Young, voting age Americans are unimpressed with Joe Biden— and with conservative Democrats like him— but they are well aware of the alternative the Republican Party is offering. That’s why they turned out for Biden and the Democrats in 2020 and 2022 and likely will again next year… at least in blue areas.
Yesterday, Ron Brownstein devoted his Atlantic column to a discussion of Gen Z and Millennial voters and how they are becoming a bigger and bigger force in the electorate. “As many as 7 to 9 million more members of the racially and culturally diverse Gen Z could cast ballots in 2024 than did in 2020,” he explained, “while the number of the predominantly white Baby Boomers and older generations voting may decline by a corresponding amount.” In 2024 there will be as many Gen Z and Millennium voters (37%) as there are Baby Boomer (and Greatest and Silent generation) voters (37%).
That’s the first time that’s happening and “that generational transition,” wrote Brownstein, “represents a clear opportunity for Democrats, who have consistently amassed solid, sometimes overwhelming, margins among both Millennials and Gen Z voters.” Democratic pollster, Michael Podhorzer cautions that “that even the emergence of these new voters may not break the larger political stalemate that has partitioned the country into seemingly immovable blocks of red and blue states [since] “Gen Z voters have broken heavily for Democrats in blue states, and provided the party solid margins in closely contested swing states [while] in red states… Gen Z voters are mostly supporting Republicans.”
While younger voters’ strong Democratic lean in blue and purple states may create growing challenges for Republicans trying to amass the 270 Electoral College votes needed to win the White House, the Republican tilt of younger voters in red states could frustrate Democrats trying to loosen the GOP’s hold on those places. “That seemingly unbreakable Republican grip has made it difficult for Democrats to win majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives, and has allowed the GOP to impose a sweepingly conservative social agenda across nearly half of the country.”
I saw it a little differently from Brownstein when it comes to the growth of Gen Z and Millennial voters in places like Houston, Dallas, Austin, San Antonio… for example. Sooner or later that’s going to help elect a Texas senator or governor as well as more state legislators and congressmembers. It’s already made a tremendous difference in red states like Georgia and Arizona and purple states like Michigan, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
Analysts Brownstein has spoken with have told him that “young people voted in very large numbers in 2020 and maintained relatively high turnout in 2022. A lack of enthusiasm about Biden personally ‘didn’t really dissuade the generation from coming out and voting for Democrats’ in either of the past two elections, says John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, which conducts a twice-yearly national survey of youth attitudes. ‘They knew the stakes in the election. They knew what life was like under more Republican control versus more Democratic control.’ Whatever they think about Biden, the influence of Gen Z, generally defined as young people born from 1997 to 2012, is certain to rise next year simply because so many of them will age into the electorate. William Frey, a demographer at Brookings Metro, estimates that about 15.4 million eligible young people will have turned 18 between the 2020 election and Election Day next year.
Another fundamental shift in American politics over the past half century is magnifying the impact of this generational evolution: Voters now divide between the parties more along lines of cultural identity than class interest. And on every important cultural and demographic dividing line between the two parties, the younger generations exhibit characteristics that predict support for Democrats.
More than 70 percent of Baby Boomers are white. But just 55 percent of Millennials are white and only slightly more than half of Gen Z are. Millennials and Gen Z are far less likely than older generations to identify with any organized religion and far more likely (especially in Gen Z) to identify as LGBTQ. Younger generations are also more likely than older ones to hold a college degree.
“What sets Gen Z apart is … they are growing up in a much more racially and ethnically diverse cohort which really is driving them to more progressive positions,” Melissa Deckman, the chief executive officer of the nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute and the author of a forthcoming book on the generation, told me.
Overall, these new voters are behaving almost exactly as those attributes would predict. Before 2004, as I’ve written, exit polls and other sources found little difference between the voting preferences of younger and older voters. But since Millennials and then Gen Z entered the electorate in large numbers, Democrats have established a durable advantage among the young. Catalist’s data (Podhorzer), for instance, show that Democrats have carried almost exactly 60 percent of the two-party vote among Millennials and Gen Z in each of the past three presidential elections and in three of the past four congressional elections; the one exception came when the party’s vote among them hit 66 percent in the 2018 congressional races.
…Podhorzer found that Democrats performed better in the red states among Gen Z than they did among older generations— but not well enough to actually win those youngest voters. Republicans still carried a majority of Gen Z voters in most of the red states. Even in red states where Democrats have won most Gen Z voters in recent elections— including Texas, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, and Montana— the party’s margins among them are typically slim. That means Democrats in red states are not generating nearly enough advantage from younger generations to overcome the lopsided GOP edge among older cohorts.
Podhorzer told me this regional variation is “only surprising to the extent you believe that age explains almost everything about voters’ partisanship. But if you understand that the neighborhood you grew up in, the parents you have, the schools you went to, and the general politics that you are introduced into is a big factor, it shouldn’t be surprising at all. Because if you grow up in Brooklyn, no matter how old you are, you are swimming in blue water … and the same goes for those growing up in red America.”
For Democrats, the most important of the trends Podhorzer cataloged may be their persistent strength among Gen Z voters in the battleground swing states that decide who wins the White House. In all, Podhorzer calculates that Gen Z voters in the swing states who have cast their first ballot in the 2018 election or after have preferred Democrats by nearly 20 percentage points. (Democrats also hold a strong 15-point edge among Millennials in those states who voted for the first time in 2018 or after.) To Podhorzer, the clear lesson of these trends is that Democrats are more likely to win the battleground states by investing in turning out these new voters than by trying to lure back the mostly blue-collar whites who have abandoned the party to support Trump.
Podhorzer says the Democratic advantage among younger voters in the purple and blue states has been driven largely by an unusual dynamic. Typically, he points out, young voters gravitate toward a party because of a positive association with the president in office as they entered the electorate: John F. Kennedy or Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama. But in this case, Podhorzer argues, the most powerful force moving Gen Z toward Democrats is not so much excitement about the party (or Biden), but negative views of Trump. “They are coming of age at a time when everybody around them, as well as the popular culture, loathe and ridicule” Trump, he says. “Especially in the blue states, where MAGA candidates have hijacked the nominating process, there is no exemplar of a reasonable Republican anywhere to be seen.”
…The Democratic advantage with Gen Z is like an investment whose value compounds over time— in this case, as their share of the electorate expands. If Republicans can’t regain at least some ground with younger voters, especially in the battleground states, the party will need to squeeze bigger margins out of shrinking groups. In any given election, as Trump demonstrated in 2016, Republicans might meet that test. But making that math add up will only get tougher for the GOP as the generational transition inexorably rolls on.
It was the right thing to do... Biden vetoing the GOP bill to end his student loan forgiveness plan. It was also the politically smart thing to do. Here are 11 House seats which were close enough so that the increase in Gen Z voters is enough to flip them from red to blue:
CO-03, Boebert- 546 votes (50.08%)
CA-13, Durarte- 564 votes (50.21%)
MI-10, James- 1,600 votes (48.0%)
NY-17, Lawler- 1,820 votes (50.32)
NY-19, Molinaro- 1,845 votes (50.8%)
NY-22, Williams- 2,631 votes (50.49%)
AZ-01, Schweikert- 3,195 votes (50.44%)
AZ-06, Ciscomani- 5,232 votes (50.7%)
OR-05, Chavez-DeRemer- 7,229 votes (51.0%)
NJ-07, Kean- 8,691 votes (51.4%)
NY-04, D’Esposito- 9,851 votes (51.8%)
