Can Dems Win Back Gen Z Voters? Yes— But Not If They Keep Nominating Corporate-Friendly Candidates

I think most Democrats— and anyone who fancies themselves sympathetic to the resistance— would agree with Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear: “I think that Governor Newsom bringing on different voices is great, we shouldn’t be afraid to talk and to debate just about anyone. But Steve Bannon espouses hatred and anger, and even at some points violence, and I don’t think we should give him oxygen on any platform, ever, anywhere.” And I think anyone who watched the disgrace of Schumer’s support of the GOP continuing resolution would agree with AOC: “There are members of Congress who have won Trump held districts in some of the most difficult territories in the United States; who walked the plank and took innumerable risks in order to defend the American people...just to see some Senate Democrats even consider acquiescing to Elon Musk. I think it is a huge slap in the face, and I think that there's a wide sense of betrayal.”

The two statements brought to mind a piece by Joshua Cohen The Nation ran a few days ago, Why Democrats Are Losing My Generation. There was a 20 point shift towards the GOP in 2024 among the country’s youngest voters. It cost Kamala the election, cost the Democrats a few seats in the House and “it signaled the potential destruction of one of the Democratic Party’s most cherished narratives. Throughout the trials and tribulations of the Trump era, consistent Democratic strength… a major source of long term optimism among liberal politicians and voters alike. While Trump’s strength among the shrinking pool of old and white voters might have been enough for him to narrowly win in 2016, it was said, his inability to win the voters of the future meant that he and his movement were living on borrowed time. But by making massive gains with these exact voters in 2024, Trump completely reversed this dynamic, seemingly claiming the future liberals expected to be theirs.”

It would only be in 2008, however, when the bottom truly fell out for Republicans and the youth vote. Obama won young voters in a complete landslide, and he did so for reasons beyond his often-cited youth and innovative campaign tactics. Although Obama was more effective at reaching young voters than McCain, he also benefited from the fact that the cohort had become significantly more left-leaning than practically every other age group over the course of the Bush administration. After eight years of failure and amid the biggest recession in 80 years, they had become extraordinarily supportive of government intervention in the economy, nearly-unanimously opposed the Iraq War, and were far more likely to describe themselves as liberal than any of the generations before them. In addition to all of this, they were also the most diverse age cohort by far, the fact of which made them naturally favorable to an Obama campaign that did extraordinarily well among Black and Latino voters.

All of these factors would stick over the next four years of Obama’s presidency, allowing him to once again decisively carry the youth vote in 2012 (albeit by a reduced margin). As in 2008, the new class of youth voters in 2012 held attitudes that were significantly to the left of the rest of the population.

Looking back now, it’s not hard to see why this was the case. To these new voters, conservatism was defined by the failed presidency that they grew up under, while liberalism was represented by the young, hip, charismatic leader who fought against it. Economically, the challenges they faced in a high-unemployment post-recession job market naturally oriented them toward liberal policies. Culturally, their values of acceptance put them at odds with a socially conservative GOP. Their experience watching repeated foreign policy catastrophes made them more skeptical of hawkish Republican positions than their elders.

Had Democratic elites chosen to meet this class of voters where they were, they might have had a much easier time dominating the youth vote for years to come. But Democrats didn’t meet these voters where they were. Instead, they went backward from Obama by rallying behind the more centrist, establishment-oriented Hillary Clinton. This move sent young Democrats— who, at this point, represented young voters more broadly— rallying strongly in the primary behind the self-declared socialist Bernie Sanders, whose focus on economic issues matched their concerns far more closely than Clinton’s potpourri of hawkishness and cynically deployed identity politics. Although Clinton and her campaign worked relentlessly to outflank Sanders on cultural issues, her efforts hardly made a dent in his support among his pocketbook-focused youth base.

Had Clinton gone on to significantly regress with young voters in the general election afterwards, there would have been an obvious explanation as to why. While Obama and Sanders represented a new politics of outsider energy and economic liberalism, it could have been said, Clinton didn’t, and young voters rejected her because of it. But, in the end, she didn’t. Even after her failure to win over young voters in the primary, and even as she shed support from countless traditionally Democratic areas, Clinto still handily defeated Trump among young voters in 2016.

Four years later, an even-older Biden would do the same, also handily winning young voters in the general election after also losing them by dramatic margins to Sanders in his primary. Clearly, a great number of youth voters were able to hold their noses and vote for an establishment Democrat they did not necessarily like when Trump was the alternative.

Why did things change so dramatically in 2024? The reason is that the failures of the Biden era changed everything. To understand how, put yourself in the perspective of a voter my age; e.g., someone born in the early 2000s. When we grew up, the Democratic Party was defined by a charismatic leader who oversaw a growing economy and ended his term with strong approval ratings. When we came of age, we came to know a Republican Party defined by an unpopular, flailing Trump whose weak leadership defined the most traumatic period of our lives (the pandemic). We had never known a popular Republican president or an unpopular Democratic one.

But when Biden’s administration burst into flames, it marked the first time since Jimmy Carter that voters our age came to know Democrats through an administration under which their  standard of living declined. And when retrospective evaluations of Trump’s first term turned positive, it marked the first time since Reagan that young voters could look back on a Republican administration they knew that wasn’t abjectly hated. The dynamic that had dominated the way that people our age had understood politics for 20 years had been completely reversed for us. Operating with the limited frame of reference available to us, we then swung strongly toward the same exact candidate that people our age rejected decisively in the prior two elections.

What can be done about this? Did Biden’s failures poison the well for his party among Gen Z in the same way that Bush’s failures did for Republicans with millennials?

History indicates that there’s a chance that it could, as millennials were far from the only generation to have their lifetime views shaped by the politicians they grew up under. As the New York Times reported in a fascinating 2014 study about the influence that someone’s birth year has on their politics, there is almost a century of data showing that political sentiment is profoundly influenced by first impressions. According to the study, most voters who were born in 1941 and came of age under the popular President Eisenhower gained lifelong pro-Republican views. Those born in 1951, meanwhile, were substantially more liberal throughout their lifetimes as a result of the combined unpopularity of the Vietnam War and Richard Nixon. These trends only continued in future decades, from the Gen Xers who grew up under Reagan having Republican leanings all the way to our aforementioned Bush-scarred left-leaning millennials. In the worst case scenario for liberals, Biden could have the same kind of long-term impact on Gen Z that past unpopular presidents have had on the young voters who saw them fail, turning our age cohort into (relative) conservatives for decades to come.

Still, and quite mercifully for Democrats, there’s a chance that Biden could prove to be less influential than his predecessors on the views of young voters. One thing in his favor: as unpopular as he was, he never reached the depths of Richard Nixon or George W. Bush, so he might not change things as dramatically long-term. Some evidence of this can be seen in Tufts University’s post-election youth poll, which shows that the actual ideological leanings of youth voters in 2024 did not shift as dramatically as their vote choices did. While the proportion of young voters declaring themselves as outright conservatives did increase, the bulk of Trump’s gains came from self-described “moderate” young voters who were strongly focused on the economy. On top of this, it’s also likely that Democrats lost a significant portion of their youth vote to the couch. Relative to 2020, the youth share of the overall electorate decreased quite meaningfully, suggesting that young voters who weren’t necessarily conservative but were angry with Biden’s record on Gaza or the economy simply chose to sit out the race. Put together, the data and historical record we have suggests that while young voters did not like Biden and that their dislike did profoundly influence their vote choices, this rejection of him did not spark the kind of full-on revolution in ideological views that we have seen in the past.

Still, what about the things beyond Biden? What about our culture? While I, as a Gen Zer, can understand why many are drawn to our unique personal experiences as explanations for our behavior, very few of the explanations that have been given over the past few months hold up to scrutiny.

Take school lockdowns as just one example. I fully understand that they could have been a cause of resentment, because I was there! I had to spend my entire first year of college quarantined. It sucked! But it’s also true that voters my age overwhelmingly backed Democrats when those lockdowns were actually in place and Trump was running as the candidate who would get rid of them. We also backed Democrats overwhelmingly in the post-Covid 2022 midterms. While our experience with Covid may make us culturally distinct from millennials or older Gen Zers, there’s little compelling evidence that it is the principal reason why we are politically distinct from them.

…If Democrats truly want to rebuild their Obama-era strength with the voters of tomorrow, they will need to move beyond gimmicky solutions like podcasts with Charlie Kirk and address the problems they are facing head-on. The era of resting on their Obama-era laurels is over. Instead of continuing to defend the failed administration that served as our first impression of their style of governance, they will need to break from it and convince us that they are offering something different. Instead of playing fast and loose with our votes by nominating their preferred establishment insiders year after year, they will need to get comfortable with running and supporting candidates who can speak to our understanding of the political moment. If they don’t do this, someone else will— and they may not like who that ends up being.

Yesterday, Axios, not looking specifically at the youth vote, looked at a focus group already showing buyers’ remorse among Trump voters in Michigan. Validating Cohen’s main point, these voters are “worried Trump's approach may hurt their pocketbooks. ‘Erratic,’ ‘frightening,’ ‘disruptive’ and ‘dictator’ were among the words they used to describe their concerns.”

The panel included voters who backed Biden in 2020 but switched to Trump last November. 8 were self-described independents, 4 were Republicans and just 1 was a Democrat. They “felt differently after more exposure to Elon Musk, DOGE, large-scale federal worker firings, tariffs and no relief on prices.” One 31 year old said she “was voting for him based off of the economy the first time around and I'm seeing a significant decline.” Another woman, age 26, said "I was expecting him to do things to better our country and I'm not seeing that.”

Still “Only one of the 10 Trump voters-turned-critics said they'd choose Kamala Harris for president if they could do it over.” I doubt Democrats will learn anything from that— or from the massive turnouts Bernie is getting for his rallies in swingy congressional districts with Republican incumbents. It just isn’t in their careerist self-interest to take lessons from these things. Apparently, they’d rather lose than move left.

Unlike Schumer’s anti-inspiration excuse making yesterday, Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy told his followers why he was about to vote no. “First of all, Trump has a plan to destroy our economy and our government, to create a crisis that allows him to hand our government over to his billionaire friends and suspend our democracy. That’s what he’s implementing already. I wish that weren’t true, but it is. The question is whether this funding bill makes it easier or harder for him to implement that plan. I believe that it makes it easier, so I refuse to support it.”

He reminded Schumer that “Republicans are in charge, but in the Senate, they need Democratic votes— at least on cloture, which closes debate and prevents a filibuster— to pass a funding bill. The problem is they never negotiated with us. They didn’t even try. They wrote their own partisan bill, filled with right-wing nonsense. They were so confident they could steamroll Democrats that House Republicans adjourned and went home days ago. You may hear Republicans and the media call this a ‘continuing resolution.’ It is not. It doesn’t merely continue last year’s funding. It makes changes that make it easier for Trump to implement his plan to destroy our country. It makes massive cuts to housing programs, and programs for health care for working families and doesn’t fully fund staffing needs at the Social Security Administration. It paves the way for Musk to advance his illegal assault on those government services. It gives Trump brand new spending powers— like the ability to start new military programs that have never been authorized by Congress. At this moment of crisis, that is very dangerous. And it takes key guardrails off presidential spending authority, allowing Trump and Musk to move money more easily to suit their whims. Now listen, Trump and Musk are going to keep acting illegally, no matter what this funding bill says. Whether we stop them will be up to the courts and our ability to mobilize people all over this country against their deeply unpopular agenda. But by passing a bill that makes their plan easier to implement, Democrats risk putting a bipartisan veneer of endorsement on their campaign to give our government to the billionaires and destroy the rule of law. I just won’t be part of that.”

Although Trump lauded him, Democrats were talking about finding primary opponent. “Younger Democrats,” reported Shame Goldmacher, “are chafing at and increasingly complaining about what they see as the feebleness of the old guard’s efforts to push back against Trump. They are second-guessing how the party’s leaders— like Schumer, who brandishes his flip phone as a point of pride— are communicating their message in the TikTok era, as Republicans dominate the digital town square. And they are demanding that the party develop a bolder policy agenda that can answer the desperation of tens of millions of people who are struggling financially at a time when belief in the American dream is dimming. In other words, the younger generation is done with deference.”

Amanda Litman, who leads Run for Something said “The generation that got us to this point does not have the skills or stomach to get us to the next point.” Chris Deluzio (D-PA), age 40, said “‘Our party needs more of a fighting spirit…This is not a normal administration, and they’re willing to do dangerous things.’ The split is ‘not solely along generational lines,’ he said. ‘But I do think the newer, younger members maybe get this intuitively.’ Deluzio said that Democrats elected before the Trump era tended to be shaped by fond recollections of comity and camaraderie across the aisle. ‘Those of us who are a little younger or have come to the Congress more recently, we don’t have the experience of some days of yore where things were more functional and the parties all got along,’ he said.”