Tatem Carroll, an 18-year-old in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, just graduated high school. She used to think that once she got her diploma, she’d “get the hell out” of her parents’ house. Now, she says she’s “scared shitless” about the future.
“I’m like, am I gonna live with my parents forever because our economy is trash?” wonders Carroll, who speaks to me over Zoom from her childhood bedroom. “It’s terrifying.”
She tells me about her boyfriend, a Christian like herself. She says they’ve been dating for three years and that she can’t wait to marry him. But they will have to wait to start their life together, given inflation and the rising cost of living.
“I’m like, when is that gonna happen?” she says. “Because we couldn’t even afford to rent an apartment in my small town.”
About two years ago, she said, she first thought about politics when she started driving. Her parents told her all she had to pay for were gas and car insurance, but she says it was tough to get by—let alone save anything. Her retail job at the local mall was based fully on commission, meaning her paychecks could fluctuate from $400 to $1,000 a month.
“I was like, ‘This is terrible. I’m working so that I can pay for gas to get to school and to get to work so that I can make more money to pay for gas,’ ” says Carroll, twisting her side ponytail. “And then I thought, ‘Oh, this is because of Biden.’ ”
She remembers that under Trump, when she was around 12 years old, gasoline often hovered around $2 a gallon. Now she’s used to seeing the gas station sign read $4 or more. She says everyone she knows is in the same boat—“broke” and living with their parents. While most economists admit Biden has little control over the price of gas, voters are still prepared to punish him for it.
“I feel like I could’ve afforded a future,” she says about life under Trump. “But now I’m shit out of luck.”
Carroll is one of a growing number of Gen Z Americans, born between 1997 and 2012, who are planning to vote for Trump this November. The idea of voting Republican before 30 is like going on birth control at 60. You could, but why would you? Which is why the latest polling on the political leanings of America’s youth is so shocking.
New polls show that the Gen Z vote, which Biden won by about 20 points in 2020, is now in play. A recent New York Times/Siena College survey—taken after Biden’s disastrous debate flop—puts Trump ahead of Biden by eight points among registered voters aged 18–29. And Pew research, conducted from February 1 to June 10, 2024, shows the GOP is leading among those under 30.
“Trump is a lot more competitive than he was four years ago,” said John Della Volpe, a Harvard pollster who helped advise Biden’s 2020 campaign. Much of that, he says, boils down to young men, who data show are politically drifting away from their increasingly liberal female peers.
“They generally think of Trump as the antihero,” says Della Volpe, once known as the Biden campaign’s “Gen Z whisperer.” “He’s a voice against the establishment.”
That kind of “cult of personality,” he adds, “could be quite attractive” to young men.
Trump has recently tried to reach young voters by joining TikTok, the platform he once tried to ban but has since embraced—and that has embraced him back. After news of his criminal conviction broke on May 30, many Gen Z voters flocked to the app to proudly announce they were “voting for the felon,” turning the phrase into a TikTok trend. A few days later, Trump posted his first TikTok, showing him rubbing elbows with UFC CEO Dana White while greeting fans, a post that earned him more than a million followers overnight.
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Now, after Saturday’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, young men are coming out of the woodwork to back the former president. Almost immediately in the wake of the news, some of Gen Z’s biggest male icons, including wrestler Jake Paul, YouTuber FaZe Banks, and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, rushed online to praise the former president’s “gangster” response to the shooting, which killed one rally attendee and critically injured two others. With blood on his face after a bullet clipped his right ear, Trump raised his fist to the crowd and appeared to shout, “Fight!”
In less than 24 hours, that image became an internet meme—from Trump’s face superimposed onto an iconic Matrix scene to a split screen comparing Trump’s stone-cold reaction with Biden tripping over a flight of stairs.
Jordan Miller, 22, was at an airport bar sipping a margarita when the TV flashed that gunfire had broken out at the rally.
“The guy next to me just goes, ‘holy bleep,’ ” says Miller, an operations analyst in Phoenix. “They didn’t even have all the details, like if he got shot, and in the first clip I see, it’s him getting pushed to the ground and then standing back up. It was really cool when he threw his fist up.”
He adds: “It certainly fired me up.”
Previously, he had been planning to vote for RFK Jr., given his promise to crack down on Big Pharma, but in that moment, he tells me he realized voting for Trump could do a “greater good.”
“It made me feel like I can trust him, and he’s going to stand up for this country,” Miller says of Trump. “I don’t think there’s very many people in this country that after they get shot, one inch from their brain, would be able to get up and essentially tell the country to fight—and I think that’s what he was mouthing while he had his fist up. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to fight for what I believe in. For what’s right.’ ”
In Atlanta, James Crandall, 22, had a similar epiphany. He said he was already planning to vote for Trump, but the image of the former president emerging from a herd of Secret Service made him double down on his decision.
“That was the best possible reaction you probably could’ve had,” says Crandall, who works in real estate financing. “I don’t think anybody would expect the guy to get up and do anything—he could’ve just gotten hurtled away or run and everyone would’ve understood. But he definitely took a ballsy route and got up to show everybody he was okay.”
Ruy Teixeira, a demographer and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells me it’s too soon to judge the potential impact on the presidential race but that Saturday’s optics have the potential to bring “Democratic-leaning constituencies like young black men and young Hispanic men” onto Trump’s side.
“It leans into what some of these guys are talking about, which is, ‘Who do the Democrats got? This old dude who can barely talk.’ And Trump’s not that young either, but he looks badass.”
CJ Pearson, the 21-year-old co-chair of the Republican National Committee’s Youth Advisory Council, says there’s been a “cultural reset” since Trump’s first term. Back in 2016, when he was only 13 years old, Pearson says it was “popular to hate Donald Trump.”
“It’s absolutely swung to the other side of the pendulum,” says Pearson, a conservative influencer with nearly half a million followers on X. “It’s not notable to be anti-MAGA. It’s no longer cool to hate him, because it’s become safe to do that.”
Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster for Biden’s campaign who also led his polling team in 2020, throws cold water on Pearson’s theory. She tells me it’s possible Gen Z voters could “have an impact on the vote,” but that if they do, it’s not because liberal youths are converting to conservatism.
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“Those are voters who already were Trump supporters,” she tells me about the subset of youths who back the former president. “They were already galvanized.”
But in Mounds View, a suburb of Minneapolis, 17-year-old Eden Rios claims herself among the converted.
Only a few years ago, she says, she was “very anti-Trump.”
“I would just feed into what people would tell me, like, ‘Oh, Trump’s a racist,’ ” says Rios, who’s one of the 8 million young Americans who will have turned 18 and be newly eligible to vote by this November. “I thought he just wanted to deport all of us. But then I realized most of the time, he’s usually just joking because he knows how to get attention.”
When Rios—whose parents illegally crossed the border from Mexico as kids—went online to find out what was so bad about Trump, she instead decided that Biden was the “horrible” one, because of his “open border” policy and his push to expand abortion access.
“I can’t vote for someone who supports abortion,” says Rios, a Catholic. “I don’t think that murdering children should be legal, so my vote will definitely go to Trump.”
Pearson says it’s voters like Rios who are leading a revolt against being told what to believe—from professors who try to “control our ability to think instead of imploring us to learn how to think” to a media that tries to dictate the boundaries of acceptable discourse.
“We’re resisting this notion that we should just be okay with going along to get along,” he tells me. “We are the new resistance.”
Biden was supposed to have Gen Z in the bag. This was the White House that once trotted out Olivia Rodrigo, the then–18-year-old pop star, to encourage youths to get the Covid jab. His administration has reshaped Title IX law to protect students with alternative gender identities, forgiven $167 billion in student debt, and made combating climate change a priority—all moves that were expected to excite the youth vote.
And yet, even progressive college kids have joined their conservative peers in the streets to chant “fuck Joe Biden.”
Ruy Teixeira, a demographer and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells me that Biden’s campaign has “overindexed on the views of leftist progressive activists.”
“Most people don’t have student debt. Some people have debt, they just don’t have very much of it, and others had debt but they paid it off,” says Teixeira, co-author of Where Have All the Democrats Gone? The Soul of the Party in the Age of Extremes. “And even among the slice that has debt, they have other things they’re worried about. It’s not like they think, ‘If I can get my student debt alleviated, I will be doing well.’ ”
Even without student debt, he says many young voters would still be light-years away from being able to afford a home or “upward mobility.” Teixeira says Gen Z is like other voters in that they care about economic stability over student debt or climate change—“they’re not like the fucking Sunrise Movement,” he adds.
“The concept that young voters, because they’re so allegedly progressive, couldn’t possibly vote in larger numbers for Trump is just kidding yourself. It’s whistling past the graveyard.”
Naomi, a 23-year-old recent University of Maryland graduate, is realizing that she might not be a liberal after all. Even though she told me that she “never in a million years” thought she’d vote for Trump, she’s now considering doing just that. The turning point for her was October 7, the deadliest massacre against Jews since the Holocaust, which her peers used as an opportunity to rally against Israel. At heated student government meetings, she says anti-Israel students—some of whom she had marched alongside at Black Lives Matter rallies—got up and hurled “literal blood libels” at her and other Jewish students.
“It was the most sobering experience of my life,” says Naomi, the granddaughter of four Holocaust survivors. “That is what opened my eyes to what the Democratic Party is turning into.”
Even though she cried when Trump was elected in 2016, she’s now leaning toward voting for him, especially since Biden has wavered on delivering arms to Israel. She considers the sitting president the “bare minimum of an ally” to the world’s only Jewish state. Now, she calls herself “politically homeless.”
“I couldn’t identify as a Democrat right now,” she says, pausing. “That’s so weird to say.”
But some never joined the left to begin with. That includes Lauren Elise, a 20-year-old Christian influencer in North Carolina who says she’s part of the “silent majority.”
“Life under the Biden presidency is hard,” she tells me.
She says that Biden’s plan to forgive student loans falls flat with her because she “made a promise” to herself and her parents never to get into debt. At times, that meant holding two jobs at once and living at home just to cover tuition. And now Biden wants her to pay the debt bill for other students.
“All of the sacrifices I made. . . ” she begins. “I don’t live on campus. I don’t live with friends. I don’t go to this amazing Ivy League school and have all these amazing, life-changing professors.”
She pauses, catching her breath: “I made those decisions. Because at the end of the day, this is my responsibility, and the idea of making someone else foot the bill makes me sick. You’re supposed to take care of yourself.”
Still, financial independence is no easy feat for Lauren, who asked us to withhold her last name because she says her conservative TikTok account, which has over 160,000 followers, attracts occasional death threats. She says gas alone can cost her up to $100 a week due to her 40-minute commute from her parents’ home to her college in Fayetteville. Like Carroll, the Oregon teen who’s desperate to start a life with her boyfriend, Lauren’s major motivation to vote for Trump is because of the high cost of gas.
“I—I—I can’t do four more years of this,” she says. “I can’t do four more years of this.”
Olivia Reingold is a reporter for The Free Press. Follow her on X @Olivia_Reingold and read her portrait of the cohort eager to vote for Biden, “Inside the Biden Bubble.”
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