutal destruction in Gaza, while the incumbent rebuffed them, over and over again, with the status quo. The same could be said of many of the most popular causes of the 2020 primary: a minimum-wage increase and a more sensible health care apparatus, both of which were championed by Bernie Sanders, who—sorry, it must be said—received strong backing among the exact same constituencies from which Harris hemorrhaged votes. Gen Z women were clearly moved by Harris’ staunch support for abortion rights—they voted for her at a 58 percent clip, according to Tufts—but she waited until the final weeks of the campaign to go to bat for legalized recreational marijuana. Same with the Democratic PACs that attempted to exploit the frighteningly puritanical antiporn, antipleasure, and antisex fringes of the Trump coalition that have grown only more curdled and repellent in their four years out of power. It’s called a culture war for a reason. And at every turn, Harris didn’t seem eager to fight it.
There’s precedent for all of this. Reagan won the youth vote. So did Nixon. Trump’s claiming the mantle is hardly surprising. Those Republicans of yore succeeded in their party’s expansion by presenting a concrete set of policies to sway the insurgent generation to their side. (Nixon, for example, ran on ending military conscription before the 1972 election; a broad swath of college kids responded by deserting the Democratic nominee, George McGovern.) The calculus of the Trump camp is much darker—and more convoluted. It evokes a vision of America in which the perceived subjugation of young men is the fault of a radical gender agenda and unchecked immigration, the latter of which can be contained only by mass deportation and, I guess, the crypto industry. But that is far from a sturdy monolith. It can, and should, be easily conquered. All it takes is a platform that authentically offers something—anything—to youth voters. As they’ve proved, time and time again, they’ll listen.
