The Kids Are Alright, 2025

Need some upbeat news?

“The Kids are Alright,” Hyde Park, 1965.

I do. Over at The New Republic, Adam Bonica and Jake Grumbach report findings that reports of Gen Z bro-ification are greatly exaggerated.

Gen Z registrants this month voted “overwhelmingly for Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City, as well as for other Democrats, such as Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia.” A recent “gold standard’ survey shows that racial resentment is vanishing among this demographic cohort.

“Racial resentment” as defined by political scientists is not belief about racial characteristics or biology but measures attitudes that attribute racial inequality to “cultural failings of minority groups rather than to systemic barriers or discrimination.” As in a late Asheville acquaintance’s “bunch of lazy blacks” comment to “The Daily Show” in 2013. That term is pretty finely tuned but what does it mean?

Importantly, it is more predictive of how someone votes “than income, gender, education, geography, or attitudes about economic policy, gender, or religious traditionalism.” And Gen Z scores the lowest for any generation yet measured.

Bonica and Grumbach write:

This finding demolishes a central assumption of contemporary political analysis. Those young working-class whites, as well as young Latino and Asian men, that everyone assumes are driving reactionary politics? They’re more progressive on race than boomers, Gen X, and even college-educated elder millennials. Many commentators have highlighted “educational polarization,” the growing gap between college and non-college voters on partisanship and attitudes about race and culture. But the generational gap completely overwhelms this education divide that supposedly defines modern American politics.

The progressive shift appears across every demographic slice you can imagine. Young men and women are moving together, becoming less racially resentful over time. The pattern holds across regions, religions, and urban-rural divides. Despite endless discourse about young men being “lost to the manosphere,” the data shows them progressing alongside their female peers.

There is one way in which young, white men can’t catch a break:

Republicans spent years attacking them as “woke” snowflakes who needed safe spaces. Now Democrats dismiss them as “red-pilled” misogynists. Both narratives are wrong. They’re simply more progressive on race than their fathers and grandfathers, continuing a pattern that has held for generations.

Unsurprisingly, “Young Republicans remain nearly as racially resentful as older Republicans.” It’s Democrats and independents who have shifted left. Massively, in the case of independents. The upside is the Republican base is shrinking. The rest of Gen Z is comfortable with both economic populism and politics that acknowledges people’s identities. So beware, Democrats:

… our findings show that a Democratic Party that defensively retreats on racial justice—especially backtracking on commitments to racial justice that Democratic leaders have already made—isn’t making a hard strategic choice. Instead, it’s awkwardly alienating its future base to chase voters who are literally dying off. Republicans’ Southern Strategy delivered temporary victories by activating racial resentment, but that strategy is approaching its expiration date.

So are plenty among Democrats’ gerontocracy.

Horse-race commentary tends to mistake normal electoral swings for broader cultural trends that aren’t there, Bonica and Grumbach argue. “We mistake turnout fluctuations for ideological transformation.” And mistake unrepresentative loud voices out there for generational spokesmen. And of course, there’s motivated reasoning: “Everyone finds anecdotes that confirm their assumptions while ignoring mountains of contradictory data.”

The pair conclude:

The story of Gen Z isn’t one of racist backlash or “red-pilled” young men. It’s the story of the most racially progressive generation in American history. Democrats who think they need to retreat on racial justice aren’t being hard-headed realists—they’re fighting the last war while the terrain has fundamentally shifted beneath their feet.

Same as it ever was.