There are two Gen Zs

We can confidently say that Gen Z got a lot more Republican over the last couple of years, thanks to a swarm of new, first-time young voters — specifically men of all races. Pre-election polling captured this phenomenon, voter registration trends tracked it, and post-election exit polls suggest ballots reflected it. Add to this a recent report from the Democratic firm Catalist, which has produced some of the most definitive analyses of the 2024 election, and you start to get a pretty solid sense that young voters have shifted hard toward the Republican Party. Still, that might elide some nuance within Gen Z. The data we have from the last election suggests, broadly, at least two types of young voters: “Old Gen Z” — more Democratic, more progressive — and “Young Gen Z” — more Trump-curious and more skeptical of the status quo. That internal split, roughly between those aged 18 to 24 in the latter camp and 25 to 29 in the former, hasn’t dissipated post-election; it is still showing up in polling and surveys. No cohort is monolithic, but a combination of factors — the pandemic, the rise of smartphones and newer social media, inflation, Trump — seems to be driving a wedge within Gen Z. The upshot is that there appear to be two Gen Zs. And that divide within the generation certainly complicates the long-held belief that younger voters are generally more progressive than older ones — and that Democrats thus have a natural edge with younger generations. Politically, there are two Gen Zs About a year ago, the Harvard Youth Poll, a public opinion project from that university’s Institute of Politics that has been recording young voters’ sentiments for more than a decade, tracked a major difference in the way voters under the age of 30 were feeling about Joe Biden and Donald Trump. While Biden held a lead of 14 percentage points among adults aged 25 to 29, his lead among 18- to 24-year-olds was 10 points smaller. Support for Trump was higher among the younger part of this cohort by 5 percentage points in the March 2024 poll. That dynamic remained true even after the Democrats switched to Kamala Harris as their standard-bearer. In the same poll conducted in September, the younger half of Gen Z voters continued to lag in its Democratic support compared to the older half. Now, more than four months into the Trump presidency, this dynamic — of Young Gen Z being more friendly to Republicans than Old Gen Z — continues to show up in the latest Harvard IOP poll. For example, the March 2025 survey found that Young Gen Z holds more favorable views of Republicans in Congress than Old Gen Z; while the older cohort disapproves of the GOP by a 35-point margin, the margin for the younger cohort is 28 points. Similarly, the older cohort disapproves of Trump’s job performance more sharply than the younger cohort — a 7-point gap on the margins. The same survey found Trump’s favorability is 5 points better with Young Gen Z than with Old Gen Z. And while both groups tend to be unaffiliated with either party, a slightly larger share of Young Gen Z, 26 percent to 23 percent for Old Gen Z, identifies with the GOP. Older Gen Z hasn’t seen any slippage in its wariness of Republicans. Across all three of those Harvard polls, the share who identify with the Republican Party has remained essentially unchanged. The only major difference in the spring poll is a significant shift away from Democrats toward the “independent” label. Old Gen Z’s views of Republicans in Congress have gotten more positive — 63 percent of them disapprove this spring, compared to 76 percent of them last year. That said, these older Gen Z voters’ views of Trump have only dropped since the fall. Harvard’s poll isn’t the only one picking up this split in preferences. Yale University’s youth poll from April has tracked similar divisions in political identification and preferences, while other non-political polling from the Pew Research Center has tracked internal differences within Gen Z as well. The ideology of the Gen Zs In terms of ideology, the polling is noisier, but shows signs of a split as well. Harvard’s pre-election polls did track higher “conservative” identification rates among under-25s than over-25s. Across all three 2024 and 2025 Harvard polls, conservative identification is essentially unchanged across both groups. Regardless of how each subgroup self-identifies, however, other polling suggests that the youngest Zoomers may still hold more conservative views than the oldest Zoomers. According to the spring Yale Youth Poll, younger Gen Z men and women tend to have more Republican-coded opinions than their older Gen Z peers on a range of policy issues. They tend to view Trump more favorably, side with the Republican position on some policies, like immigration, trans women in college sports, and Ukraine, by higher margins, and are more likely to consider casting a vote for a generic Republican candidate than older Gen Z. Younger Gen Z is also the segment of Americans where religiosity seems to be holding steady, if not outright increasing. As I’ve reported before, young Gen Z men are holding on or returning to organized religion in rates high enough to slow down a decades-long trend toward religious dissociation in America. They are outpacing older Gen Z and younger millennial men in identifying with a religion, per the Pew Research Center’s latest Religious Landscape Study. And in particular, among all Gen Z born between 2000 and 2006, a higher share, 51 percent, identify as Christian than they did in 2023, when 45 percent said so. Increased religiosity isn’t necessarily direct evidence of more conservative thought or Republican affiliation, but there is a correlation between Republican partisan identification and respondents saying that the role of religion is important to them or that they identify with a religion at all. In other words, more religious Americans tend to be more Republican, or more conservative. This split could upend future elections Should these trends hold, they will pose a challenge for both major political parties. The idea of a rising Democratic electorate — that younger, diverse, and more progressive generations of voters becoming eligible to vote could deliver consistent victories for Democratic and liberal candidates — looks increasingly tenuous, not least after the 2024 elections. The polling since suggests the pro-GOP shift among younger Gen Z-ers may not be a blip. But Republicans will have work to do to sustain these gains and to have them work in their party’s favor during election season. That Young Gen Z showed up for the GOP in 2024 doesn’t guarantee that they will do so again in next year’s midterms, or the next presidential election. And a lot is at stake. Gen Z will become the largest part of the electorate in 2030, and will have the power to sway elections, if Democrats and Republicans can keep them engaged. For now, the data show there may be something durable in the split that 2024 polling captured: The newest cohort of young voters, who couldn’t vote in previous elections, was significantly more Republican than the oldest young voters. In 2020, Trump got about 31 percent of their vote. In 2024, he got 43 percent of their support. And the 2024 Catalist report suggests that the shift was driven by the emergence of a previously disengaged, male, and racially diverse youth electorate, made up predominantly of newly eligible Young Gen Z voters. Young Black and Latino men in this cohort shifted their votes to Trump, and were a significant chunk of new voters. Was this shift unique to Trump and his campaign? Perhaps. But what data we do have suggests there is an underlying curiosity or openness toward Republicans among the youngest cohort of Gen Z — one strong enough to cleave this generation in two.

This moment demands more than headlines

There are two Gen Zs