Welcome to Washington: Trump’s Generation Z Crisis

In hindsight, it is plain now that there was one dominating force that drove people to the polls to hand President Trump his victory last year — the cost of living. That same issue should be deeply concerning to Republicans now, given new data released last week detailing how one key voting bloc is faring in this economy. Welcome to Washington, where this week Congress is set to consider a host of important items, including the National Defense Authorization Act, a number of key executive nominees, and government funding measures for the year. As the press studies congressional negotiations and the president prepares for his immigration crackdown at Chicago, there is a story receiving inadequate attention far from the nation’s capital. Last week, the president received the news that only 22,000 jobs had been created in August. It was a dismal number, yes, but there is an even bleaker statistic. The unemployment rate for those between the ages of 16 and 24 came in at 10.5 percent. It is a slight improvement over July, when the unemployment rate for that cohort hit 10.8 percent. The stubbornness of youth unemployment, however, paints a dismal picture for the president and his party. The last time the youth unemployment rate was that high — outside of the Covid pandemic — was just before the 2016 election. Last year, Mr. Trump and other members of the GOP benefited greatly from certain demographic groups swinging to the right. Hispanic voters moved 22 points toward Mr. Trump between 2020 and 2024. Men under the age of 50 voted for the president by a one-point margin, though it was an 11-point swing from the 10-point margin by which President Biden won that same demographic in 2020. Naturalized citizens — meaning those immigrants who attained citizenship — backed Vice President Kamala Harris by four points, though Mr. Biden had won that group by 21 points over Mr. Trump. Young voters, similarly, swung wildly toward the GOP. According to a Pew Research survey following last year’s presidential election, Ms. Harris won voters born in the 1990s and 2000s by 13 points, which is half of the margin that Mr. Biden won that group by in 2020. He dominated that cohort by 26 points. When Secretary Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee in 2016, she fared even better. Among voters born in the 1990s and 2000s, she beat Mr. Trump by 37 points. Some political prognosticators were bemused by young people’s shift to the right last year, given the oft-stated belief that the country would grow more progressive as history marched on and the increasingly liberal views of successive generations became dominant. Like most other groups, Gen Z moved dramatically to the right, in part because of the belief that America is not the America it thought it was inheriting upon graduations from college or emergence into the American economy post-pandemic. Rising prices for everyday goods, the increasingly unaffordable goal of buying one’s first home, and the displacement of those college-educated young persons who are now seeing entry-level jobs become increasingly rare due to advancements in artificial intelligence represents a fundamentally regressive convergence of several tides that affects my generation more than all others. One of Mr. Trump’s closest allies, Charlie Kirk, has warned that if conservatives cannot get their hands around this affordability crisis and deliver real results for young people, then Generation Z and other younger people will shift back to the left just as quickly as they shifted to the right, if not even further leftward this time. It’s something Mr. Kirk calls the “Mamdani Effect.”“The ‘Mamdani Effect’ is grievance-based politics, playing into people’s bitterness, and also playing into the economic disorder that Biden left us,” Mr. Kirk told Fox News in July. “But understand: For the younger voters that I represent and the younger voters that delivered the White House for President Trump — they can’t afford homes, they’re increasingly renting, they’re not getting married, they’re not having children.”Younger voters are souring on the president — and fast. A survey from CBS News released Sunday finds that voters under the age of 30 are more likely than nearly every other group to disapprove of the president’s job performance. Voters between the ages of 18 and 30 give Mr. Trump poor marks, with 35 percent approving of his handling of the presidency and 65 percent disapproving. For older readers, that may seem typical for a rebellious, younger group that disagrees with the conservative aims of a Republican president. Yet just a few months ago, Gen Z was open and ready to support Mr. Trump. The same CBS News poll, conducted in March, showed that the president was within the margin of error for having a net positive approval rating with those under the age of 30. At that time, just 51 percent of Americans under the age of 30 disapproved of the president’s job as commander-in-chief, while 49 percent said they approved.

Welcome to Washington: Trump’s Generation Z Crisis

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