Jean M. Twenge at the Atlantic, using data from the Cooperative Election Study (Tufts) rather than the Yale Youth Poll, offers evidence that the Democratic Party’s immediate post-election handwringing about Gen Z conversion was overstated: “the youth-vote shift in 2024 [appears to be] more a one-off event than an ideological realignment.”

“The 2024 election might have been an anomalous event in which young people’s deep dissatisfaction with the economy, especially the inflation that hit their just-starting-out budgets, drove them to want change.

Another distinct possibility is that, going forward, Gen Z will vote for whichever party is not currently in office. Gen Z is a uniquely pessimistic generation.” 

Twenge acknowledges that CES’s “data aren’t perfect—they have yet to be validated against the voter file, meaning they are based on self-reported voter turnout. But they are still a much better source for studying generational shifts than data from just one year, like [David] Shor’s [the loudest advocate of the youth realignment theory].”

“Consistent with other reports, the CES data show that young adults (ages 18 to 29) voted for Trump in 2024 at a much higher rate than they did in 2020. The trend was especially pronounced among young men, whose support for Trump increased by 10 percentage points since 2020, compared with 6 points for young women.

. . . .

[But] the CES data [also shows] young adults have actually become less likely to identify as conservative in surveys during presidential-election years since 2008. The trend is not due to increases in the nonwhite population; fewer white young adults identified as conservative in 2024 (29 percent) than did in 2016 (33 percent).”

The same is true for issues.

What definitely has changed is the percentage of voters in this age bracket identifying as independents.

“Indeed, most of the change over the past two elections appears to have been driven by young independent voters breaking for Trump in 2024 when they didn’t in 2020.”