Hope from the Kids
By 
As I stated yesterday, I basically hate everything about what the world has become in my lifetime, both politically and culturally. I’ve wondered what it would be like for the world to get better in my lifetime, but that is evidently not something I will ever find out. But, as one commenter pointed out, despite all the awful coverage about young voters being a bunch of incels, in fact, statistically young voters are pretty awesome and much better than the failed decrepits ahead of them.
But this past Tuesday, we saw Gen Z vote overwhelmingly for Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City, as well as for other Democrats, such as Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. These Gen Z landslides for Democrats may have been a surprise to some, but not for us. Well before the election, the data was already telling a different—and far more hopeful—story about the politics of Gen Z. In surveys from over 60,000 Americans in the 2024 Cooperative Election Study, the gold standard for political research, a clear pattern emerges: Racial resentment is collapsing among young people.
Political scientists use the term “racial resentment” to measure a specific set of attitudes about race. It’s not about a belief in biological inferiority, which is a feature of old-fashioned racism. Instead, it’s a worldview that attributes racial inequality to the perceived cultural failings of minority groups rather than to systemic barriers or discrimination. The survey asks respondents to agree or disagree with statements like: “Irish, Italian, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Black Americans should do the same without any special favors.” High racial resentment means believing racial disparities stem from lack of effort; low racial resentment means recognizing structural obstacles. Racial resentment has been mostly studied among white Americans, but it’s also very important for understanding the politics of Asians and Latinos. When Trump increased his support among Asians and Latinos, he did so by attracting those with higher levels of racial resentment.
Does scoring high on the racial resentment scale mean you’re a racist? Scholars differ on this question, and it’s outside of the scope of our analysis. What is most important for our purposes here is that your level of racial resentment predicts how you vote. In predicting who votes for or against Trump, racial resentment is one of the most powerful variables out there—more predictive than income, gender, education, geography, or attitudes about economic policy, gender, or religious traditionalism. In short, scoring high on racial resentment means you’re virtually certain to vote for Trump, whereas scoring low means you’re basically certain to vote against him. And among young Americans, racial resentment is at historic lows.
And here’s what the data shows: Gen Z has the lowest racial resentment of any generation ever studied.
The upshot here is also interesting:
As we’ve written before, we don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all optimal messaging and policy strategy for Democrats. We don’t think that Democratic candidates should march in lockstep to the left on all issues of racial politics, and a platform of symbolic identity politics without a strong economic vision is probably the worst of all worlds. But our findings show that a Democratic Party that defensively retreats on racial justice—especially backtracking on commitments to racial justice that Democratic leaders have already made—isn’t making a hard strategic choice. Instead, it’s awkwardly alienating its future base to chase voters who are literally dying off. Republicans’ Southern Strategy delivered temporary victories by activating racial resentment, but that strategy is approaching its expiration date.
Remember, as well, that Gen Z is close to majority-minority. Combine progressive young whites with growing electoral power among young voters of color, whose racial resentment is also historically low, and the math becomes undeniable. Racial justice isn’t a luxury Democrats can jettison—it’s the foundation of any stable future majority coalition.
Why does conventional wisdom get this so wrong?
The last question is pretty easy to answer–a mix of a bunch of rich people in the media and Democrats relying on the same consultant-industrial complex based in the Beltway ever since Bill Clinton won in 1992. But the larger point I think is that young people feel that the system is rigged against them, which is true. Old people won’t leave their homes, new home building is pitched way too high for their finances, they have college debt, their job prospects are being destroyed by the AI nonsense, the political system is dominated by old white men born in 1946 (that the nation will be led for at least 24 years by men born in the first year of the Baby Boom is a perfect metaphor for America generally), they’ve lived their lives under the threat of school shootings that no one will do anything to stop, etc. That doesn’t per se make them all a bunch of leftists. But there’s not much tolerance for the old bullshit to divide by race or gender or sexuality. Sure, you can find Charlie Kirk and Nick Fuentes out there–and those who are on the far right are really on the far right as any College Republican chapter demonstrates–but they are a stark minority of young people. Maybe we should focus on real young people, but that would be like higher education reporting talking about colleges not in the Ivy League. So we’ll just keep seeing the same nonsense from the media.