That senior citizens support Republicans while young Americans vote for Democrats by wide margins is one of those old truisms in politics.
Or is it?
Shockingly to many, polls show that Joe Biden is bleeding support among Gen Z (those born after 1996). What’s more, they also find that he’s doing better among seniors than most Democrats do.
In addition, if a couple of Gen Zers interviewed recently by Fox News are any indication, some of these young people are getting “red-pilled”: They’re waking up to and are disgusted by the left-wing propaganda they’ve been fed.
Politico reported on the general trend in April:
Something weird is happening beneath the overall stability of the early 2024 polling — and it’s either a sign of a massive electoral realignment, or that the polls are wrong again.
Polls show former President Donald Trump is ascendant with the youngest bloc of the electorate, even leading President Joe Biden in some surveys, as less-engaged young voters spurn Biden. Meanwhile, Biden is stronger with seniors than he was four years ago….
If these changes are real, it would have profound effects on the coalitions both campaigns are building for November. No Republican has won young voters since George H.W. Bush’s landslide victory in 1988, and no Democrat has carried the senior vote since Al Gore hammered Bush’s son, George W. Bush, on Social Security in 2000.
Providing some numbers, Fox News related last month that “according to the Fox News Voter Analysis and other [network] exit polls,” Biden won younger voters “by more than 20 percentage points four years ago.” Today, though, the outlet also informed, the “survey indicates Biden edging Trump by only four points among voters under 45 and just six points among those aged 18-29.”
This anomaly, however, is at least partially explainable by way of a very common political phenomenon, according to Fox.
That is, many of these young people are “voting their pocketbook.”
“‘They don’t see a lot of connection to him,’ Marist College Institute for Public Opinion director Lee Miringoff told Fox News as he pointed to younger voters,” the news outlet explained. “‘They’re worried about the cost of living, which isn’t reserved just for them, but clearly, as they envision moving into adulthood, cost of living, housing costs, how to get into that next step seems to be an obstacle.… They’re seeing the economy as a lot of other voters do — laying it on Biden’s doorstep at the moment.’”
This is actually Politics 101: When the economy is perceived negatively, the incumbent president gets the blame.
Regardless, this new polling trend continues. Claiming that Gen Zers are fleeing the Democrats in “droves,” Fox News told us Tuesday about a Fox survey showing that Biden leads Trump by only eight percent among this age cohort. To glean some insight into this phenomenon, the outlet reported on a Tuesday Fox & Friends interview with two young ex-Democrats, Becky Oliveira and Grace Guentzel.
Explaining her transformation, the NYC-bred Oliveira told program co-host Lawrence Jones, “I grew up in this social media culture that was very dominated by left-wing propaganda, for lack of a better word, that was pushed to me through the algorithms and I accepted it wholeheartedly, I loved it. I was very into it until I started to come out of it and realize that a lot of what I believed was very emotional, and not really based in logic or fact.”
This is par for the course, as “leftism” is an emotion-based pseudo-ideology.
“So once I started to have that realization, it really all came to a head around 2020 when I started to see how Democratic policies were playing out in my city,” Oliveira continued. “Cashless bail for one… the riots after the killing of George Floyd… Madison Avenue being completely decimated by… these roving bands of rioters.”
Fox describes Oliveira as a former “leftist and radical feminist” who was beside herself after Trump’s 2016 election triumph. Now, however, she’s going to vote for him, saying that Biden’s governance has “completely destroyed the country” and is “destroying our futures.”
As for Guentzel, she “was raised in a progressive household, but has since deviated from her parents’ political identification and now considers herself a Republican,” Fox tells us.
“‘For me, it really came down to just looking at the nuance and doing my own research,’ Guentzel said,” Fox continues. “‘I feel like I surrounded myself with a lot of Democrats and was kind of in that culture, so it was normal for me. But I think once I started to do my research and understand the nuance, because I kind of saw things as very one-sided, but once I kind of got out of that like cycle and stopped only surrounding myself with one kind of people, I think I started kind of leaving the hole that I was in and came more towards the right.’”
Guentzel still doesn’t know who she’s voting for, but she’s certain it won’t be Biden (the interviews with the two ladies are below).
Anecdotes aside, though, what’s really going on with Gen Z’s politics? First note that the group is still supporting Biden overall, and studies unsurprisingly show that it is quite liberal. If a subset of the generation were deviating from this, however, it would be understandable.
Remember that rebellion against the status quo is common among modern young people, and the status quo today is left-wing. Gen Zers have had media, entertainment, and, perhaps most significantly, their teachers and professors (the epitome of the uncool!) ramming leftist ideology down their throats. That some would recoil against this is no shock.
Note, too, that much more so than the elderly, the young who do imbibe news and opinion tend to reject the monolithically left-wing legacy media (newspapers are for gramps) and instead gravitate toward online sources, such as Joe Rogan’s podcast. This gives them a window into the world beyond the “progressive” echo chamber.
This said, ideological rectitude — and behaviors that preserve civilization — ever and always depend on a certain factor. As Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke put it, “It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”
A people lacking in virtue is destined for tyranny. So the only question we really must ask when assessing our national fortunes is: Are people today, the young in particular, morally sound?
Or, are they “men of intemperate minds”?
