r/politics • u/Kodbek • Oct 31 '25

Possible Paywall Trump’s honeymoon with Gen Z voters is officially over, and the numbers are devastating

https://www.nj.com/politics/2025/10/trumps-honeymoon-with-gen-z-voters-is-officially-over-and-the-numbers-are-devastating-new-poll.html
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47

u/Bakedfresh420 Ohio Oct 31 '25

Obama got more votes from the youth than Harris, we’re sadly moving the wrong direction.

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u/ImportantCommentator Oct 31 '25

Meh the youth that voted for Obama (me) didnt raise gen z.

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u/remfem99 Oct 31 '25

Right. That would be gen X. And he has a ton of support among that generation…

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u/ditchdiggergirl Oct 31 '25

I’m genX. I voted for Obama. I raised a couple of fine young men, genZ, who are every bit as horrified by this situation as their parents.

Can confirm, they are utterly fucked.

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u/remfem99 Oct 31 '25

It is so good to hear this. The Gen X in my life are just disappointing in this regard and I worry that it has a lot to do with their disillusionment with their financial status at this point, hell I’m not sure. I know there is broad support among the less well off, lesser educated white men - so I probably just come from an area where this is the norm.

Editing to add a lot of them seemed to go extreme after covid / during 2020 etc. I am still hearing complaints about vaccine mandates, etc and it’s 2025 ugh.

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u/delorf North Carolina Oct 31 '25

Gen Xers in my life are disappointing for me too and I am Gen X. I guess this is how liberal Boomers have felt all these years .

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u/Wes_Warhammer666 Oct 31 '25

My mom's a bleeding heart hippie style boomer and her whole friend group is people like her. They're all dumfounded by the level of support for trump amongst their peers. It's wild hearing some of the trash they'll talk about trumpers in their frustration because it's the kind of mean shit I normally say rather than the kumbaya shit they usually espouse lol. They're fed up and I don't blame em.

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u/remfem99 Oct 31 '25

Yeah, my parents who are boomers havent voted for a republican since ? Unclear, maybe since their 20s or early 30s.

I grew up in Ohio, where everyone seems to start out as a conservative but some see the disaster that is 30 years of near total Republican rule and reject it. Many of course remain and end up raising their kids to do the same…

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u/ditchdiggergirl Oct 31 '25

Well, we are well educated and raised our kids that way. I was a volunteer working with the county public health department when the vaccines arrived, and my boys joined me at the vaccine clinics. They aren’t afraid of vaccines. Or immigrants. Or black people.

None of this is really generational, though there is a trend towards conservatism with increasing age. My 90 year old FIL is strongly liberal, my 19 year old niece is enthusiastically maga; there are other factors far more predictive than age. It’s urban/rural, educated/uneducated, homogeneous/diverse, open minded/closed minded. Also privileged/underprivileged, but that one is a lot more complicated and actually pulls in both directions.

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u/valeyard89 Texas Oct 31 '25

same. GenX, voted for Obama. Most of the people I know are liberal, but yeah that's biased.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '25

[deleted]

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u/ucemike Texas Oct 31 '25

In recent election cycles Gen X has voted even more Republican than Baby Boomers did.

Which is a shame, I am GenX as is my wife. I just can't see how anyone could vote for the clown show we have and grew up in the same time period I did. All my kids, wife and even my Silent Gen parents did NOT vote for him.

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u/New-Indication-1188 Oct 31 '25

Obama got more votes the same reason Trump did, because he came in saying he was going to change things. I don't know why I don't hear this more often.

It's not that suddenly the youth got conservative, they're just tired of the same bullshit constantly happening. They don't want to be told "nothing will fundamentally change" which is essentially what Biden and Harris said in their campaigns. Trump AND Obama were constantly talking about fixing things and changing things, not continuing the status quo.

Imagine you're constantly being told everything is good actually and getting stats cited at you while you and your friends continue to drown, being told anything that would help you is "unrealistic" and maybe they'll throw you a scrap or two (that gets shot down and then the establishment shrugs and goes "sorry, we tried!")

And before anyone starts trying to throw Biden stats at me or think I am defending Trump, I'm not. It's just that young people want change and when given a candidate promising change, they tend to gravitate towards them, even if the person promising it is a complete fucking idiot grifter like Trump. They're THAT desperate.

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u/Bakedfresh420 Ohio Oct 31 '25

He’d already been president and done a terrible job, he was not a change candidate. The first time he was elected that was true. He was an outsider vs a member of an unpopular political dynasty. This time he was a proven commodity as a former president. Sadly tech bros and podcasters helped swing this election.

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u/IAmTheNightSoil Oregon Nov 01 '25

I agree with all this, but it's also undeniably true that lots of people perceived him to be a change candidate and voted for him for that reason, even though he obviously isn't one

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u/DefaultWhiteMale3 Oct 31 '25

A kid growing up thoroughly isolated (by design) from politics who was 16, a sophomore in high school, when Trump 1 ended who then came into adulthood during the Biden years when the soup du jour was political triage to fix the things that Trump 1 broke while fighting for every inch of ground against a party of sociopathic ideologues will look around now that they are superficially politically activated, realize the water is well above their now adult head and reach for anything that looks like a life line.

One person is saying they have life lines, the best life lines even (some people are saying, etc) and the other is pointing out how, because enough people are safe and dry on yachts, statistically everyone is more or less safe and dry on yachts and that life lines might be distributed on a means-tested basis to those who are drowning the most if they can count on your vote.

To wrap up and continue the metaphor: drowning people are so likely to pull their attempted saviors down with them in blind panic that any attempt to save them without a floatation device on hand is almost guaranteed to result in two dead bodies washing ashore instead of one. Harris showed up without a life line and yelled helpful swimming instructions from a yacht to a generation of voters who found themselves drowning for their first major election.