The pandemic split a generation
As an election watcher/worker, this Axios report that Gen Z is not monolithic caught my attention:
Gen Z isn’t one generation: Research suggests it’s two, split by the pandemic, and the younger half won’t sit still. After lurching right, the youngest voters are souring on the administration, per a recent Yale poll.
Why it matters: The generation raised on lightning-fast cultural and tech shifts has become a sought-after — and perhaps, predictable — swing group. Politicians and institutions treating them as a monolith risk misreading the country’s young people.
- That partisan split between two distinct sub-generations became evident in 2024, with young men, in particular, swinging rightward.
- The divide runs deeper than the ballot box, shaping the way younger and older members of the generation view institutions, brands and tech, and even how they develop trust.
NC Democrats’ chair Anderson Clayton, 28, was on the Bulwark Focus Group podcast on 3/21. The focus group was Gen Z. The very first audio clip played [timestamp 7:00] was a woman saying, “I’ve never really felt seen by either parties.” That’s what I’ve witnessed in 8 months of weekly rush-hour messaging to commuters: young people want to be “seen” more than “policied” at. They view politics as a red kid and a blue kid fighting in a sandbox over control of the sandbox and think: What has that got to do with my struggles? They don’t feel seen by politicians, so they don’t vote like seniors. Polticians don’t pay them as much attention because they don’t vote like seniors. It’s a vicious cycle.
That’s why YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD draws thank-yous and requests for pictures week after week after month. It’s like instant trust. People feel seen.
Rachel Janfaza, author of “The Up and Up” explains that the Covid pandemic split Gen Z in two:
- Gen Z 1.0 graduated high school before COVID-19 and grew up without TikTok. Black Lives Matter was part of the cultural zeitgeist.
- Gen Z 2.0 graduated after the pandemic, their school years shaped by masking, quarantines and remote learning.
“No other generation in modern history had been through this once-in-a-lifetime pandemic,” Janfaza tells Axios. And, “no other generation has had the core mode of communication and culture shift as quickly as ours.”
What the polling looks like:
By the numbers: In Yale’s spring 2026 youth poll, 52% of voters aged 18–22 favored Democrats on the congressional ballot — a dramatic reversal from a year earlier, when they favored Republicans by nearly 12 points.
- The one exception: men aged 18–22, the sole young demographic that shifted away from Democrats.
- The earlier rightward tilt wasn’t driven by true conservatism, Edelman says, but by “rebellion and also being very frustrated with the status quo.”
Caveat: Yale’s 18–22 subsample skews male, according to the poll’s write-up.
I keep trying to get our people to pay more attention to and adjusting their pitches for younger voters. Almost half of younger registrants are registered independents. If they voted like seniors, they could upend American politics.
But then the Trump administraion is doing a pretty good job of upending politics all by itself.