Gen Z voters turned out on Tuesday, carrying Democrats under 30 by nearly 50 points and powering Democrats in House and Senate races where they flipped seats.
The results mark a striking reversal from 2024, when younger Americans shifted right toward Donald Trump. This week, exit polling showed the youngest generation issuing a rebuke of the party in office.
Nowhere was that shift more pronounced than in Texas. James Talarico won his race by 12 percentage points overall, but among Gen Z voters specifically, he secured a 60-point victory.
Americans ages 18 to 29 made up 11% of the total vote on Tuesday. While that turnout rate historically lags behind older demographics, their impact proved decisive on the margins in House and Senate races where Democrats flipped seats.
Throughout his second term, Gen Z increasingly soured on the president. Exit polling revealed that economic issues dominated their concerns, with a plurality of 43% citing the economy as their top priority.
More than eight in 10 young respondents stated that Trump’s policies worsened economic conditions. They also expressed opposition to his tariff strategy and the decision to go to war with Iran.
Voters also pointed to unfulfilled campaign pledges. Many felt let down by unkept promises to lower prices, avoid new wars, crack down on federal corruption, and release the Epstein files.
Early analysis from CIRCLE indicates that 15% of young people who backed Trump in 2024 voted for a Democratic House candidate in this year’s midterms. Democrats made double-digit gains with young white men and Latino men who voted Republican in 2024.
The party also narrowed margins among young rural voters and people without college degrees. However, it remains unclear what exact share of those Democratic gains stemmed from young Trump voters choosing to sit out the election entirely.
John Della Volpe, a pollster who runs the Harvard Youth Poll, noted that the results demonstrate that neither of the two major parties owns Gen Z. Ahead of an election cycle where Gen Z and millennials will comprise more than half of the electorate by 2028, every party faces the same reality.
The cohort of younger people in this cycle had a different set of experiences than the cohort of people two years ago, or four years before that. Every candidate, every party has to earn their votes.
By 2028, Gen Z and millennial voters will make up more than half of the electorate.
