The Generation the Right Could Lose
Young men voted Republican in historic numbers. Now what?
To generations old enough to remember growing up without a cellphone, social media. Or the housing crash, Generation Z is many things. Depending on who you ask, they might be labeled as “lazy,” “entitled,” or generally accused of not knowing how the “real world works.” Others cling to the belief that Gen Z is overtly liberal, addicted to social media, and the North Star of a racially diverse progressive future.
Instead of stereotypes, let’s start with the facts.
Generation Z numbers over 71 million Americans — roughly 21 percent of the population. It is indeed the most ethnically diverse generation in the country’s history. A bare majority are non-Hispanic white, 52 percent, and one-in-four Gen Zers identify as Hispanic. Around 22 percent have at least one immigrant parent, compared to 14 percent of Millennials at the same age, but the number of foreign-born Gen Zers is lower than in the millennial cohort.
This matters. Gen Z is not a generation of immigrants, but it is a generation shaped by immigration.
The youngest members of Gen Z are just entering their mid-teens and the oldest are in their late twenties. A significant cohort turned 18 in time to cast their first ballot in 2020, where they made up roughly one-in-ten eligible voters. That share will only grow over time.
In the 2020 Democratic primary, Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, two of the most progressive candidates in the field, received a combined 60 percent among voters under 30 in YouGov/Economist polling. While the energy of the Sanders and Warren campaigns was real and staffed by young organizers, both lost the nomination to Joe Biden, who dominated with older, moderate Democrats. Their primary failures only reinforced the conventional wisdom among political strategists: young voters are unreliable, hard to mobilize, and don’t show up.
That conventional wisdom, however, took a hit in 2020. Roughly 51 percent of young adults ages 18 to 24 voted in the 2020 presidential election — a significant jump from 43 percent in 2016 and the highest youth turnout since the modern era began.
For a brief period, it seemed like the conservative movement was paying attention. In the 2024 election, young voters as a whole favored Kamala Harris over Donald Trump by just four points, a dramatic collapse from Biden’s 25-point margin, and the strongest showing for a Republican presidential candidate among young voters since 2008. Among young men specifically, the shift was historic. A post-election survey found that 58 percent of Gen Z men reported voting for Trump, the first time a majority of young male voters backed a Republican presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush in 1988. Unlike Harris, the Trump campaign actively worked to gain votes from the “manosphere,” with both Trump and then-vice-presidential nominee JD Vance appearing on numerous major podcasts.
It proved decisive. There are numerous examples from data that tell the story, but one anecdote may tell it best. On the day of the election, MSNBC was asking voters who they were voting for and why. One young man answered Trump, because he had gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast and Kamala Harris had not.
The 2024 party identification number switch is equally striking. A survey conducted in late 2023 found Gen Z men more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans — 30 percent versus 24 percent. By late 2024, that had completely reversed: 38 percent identified as Republican, compared to just 23 percent as Democrat. Conservative identity among Gen Z men rose from 31 percent to 45 percent in a single year. Meanwhile, a Yale Youth Poll found voters aged 18 to 21 now favoring Republicans by 11.7 points.
None of this means conservatives have won the generation. By mid-2025, young men were essentially split on the 2026 congressional ballot: 41 percent said they would back the Republican candidate, 40 percent the Democrat, with 16 percent saying they would vote for neither. These voters are not locked in. They are persuadable, which is precisely the problem for a political right that has done almost nothing to hold them.
Social media is where this fight is actually happening, and the right has been slow to understand its own advantage there. TikTok’s algorithm is designed to learn quickly what keeps users watching and deliver more of it — creating ideological echo chambers built not by conscious choice but by code. The left recognized this early and built infrastructure around it. But the algorithm is not inherently liberal — it rewards engagement, and conservative content can be just as sticky. YouTube’s recommendation engine pushes increasingly conservative videos onto home pages based on viewer behavior, and the podcast ecosystem — led by figures like Rogan — has delivered millions of young men into conversations about economics, masculinity, and political identity that no traditional Republican Party operation ever reached. Even X has now become a preferred platform for conservative messaging.
The influence of these platforms is no longer up for debate. A June 2025 Morning Consult report found that Gen Z has become 12 percentage points less likely to identify as liberal than in 2016 — a drop more than twice as large as the general populations over the same period. Young people have gone from being potentially the most progressive generation since the Baby Boomers to potentially the most conservative generation in 50 to 60 years.
However, much of what drove young men rightward in 2024 was less ideological conviction than a spirit of anti-establishment rebellion, channeled through the cultural force of Donald Trump. A Manhattan Institute focus group of right-leaning Gen Zers found that what matters most is not ideological consistency but vibe: humor, transgression, and the sense of being led by someone who commands attention. That is not a political movement. That is a political moment. And moments end.
Young conservatives are not waiting to be handed a party identity. They are forming one loosely, online, around personalities and aesthetics more than party platforms.
There are young conservatives on every campus, in every mid-sized city, posting on X and watching YouTube and holding views that are not reactionary but genuinely populist: pro-worker, pro-industry, skeptical of concentrated power whether it comes from government bureaucracies or Fortune 500 boardrooms. Many of them have never been asked to do anything with those instincts. They have never been recruited, trained, or given a platform that treated them as the future rather than the audience. As a result, some drift. Some get absorbed into an online culture that is loud but purposeless. Some quietly become right-liberals — people who vote Republican but whose political identity is untethered from any durable set of commitments.
Winning a generation’s vote is not the same as winning its loyalty. And loyalty, in politics, is built through the experience of belonging to something and being given a stake. The progressive infrastructure understood this for decades. The question is whether the conservative movement is ready to build the same thing — not for the next election cycle, but for the next generation.
Aiden Buzzetti is the President of the Bull Moose Project. You can follow him on X @AidenBuzzetti.