The politics of Gen Z

0:00Astead Herndon:Like any good millennial, I have a love-hate relationship with Gen Z. I love that they're rethinking the rules of work and culture. I love that they love wired headphones. Gen Z trendsetters are making the old technology the must-have accessory this fall. I love that they're healthier than other generations. But there's also some things I just don't understand about them. They wear millennial styles and listen to millennial music, but they hate millennials? They weirdly hate every sex scene in a movie, and they hate the laughing emoji too? Regardless of how you feel about Gen Z, it's undeniable that younger voters are changing the national political scene more and more every year.

0:41Astead Herndon:And in particular, it's their political independence, their unwillingness to define themselves by Democrat or Republican, that's different than generations prior. We heard some of this at Trump's UFC fight in Washington, D.C. We don't care which side it is. It's just whoever has, you know, whoever's putting America first, whoever's got, you know, the priority. The vote's up to grabs, it's up for them to earn it. But the difference comes through even more clearly in the data. This generation doesn't think about politics like the ones prior. So what is going on with the kids? I think the biggest misconception about Gen Z's politics right now is that all of a sudden they're all socialists.

1:18That is just not the case. They are embracing candidates who are offering new, bold ideas in the absence of those ideas from establishment Democrats.

1:26Astead Herndon:This week on America Actually, Gen Z researcher Rachel Janfaza joins us to separate Gen Z fact versus fiction. Let's dig in.

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2:44Astead Herndon:This week, I wanted to dig into the numbers to get a more accurate and nuanced understanding of Gen Z, a diverse generation that will play a big part in shaping our post-Trump future. And to do that, I partnered with Murmuration, a national firm that conducts a lot of in-depth surveys with a particular focus on young people. And after digging through their data, there's three things that stuck out most clearly when it comes to Americans under the age of 30. One, this generation is fiercely independent. When presented with a list of common political labels like Democratic Socialists or Liberal, Moderate, even America First, the most common response for young Americans was none of the above.

3:26Astead Herndon:Almost 30 % chose that option when we're talking about Americans under the age of 30 years old. Second, this is a generation deeply shaped by their economic and social anxiety. Murmuration found that only 28 % of people 18 to 30 say that they can cover an unexpected expense of$500 using cash or savings. The third thing that stuck out in the data was the gender divide among Gen Z men and Gen Z women. There was a 17-point gap between Gen Z men and Gen Z women when it came to supporting the Democratic candidate in the 2024 election. It was the biggest gender gap of any age cohort. And Memoration found that young men are twice as likely than young women to view Donald Trump favorably.

4:13Astead Herndon:But that's just the top line numbers. So I wanted to talk to someone who understands Gen Z voters intimately, and can help explain the why behind some of the trends we're seeing. So I hit up Rachel Jamfaza, who started a research firm called The Up and Up, all focused on Gen Z voters. She's written here at Vox, and I love the work she does to understand what can be a misunderstood group. Here's our conversation. Rachel, thank you so much for joining us. I've wanted to have you on the show for a while. I appreciate you coming in. Thanks for having me, Estad. I'm excited to be here. We are going to dig into the data around Gen Z and really try to understand what I think is a generation that's been kind of misunderstood, maybe, or at least put into some boxes.

4:57Astead Herndon:You know, I have a little bit of sympathy for them because I remember all the stories about millennials and avocado toast and all of those complaints. But it feels like we've now entered into an era where we talk a lot about Gen Z, but really to them. You do work where you do focus groups surrounding young voters. How did you get into that? So I started covering young voters, youth political culture, youth culture in general when I was in college and was freelancing during college. wrote my senior thesis on the role of social media and youth-led social movements from 2010 to 2020, handed it in literally the day that the pandemic started.

5:33And so everything that I wrote about was outdated the second I turned it in. But that was my start really focusing on young people and youth culture. And it was because I was living through the first four years of Trump's first term in office as a college student, watching the activism on the part of all the students around me and across the country, and really just felt like my generation was engaging with politics differently than past generations, in part because of social media, but also because of a different proximity to and relationship to authority. And that's only multiplied since then.

6:06Astead Herndon:Yeah, that's become really clear. And that moment in time marks an important delineation in a lot of our lives, I think particularly in Gen Z. You've done a lot of work around the different Gen Z. I've read you talk about Gen Z 1 versus Gen Z 2. How would we describe those differences? So I call this the theory of the two Gen Zs. I really started to cultivate it doing focus groups with young people in 2022, hearing the way that high school students at the time and college students at the time just had a different outlook. And I realized that those who had graduated high school before the start of the pandemic, those Gen Zers, just had a different worldview than the younger half of Gen Z who was still in high school at the time that the pandemic hit.

6:48And I think the reason that is is because of the taste of independence that people on the older cusp of Gen Z had prior to a lockdown situation. And so really the age cutoff now is anyone who is between roughly 29 and 22, I would say, is Gen Z 1.0. And anyone younger than that would be Gen Z 2.0. And there is no official end date to Gen Z right now. Like it's sort of 1997 to 2012. So it's not very clear yet. Usually, yeah, when the Gen Alpha marker comes in.

7:20Astead Herndon:It's interesting because in some ways that feels intuitive. Like, you know, folks change as they get older. But you're mentioning like a important line of demarcation being when the pandemic hit. But can you just name for me what the difference was between the generations? Like I get that they're different experiences, but how did that shape a different form of politics? Totally. OK, so Gen Z 1.0 really came of age during Trump's first term in office. This was a new phenomenon. He was breaking down past barriers. and we saw a lot of youth odd activism in response to actions or inaction from the first Trump administration.

7:56So you saw things like the March for Our Lives and climate strikes and the Black Lives Matter movement. And there was this very real sense that, you know, if we protest and change, perhaps there could be a difference. Whereas Gen Z 2.0, when it comes to their politics, first of all, they came of age really during the Biden era. This was a post-COVID sort of upbringing. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

8:20Astead Herndon:Build back better in quotes. Right. And they really grew resistant to authority because they saw Democrats who were largely in charge during the time where kids went back to school and where there were things like mask mandates and vaccine mandates. They saw Democrats in charge of that, especially in blue cities or blue areas across the country where Democrats were handling the way that schools were reopening. Exactly. And so young people whose sort of lives and childhoods were on the line with that felt like they were guinea pigs, an experiment that they didn't sign up for. And I think this is when we saw a movement away from Democrats.

8:58I don't necessarily think that was towards Republicans. Trump capitalized on this in 2024 and the Trump 2.0 MAGA culture became the counterculture. But that's really hard to retain that cultural currency. And we're seeing that now in his second administration. But we did see just broadly speaking, Gen Z 2.0 is far less trusting of authority and institutions, far more independent. They hate labels. And this isn't just political. They hate labels when it comes to gender, their relationships. No one wants to be boxed in. I hear this all the time in my focus groups. And so they just moved away from both parties writ large.

9:36Astead Herndon:OK, this is great because it really lines up with what we saw from Murmuration. It really identified how Gen Z's kind of fierce independence politically and overall. I imagine that doesn't surprise you. It lines up with what you heard in the focus groups. Definitely. And the other thing that we've seen largely about Gen Z 2.0 is, you know, I talked about Gen Z 1.0's relationship to advocacy and activism. Gen Z 2.0 looks at that and says, where did it get us? And we still have all of the same problems that we had then. And the activism in some cases created small marginal victories like red flag laws in Florida, things like that.

10:10But it hasn't really shifted the culture. And Trump was back in office again. And so a lot of young people who are lowercase p progressive in terms of being in favor of reproductive health care access and don't want there to be school shootings or mass shootings and believe in LGBTQ rights. Like they are looking at these movements and saying, well, that didn't really get us anywhere. And so they're turning more to local issues. and there's been broadly this sort of shift from, you know, if we all rally together, we can make a difference to maybe I should look at the ways I could do it in my own community.

10:48Astead Herndon:In my own community, in my own life. Right. That rings true, but I want to ask about it because, I mean, some ways that, again, feels familiar even in my own life. I think that there was a way a hope or optimism bubble burst for a group of millennials in the Obama administration that you thought that things like, you know, representation would save you. And I feel like that was like a learning that some folks had at that time. But the shift towards a more like individualistic sense of self feels like a difference from one generation to the next. Like in some ways we're calling this political independence.

11:22Astead Herndon:Should we also think of Gen Z as just like individualistic? Yes and no. I mean, if you think about Gen Z at a macro level, we grew up with a device in our hand and we're taught to build our own brands across social media from like the very get-go. And that's also how you have to market yourself either to get into a college or to get a job. Everybody's a content creator. Everybody has a brand of self. Right. And then also the cost of living is very high. And a lot of young people feel like before they can think about the rights of all of their neighbors and friends, they need to be thinking about can they even afford to put food on their own table and get by and support their own family.

12:01And so I think that's been part of the shift, too. There's been multiple factors happening at once.

12:06Astead Herndon:Yeah, that's a better faith way of seeing it. I mean, part of what this says, though, does speak to other piece of the Murmuration data. They said only 9 % of young adults believe the government's official explanations for major events are usually accurate. That sort of institutional distrust feels like at the core of what you're talking about. Murmuration found that 40 percent of young adults believe that, quote, important facts are often or deliberately hidden from major events. And 26 percent believe that explanations from the government are usually incomplete. Like the idea that only 9 percent of young adults would find government explanations of events to be truthful was kind of a shockingly low number for me.

12:48Astead Herndon:Like that distrust both feels familiar, but that mass distrust feels unique to this generation. Yeah. So I think looking at the distrust, there are so many reasons why young people might not trust the government. I get it, too. Yeah, yeah. Lay them out for us. I mean, OK, so we already talked about COVID. That was massive. But they also have grown up only in the Trump era of politics. In every election that Gen Z's been able to vote, Trump's been on the ballot at the presidential level. And he, you know, depending on what side of of him you lie on, you either believe that he has broken down the government and it no longer is trustworthy or you are distrusting of the government because he's told you to be distrusting of the government.

13:33Astead Herndon:Both sides of that coin actually agree that there is a democracy problem. Right. That you either see him as a solution or a cause. Right. So there's that. And then at the same time, we've grown up with social media and the ability to see through things. And there's just a lack of transparency. And I've recently been asking this question in my focus groups. I phrase it two different ways. First, I say, what do you want to see from a political candidate or an elected official? And then I ask, what do you want to see from government? Because I've been trying to see if there's a difference between, like, candidates, leaders, and then the government as a whole.

14:06And when we ask about government, what people are looking for is sort of broad social programming. So things like SNAP benefits and WIC and help with affordability for education and the cost of housing and even local people sleep on Gen Z's appetite for local politics. They want things like potholes to be fixed because that's like actually where they're feeling. And they are not necessarily seeing that happen. In few cases, they are seeing it happen. But when leaders are able to actually communicate transparently about what they are doing to make constituents' lives better for them, that's when you start to see that trust rebuild.

14:41Astead Herndon:Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Pothole politics. You know, he's – the best example of this is that he responds directly to constituents' concerns on social media. So, like, they're showing, you know, this is something wrong. And then he's like, here I am fixing it. But, you know, it would be one thing if the kids were distrusting of traditional institutions and media and they had, you know, replaced it with an equally trustworthy source. You know, like sometimes it feels like there's been mass distrust of these institutions, only the turn to TikTok or neighbor or something that isn't providing reliable information.

15:17Astead Herndon:Murmuration found that only 8 % of 18 to 30-year-olds trust mainstream news to discover what has actually happened. So should I just see that as being displaced with the timeline? So, okay. I think that what young people are looking for when it comes to their news consumption is that they want verification across multiple different sources. Cross-checking. Yes. I've been asking this for years. And also one of those very important cross-checkers is people who actually experience the situation firsthand. Right. So they want to know from someone who's on the ground what is happening. And that's why I think you see a rise in personality-driven content across social media.

15:54A lot of the times, those are people who are actually on the ground experiencing something firsthand, and they're bringing their own perspective to it. And there was a Pew study that came out in the spring showing Gen Z news consumption habits. I wrote about this at the time. And they want journalists to be upfront about their own personal biases and where they're coming from, which when you've grown up with this mindset, something that, you know, Gen Z's been taught is that everyone has their own. I hesitate to use the phrase lived experience because I don't love that phrase, but like their own personal.

16:25Yeah.

16:25Astead Herndon:Your story is valid. Right. How it brought you to that place. Right. And so they want that to be fused into the news coverage. It's not that young people aren't consuming traditional news content. They are. But they're also looking for various other touch points that confirm that data. Or if they don't see it elsewhere, they're not going to believe it. They're not going to believe it. And I think that, you know, some of that is really fair. I mean, I understand the ways that a projected objectivity or projected lack of bias has not always served news well. and I certainly get how when you see someone on the ground, whether it be in a Minnesota dice enforcement or in Gaza, it makes you harder to trust mainstream outlets that may not be reflecting the reality that you see firsthand.

17:15Astead Herndon:So some of that makes a lot of sense to me. I guess I just wonder about the kind of overall way that information ecosystems have changed. It does seem a little bit like Gen Z is victim to the algorithm. Like, are these choices that are shaped by the individuals? Are these choices that are served to them? Like, how do we look at the causation? Yeah, it's both and. And I think what we're seeing this summer especially is a rejection and a rebuke of the algorithm. Actually, I have a report coming out on this next week. But if you look at what has been trending this summer, I actually wrote a piece for Vox about this IRL summer in-person community.

17:52Here in New York City, you had the Knicks historic run and their win, the way people were celebrating in the streets. I mean, that was insane. Then you have the World Cup bringing Americans together all across the country. But you also saw more on the local level block parties, things like Love Island watch parties. Like people are wanting to be in person and off their devices. There is a movement away from screens. And I think a large part of that is because, and what I'm hearing in my research, is that young people are sick and tired of having taste be decided for them. For them.

18:24Astead Herndon:Rather than coming to it on their own. And this is why we're sort of seeing a pushback to the traditional influencer as well and more for, like, the local creator. This has political implications, but it is a much broader story about how Gen Z is really pushing back against these algorithms that have defined their lives. After the break, how Gen Z is tackling the affordability crisis and the gender wars.

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19:46Head back to class with the number one gummy supplement brand. Stuck up on Ollie.com today. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew. Well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for.

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20:27Astead Herndon:I wanted to talk about the economic data, which seems really central here. You know, Murmuration found that young adults blame three villains most clearly for their current economic plight. Inflation at 48 percent, corporate greed at 34 percent. and government economic policies at 32%. Does that match what you're hearing in terms of your focus groups? Like, that seems like a pretty clear diagnosis of who they think put them in this situation. Yeah. So what we're hearing broadly about the economic situation in our focus groups, and it's really been the same since 2024, although now we have AI as a major cause of this too, but it's just been that everything is too hard to afford.

21:06It feels like it's like you're one bad break away from, you know, if I was living my own, I'd be one bad break away from not being able to.

21:14Astead Herndon:And I feel like that's where the majority of Americans feel like we're either underwater or just barely treading water. And when you ask about, you know, who are they sort of blaming for the current economic crisis? I do think that they blame politicians a lot of the time because they don't see economic policies that work for them and they don't really see creative ideas around how to improve this situation as they're trying to get their lives up and off the ground. And that's what they're really looking for from elected officials, especially when you're looking at the national conversation about what they might be looking for.