Inside the Political Divide Roiling Gen Z

For generations, it's been taken as something of a political truism in America: young people start out on the left, then slowly move right as they grow older, settle down, have children and pax taxes.

"If you're not a liberal at 25, you have no heart; if you're not a conservative at 35, you have no brain," goes the saying, often — and probably apocryphally — attributed to Winston Churchill.

All of that convention wisdom came undone in November, with an election that saw Gen Z, defined roughly as those between 18 and 29, moving in significant margins toward Donald Trump four years after young voters outright rejected him.

With his decisive victory, Trump stunned political observers by making substantial gains among voters under 30. For the first time since 2008, the Democratic presidential candidate did not receive at least 60 percent support among young voters. It was a profound shift in the American electorate that appears, at least so far, to be holding up in the first hectic weeks of the Trump administration.

A majority of young voters, 55 percent, approve of the job Trump is doing as president, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll released ahead of the Super Bowl. That's higher than the 52 percent of 30 to 44-year-olds (Millennials) who said the same, and 50 percent of voters 65 and older (Boomers) who agreed.

On a generational basis, Gen Z's support of Trump is only eclipsed by that of Gen X, who gave Trump his highest marks, with 56 percent saying they approved of how he has handled his job as president. Gen X is, generally speaking, the parental generation to Gen Z.

Gen Z's embrace of Trump is part of a broader national trend showing the president enjoying some of the highest marks of his political career. But a deeper look at the data also suggests something more puzzling: the Gen Z voters who overwhelmingly helped propel Joe Biden to the White House in 2020 are not the same Gen Z voters who backed a second Trump term in 2024.

An Intra-Generational Divide

So are the Zoomers — defined as those born between approximately between 1997 and 2012 — really two different generational cohorts? And if so, what is the dividing line?

It's a theory that was recently floated on social media by Rachel Jafanza, the 27-year-old researcher and founder of Up and Up Strategies. As an elder member of Gen Z, Jafanza has been holding listening sessions with young Americans for the past few years.

"I really noticed a split in how older members of Gen Z and younger members of Gen Z are thinking about their place in society and in the country," Jafanza, who also publishes the Zoomer culture-focused newsletter Up and Up, told Newsweek. "They've expressed just different life experiences that have shaped their collective adolescence."

Last week, her infographic explaining the split between what she coined "Gen Z 1.0" and "Gen Z 2.0," received more than 5.4 million views on X.

On one side are the older Zoomers: those born between 1997 and 2004, who graduated high school before the COVID pandemic. As Janfaza sees it, these are young people who grew up in a society that was not yet completely online, and one that still deemed progressive political activism as "cool."

On the other side, the younger Zoomers: those born between 2005 and 2012, whose high-school years were upended by a global health crisis, and whose births roughly coincided with the invention and rise of the iPhone and social media. These are the true digital natives who grew up with the internet, developing a drastically different idea of what "counterculture" looks like: fewer marches, more memes.

The divide Janfaza identified would explain at least some of the drastic drop off in support that Kamala Harris received from younger voters. Among 25- to 29-year-olds, Harris' margin of victory was just 3 percent lower than Biden's in 2020. But when it comes to 18- to 24-year-olds, that margin dropped 23 points below what Biden garnered four years prior.

It All Comes Back to Covid

For all the concern generated around the toll the pandemic would have on masked, social-distanced and virtual learning, five years after the initial health emergency was declared it is becoming increasingly clear that those impacts would also manifest themselves politically.

Unlike Gen Z 1.0, many of whom were in college during the first Trump era, the college experience of Gen Z 2.0 was widely characterized by a frustration over the pandemic protocols that were preventing them from partaking in the full college experience.

"They couldn't see their friends, they couldn't leave their home, and whether or not it was understood at the time, if you're a young person who spent a year doing online classes or a year of social-distance school, you know, it's just frustrating," Janfaza said.

"It's not that they are denying the pandemic or the validity of any of the medical recommendations from epidemiologists, or anything like that, I think is a little bit more simple in the sense that they were sad that they couldn't see their friends."

As their social circles moved online virtually overnight, TikTok became the formative media outlet for the younger Zoomers. In video after video, young people complained about missing their high school graduations and senior proms, of the desolate college campuses that welcomed them and the increasingly precarious economy that waited for them on the other side.

This shift happened while public health officials around the world made few, if any, concessions for young people, despite it becoming clear even by mid-2020 that they were at much less risk from the virus as older cohorts.

Janfaza wrote in November that while there are "extreme social and emotional ramifications" for anyone whose adolescence was upended by a global pandemic, "it hasn't changed everyone in the same ways."

"I'd argue that those members of Gen Z, who were younger at the peak of the pandemic, had a very different — and frankly harder — experience than those a bit older," she wrote.

Is Protesting Still Cool?

That experience was markedly different from the older Zoomers, who were getting their degrees and starting their careers during the bubbling resistance movement that accompanied Trump's first term. For many, every year of their college experience was marked by a different protest.

The day after Trump's first inauguration in 2017, young people helped turn the Women's March into the largest single-day demonstration that the U.S. had seen. In 2018, after the Parkland shooting became the deadliest mass shooting at a high school, students spearheaded a national movement calling for gun control legislation. In 2019, many of those same students would take to the streets again, joining millions of others around the world as they skipped class as part of "Fridays for the Future," an international movement demanding action from political leaders on climate change.

By 2020, when the Black Lives Matter movement swept the country in the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, social justice advocacy was almost a given for many Zoomers. As Americans rushed to post black squares to the Instagram feeds and businesses in the U.S. drafted up diversity promises and hung BLM flags in their storefronts, the protests of that summer would go onto surpass the Women's March in terms of reach.

"It was very much in the social zeitgeist to attend marches and demonstrations, whether that was the Women's March, the March for Our Lives, climate strikes, Black Lives Matter movement. Those were all fervent on and off college campuses," Janfaza said.

Of course, young people have been resisting "the man" for generations. The difference is while Trump was the embodiment of that man among Gen Z 1.0, he was not for Gen Z 2.0.

For many, he actually embodied the resistance.

"Over the past four years, when Biden was the president, MAGA and Trump was the counterculture," Janfaza said. "If you were going to be anti-authority, that meant being anti-the party in charge, which [for the last four years] was the Democrats."

Janfaza said she believes the rightward shift of the younger generation is less about Trump himself and more reflective of an overall exhaustion with politics as a project.

"Right now, in 2025, there's a desire to not be talking about politics all the time," she said.

"People don't want to be fighting anymore with their peers," she added. "I think people are really understanding of the fact that they are in community with people who likely disagree with them, no matter what side of the aisle they stand on."

Of course, most of the younger Zoomers aren't old enough to remember much of the first Trump term. When Trump won his shock victory back in 2016, the oldest members of Gen Z 2.0 would have been 11.

Those voters might look back on that period as a time "when everything was good," Janfaza said. "I had no problems I had to worry about. I wasn't trying to afford groceries or gas. I wasn't in college, I wasn't a student, I wasn't I wasn't trying to get my first job."

That has given Trump a path to build a new reputation among voters who are still relatively impressionable in their own political views and thinking.

And he has delivered. Voters under 30 are more likely than any other age group to describe Trump as "effective," (63 percent), "focused," (62 percent), "competent," (58 percent), and "energetic," (71 percent), according to the recent CBS poll.

'Yearning' for a Past That No Longer Exists

In December, Janfaza declared 2024 the "year of Gen Z nostalgia." From their booming interest in vinyl records and film cameras to Y2K fashion and a desire to go "off the grid," the obsession "with a past they didn't experience" has become a defining aspect of the generation, she said.

"That yearning is also reshaping our politics," she added in a post on X. "President-elect Donald Trump tapped into this and made surprising inroads with young voters – many of whom were too young to vote in 2016 or even remember his first term - by promising to Make America Great Again for our generation."

To be sure, every generation faces its own struggles. Boomers came of age during Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement, Gen X were the "latchkey kids" coming home from school to an empty home, and Millennials grew up in a post-9/11 world only to enter the workforce just as the global economy was unraveling. What's unique to all of Gen Z is, as Janfaza said, the sense of never-ending crises, exacerbated by phones and social media.

"In today's digital age, difficulties feel inescapable, never-ending, and are documented in real time for all to witness."

"Romanticizing the past isn't a trend for Gen Z, it's survival," she added. "We've grown up in constant crisis: economic downturn, a global pandemic, the loneliness epidemic, fall of Roe v. Wade and climate change —which will have bigger consequences for us and our children than anyone else."