Young voters helped Democrats defy historical expectations in the midterm elections, blunting a predicted “red wave” and triggering Republican infighting. For years, most analyses of the GOP’s looming demographic problems — and even the false and racist claim that Democrats want immigrants to “replace” White voters — have centered around the party’s struggles with racial minorities. But this ignores what may be an even bigger demographic threat to Republicans’ future: Gen Z voters.
Exit polls by major news outlets and scholarly reports found that voters under 30 backed Democratic congressional candidates by almost 30 percentage points: 63 percent to 35 percent. Nearly identical youth margins helped Democrats become the first party in control of the White House since 1934 to retain all of its state legislative majorities in a midterm election. Youth support for Democrats jumped even higher in pivotal battleground Senate contests — young voters favored John Fetterman in Pennsylvania by a 42-point margin and Sen. Mark Kelly in Arizona by 56 points. Young voters were a key focus of Sen. Raphael G. Warnock’s campaign in Georgia’s Senate runoff election, a strategy that paid off.
These young voters aren’t dyed-in-the-wool Democrats, but they’ve leaned hard toward the party in 2020 and 2022 because of issues they care about: combating climate change, abortion rights, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, economic justice, gun violence and mental health. Gen Z has cut its political teeth mobilizing for causes like March for Our Lives, the Sunrise Movement, Black Lives Matter, immigrant inclusion and LGBTQ rights. “I don’t think older generations realize how fundamentally angry we are,” explained Maddie Billet, a 20-year-old Pennsylvanian who voted Democratic. “We were born into a world where the environment is crumbling, democracy is dying, bigotry is becoming the norm, and we’re angry about it.”
Gen Z’s indignation and political activism is stirring but not new. Yet, unlike earlier youth activists, Gen Z has connected the dots between movement insurgency and voter mobilization. That could be a game changer.
More than a century ago, young workers became the face of the American labor movement. In 1899, newsboys went on strike, railing against the “greed” of millionaire newspaper magnates Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst. Four years later, labor organizer Mother Jones led the first Children’s Crusade of mill worker children who were fighting for a workweek of no more than 55 hours and a prohibition on night shifts for young people.
Both the newsboys’ strike and the Children’s Crusade made headlines because they dramatically captured the unanticipated power of youth protest. However, this political energy was not registered at the ballot box because young people couldn’t vote. The lack of youth electoral power ultimately freed politicians to ignore their demands.
Fifty years later, young activists again played a crucial role on the front lines of the civil rights movement, including the youth-led Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which defiantly pursued critical organizing and protest campaigns resisted by their movement elders. When Justice Department officials begged college-aged civil rights protesters in 1961 not to move forward with their racially integrated Freedom Rides on buses going into the Jim Crow South because of the enormous dangers riders would face, the students brushed concerns aside, claiming to already have “signed [their] last wills and testaments.” In Birmingham, Ala., two years later, thousands of high-schoolers breached locked schoolhouse gates to form disciplined lines of nonviolent protesters facing police dogs and fire hoses, filling city jails and exposing the moral depravity of segregationists.
These tactics, in tandem with the rise of television, exposed the violence of segregationists, even against children, for a national audience. And that exposure was pivotal in shifting public opinion on Black civil rights, helping to fuel dramatic legislative breakthroughs with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. SNCC activists also pressed to open the Democratic Party to greater racial diversity, registering record numbers of Black voters. Their clashes with Democratic leaders led to major changes in state party delegations to the Democratic National Convention and the presidential nominating process in later years.
Once again, however, this activism had a major impact, but it failed to transform young protesters into a formidable voting bloc candidates were bound to win over by catering to their policy preferences.
The connection between youth protest and youth electoral power only began to gel at the end of the 1960s, as the civil rights and antiwar movements dovetailed to produce a focused effort to lower the voting age.
The first push for youth voting rights had come after President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the military draft age from 21 to 18 in 1942. The movement adopted the slogan, “old enough to fight, old enough to vote.” But the cause met stiff resistance from powerful figures like Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.), who for decades dominated the House Judiciary Committee and vehemently opposed youth voting. “The draft age and the voting age are as different as chalk is to cheese,” he declared. “Youth attaches itself to promise, rather than performance. These are … the years of rebellion rather than reflection.”
Despite Celler’s continued power, efforts to lower the voting age gained fresh momentum in the 1960s when the draft age reemerged as a flash point during the Vietnam War, prompting baby boomers to form organizations like Let Us Vote. By 1970, lowering the voting age became a unifying cause for diverse groups including Young Democrats and Young Republicans, unions and the National Education Association. Soon endorsed by leaders of both parties, states ratified the 26th Amendment in record time in 1971, making 10 million 18- to 20-year-olds eligible to vote that year.
In the decades that followed, the much ballyhooed potential of the amendment gave way to a checkered impact: after the initial excitement of 1972, youth voting steadily declined in the 1970s. Just as young Americans gained the right to vote, widespread distrust in government took hold due to the credibility gap over Vietnam and the scandals of Watergate. That dampened enthusiasm among young Americans, not just for voting, but also for movement activism. And without that activism, it was hard to motivate young voters to engage at election time over the ensuing decades.
Youth participation spiked during the 1992 and 2008 campaigns, spurred by the magnetism of two young, charismatic Democratic presidential candidates — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. But this engagement wasn’t sustained. Charismatic candidates might capture the fancy of young voters briefly, but without consistent movement activism to arouse and organize young people, their electoral participation fell off quickly, declining markedly in the 2012, 2014 and 2016 elections for example. That freed politicians to disregard the issues important to young voters.
In 2018, however, headlines announced that young people “rocked the vote” as youth turnout leaped by 18 points and helped fuel Democratic gains. This wasn’t a coincidence. That year, the student-led March for Our Lives organized one of the largest protests in U.S. history. The 2020 presidential election saw turnout soar to 55 percent of voters between 18 and 29, a year in which record numbers of young people also participated in Black Lives Matter protests.
This year’s midterm election results may reflect a game changer in youth political engagement: a fusion of movement activism and access to the ballot box. Maxwell Frost, the first member of Gen Z elected to Congress, told Florida voters that he started organizing politically at 15 because of school shootings and the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012. “It’s righteous anger,” explained Frost, “We want to vote, and we want to be involved in decision-making because we get the urgency of these issues.”
Gen Z is demonstrating that youth mobilization can leave its mark in movement activism and the voting booth — a one-two punch that could transform American politics. These young voters aren’t partisans, as many older voters are. Instead, Gen Z’s political engagement is driven by powerful policy aspirations that defy traditional partisan loyalties. They’ll vote for whichever candidates speak to the issues and solutions they care about. While both parties have disappointed them, explaining their lack of party loyalty, on issues such as climate, racial justice, LGBTQ rights and gun control, right now it’s Democratic candidates speaking to Gen Z.
Gen Z’s muscular political presence underscores that young people have the power to rebel and reflect, and in the process they are emerging as a juggernaut of political conscience and influence.