Economic concerns and growing disenchantment with both parties is draining support for Trump among Gen Z young men, a key bloc of support during the 2024 election
Male Gen Z voters are breaking with Donald Trump and the Republican party at large, recent polls show, less than a year after this same cohort defied convention and made a surprise shift right, helping Trump win the 2024 election.
Taken with wider polling suggesting Democrats will lead in the midterms, the findings on young men spell serious trouble for the Republican Party in 2026.
Younger Gen Z men, those born between 2002 and 2007, may be even more anti-Trump, according to October research from YouGov and the Young Men’s Research Project, a potential sign that their time living through the social upheavals of the Covid pandemic and not being political aware during the first Trump administration may be shaping their experience.
Half of Gen Z doesn’t remember a time when Trumpism wasn’t normal. They don’t know how the economy should be, how diplomacy should be, anything. They just heard Trump saying Biden was a pussy, and Biden acted like a pussy, so they believe Trump was the only reliable narrator. It took these people a great deal to overcome it - I heard a lot of younger people saying Trump was the peaceful, anti-war President. Now that they realize that was a lie, other dominoes are falling.
This is such a big factor, imo.
The democrats refuse to budge from this neocon position of “benevolent interventionism.” and Trump has been able to attack them over both parts of it, which allows him to appeal both to libertarian types who want to stay out of conflicts because “the government doing stuff is bad,” and to nationalist types who want to just overtly plunder everywhere (with his actual policy being the latter). Meanwhile the democrats just cast anyone who disagrees with them on foreign policy as a Russian bot. They’re stuck in the early 2000’s where there was overwhelming bipartisan support for “bringing democracy” to the Middle East, and they seem think if they can just pick up the “moderate Republican” neocon voters who definitely exist and still believe in that project, then they’re sure to win.
The effect is that they fail to capitalize on the ideological divisions that exist on the right. The actual Republican voters that there would be a chance of peeling off are the libertarian anti-war types, but that would require actually trying to appeal to anti-war voters instead of treating them with contempt.
I don’t fully agree. There’s plenty of people on the Near Right that are primed for switching to Democrat as both parties marched to the Right. Some already have. The ones who haven’t are either held back by social pressure or Democrats position on Guns.
Clinton and Kamala both tried to appeal to that “near right” and failed. Social pressure isn’t going to magically disappear, I can agree with the point about guns but that just ties into what I’m saying. If anyone on the right can be appealed to, it’s the isolationist, pro-gun libertarian types. You will never win the nationalists, they already have a party that is giving them exactly what they want.
This is the thing I fear with autocratic/fascists in this country. If your normalize it to the following generations they’ll accept it. Why it’s important to at least be loudly against it even if it’s online. Don’t let them ever control the narrative exclusively.