It’s almost like whiplash.
Gen Z voters backed Democrats by a 35-point margin this week, according to the latest estimate from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts. That’s a wild swing from 2024, when 18-29-year-olds only backed former Vice President Kamala Harris by a 4-point margin.
Turns out, the generation that rejects labels and grew up moving at the speed of the internet votes that way too.
Read my latest piece for Vox: The midterms were a youth revolt
Check out the following graphic from the New York Times:
And this wild chart showing how just blue Gen Z voted in 2026 Senate races:
My pre-election and post-election analysis is the same.
The culture war is over, and Gen Z wants results. Young voters (and young men especially) ditched the GOP for the same reasons they backed them in the first place: the cost of living, frustration with war, and a rejection of the establishment. It’s that simple.
Plus, fear of ICE and uncertainty around AI’s affect on a dismal job market turned out to be pretty motivating.
But while young men moved left, the gender gap isn’t going away.
And while the focus seems to be on these men, young women are just as big a part of the story. They went from backing Democrats for Congress by a 24-point margin in 2024 to to backing Democrats for Congress by a 57-point margin in 2026, according to CNN exit polls from then and voter polls from now.
Candidates matter, too.
In Georgia, Senator Jon Ossoff carried young voters by a 43-point margin, according to CIRCLE’s data. In Texas, Senator-elect James Talarico carried young voters by a 38-point margin. Both Ossoff and Talarico understood the assignment and leaned into the cost of living, corruption, war, and how to put money back in young people’s pockets.
They’re both millennials, and part of a next-gen wave of candidates leading the Democratic party’s generational revolution.
