Recent polling shows zoomers swinging back toward Democrats in 2026, discouraging Republican hopes after the 2024 election that the youngest voters would form conservative-leaning views. But it’s far too early for Democrats to feel optimistic either.
Instead, we could be seeing a reversion to the mean of young people feeling simply alienated from politics altogether, as Kristen Soltis Anderson, co-founder of Echelon Insights, explained in a Substack live conversation with The Argument’s Lakshya Jain and VoteHub’s Zachary Donnini.
Young Trump voters “had kind of hoped that Donald Trump would come in and would fight for them. And it is not as though they now think that Democrats are going to fight for them. It’s just that they now think no one is fighting for them,” she said.
Of course, it’s not like Gen Z has it uniquely bad; by many metrics, it is the richest generation so far. But Anderson thinks that Gen Z’s propensity to get news on social media pushes it toward pessimism.
“If that’s the largest place where Generation Z is getting its political news, those algorithms just select for the negative so much more,” she said. “So, you’re not only feeling like, ‘Wow, I can’t afford rent; wow, groceries are expensive,’ but you also have this surround sound environment that’s constantly reinforcing to you: ‘Yes, everything sucks. You’re not losing your mind.’”
Check out the full video above to learn more about what is — and is not — driving young voters this election cycle. The crew also gets into the pros and cons of using focus groups instead of polls and why Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is “the best candidate Democrats have with young voters.”
