Four-times-indicted former president Donald Trump has been successfully selling white Christian nostalgia, racism and xenophobia to his base. However, the Public Religion Research Institute’s massive poll of 6,616 participants suggests that what works with his base might pose an insurmountable problem with Gen Z teens and Gen Z adults (who are younger than 25).
Demographically, this cohort of voters bears little resemblance to Trump’s older, whiter, more religious followers. “In addition to being the most racially and ethnically diverse generation in our nation’s history, Gen Z adults also identify as LGBTQ at much higher rates than older Americans,” the PRRI poll found. “Like millennials, Gen Zers are also less likely than older generations to affiliate with an established religion.”
Those characteristics suggest Gen Z will favor a progressive message that incorporates diversity and opposes government imposition of religious views. Indeed, “Gen Z adults (21%) are less likely than all generational groups except millennials (21%) to identify as Republican.” Though 36 percent of Gen Z adults identify as Democrats, their teenage counterparts are more likely to be independents (51 percent) than older generations.
Buddy…
Speaking with 21 people does not make a representative sample.
And something is off at the Harvard youth poll the article is relying on for the whole, “men are becoming more conservative claim”. When you pull their data (It’s the button labeled crosstabs) for previous years they’ve labeled three race categories as “Hispanic”. White and Black labels are MIA so we can probably assume they’re the mislabeled. But that’s kind of weird to have happen. The tweet they actually link to is by the poll supervisor but he doesn’t link back to his own poll. Probably because there’s no category in the results for “White Male”. There’s White and there’s Male, but they don’t give that intersection in their results for party affiliation.
Polling usually isn’t this hard to track down and figure out. The best we can say with the publicly available data from that poll is that in the last few years 6 percent more young men identify as Republican. White respondents only rose by 1 percent. It’s important to note that’s not an out of character swing. It could easily come from frustrated libertarians moving to the GOP. Especially since the Democrats lost 7 points and Independents remained steady at 38-40 %. Without more information it’s all tea leaves. (and going I doesn’t mean becoming more conservative, there’s a lot of disaffected progressives.)
One thing their 2023 takeaways was very clear about though is that among likely Gen Z voters Biden has a double digit lead. Which would mean the article we’re here commenting on is accurate. As you can absolutely be a Republican and not vote for the MAGA man.
Overall this is the second piece I’ve seen from a conservative outlet trying to paint a Gen Z gender gap with men becoming more conservative. Broader polling absolutely does not support this. It may support it in the future, but Gallup’s 2023 May poll, and PRRI’s most recent polling (Obviously as we’re talking about it here) show a continuing trend of progressive leanings in Gen Z across all demographics.