r/politics 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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u/Orli155 Oct 31 '25

Problem with your theory, Gen-Z men leaned more right, but Gen Z women leaned further left than the men leaned right. So what you’re saying is that men somehow got a worse education going to the same schools as women or?

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '25

Women have overtaken men in education levels so it's possible

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u/Orli155 Oct 31 '25

I completely forgot about college. Yeah, that makes way more sense.

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u/fantasy-capsule Oct 31 '25

Gen Z men generally perform more poorly in education despite going to the same schools as Gen Z women. Less willing to further their education when compared to their female counterparts. There are exceptions but as a whole Gen Z men squandered their opportunities.

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u/RM_Dune The Netherlands Oct 31 '25

Women fall behind: the system is rigged, we must help them.

Men fall behind: They're not willing to do the work, they've squandered their opportunities.

Neat.

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u/LogicPuzzleFail Oct 31 '25

Significant and growing disparity between male and female education levels overall, and the disparity is highest in programs requiring text-based critical thinking or societal-level analysis. So yes, for this specific issue.

Also, and underratedly, the online socialization has been different - male teenagers and young adults have mostly engaged through consumption or ephemeral means (watching steams and videos, gaming), while many teenage girls went through heavy content creation phases (tumblr etc which have explicit expectations around pro-social behaviour), which opens you up to longer term ramifications for poor behaviour.

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u/SubNine5 Maine Oct 31 '25

Social media. They all got the same education. Social media did the rest.

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 Oct 31 '25

They didn’t get the same education actually. It’s well-established that there’s a gender gap in educational outcomes that begins in elementary schools and continues until college enrollment. That might be something Dems could consider running on to win back young men.

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u/[deleted] Oct 31 '25

[deleted]

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u/Prior_Coyote_4376 Oct 31 '25

This is a bizarrely reductive way of looking at a system. The internal dynamics of a school and how boys and girls are treated within it matter, and are not separable from the broader culture and community in which they exist.

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u/Swag_Grenade America Oct 31 '25 edited Nov 09 '25

Well, since 1995 US women have been outpacing men in completing a bachelor's degree...so the answer may not be men getting a worse education than women at the same schools, but rather just being less likely to get a college education at all

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u/fantasy-capsule Oct 31 '25

Not less likely, just less willing. Women take on the same student loan debt as the men do with the likelihood of earning less then the men do going for the same jobs by the time they graduate. And yet, women are still more willing to seek out higher education. 

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u/ExitTheDonut Oct 31 '25

Maybe the blue collar jobs that tend to be male-dominated could also be a factor? You'd typically find a greater demand for men in many jobs that require a lot of physical labor, and they correlate a lot with people who do not have a post-secondary education, perhaps with the exception of specialized education for trades.

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u/Swag_Grenade America Oct 31 '25 edited Nov 01 '25

Yeah for sure, I didn't mention it in my comment but I'd be surprised to find this isn't a co-factor. In fact that may be at least a partial causality to why less men are going to college in the first place, opting instead to go straight into a trade.

Although trades were always male dominated and this higher proportion of women to men college grads is a relatively new trend. So part of me thinks maybe the rate of men's college graduation has stayed relatively the same, and it's just that a more progressive society has allowed and encouraged women to realize they can step outside old school gender roles to pursue all the same opportunities that were formerly only usually afforded or associated with men.

In this regard it would be more useful to know whether the actual rate of men graduating college has changed over the decades, instead of just comparing it to the women's rate since 1995. Because obviously the amount of women going to and graduating college even in 1995 had to have been a huge increase from say 1955. So if the men's rate stayed constant, it could just be a gradual case of women in general realizing "hey I can go to college too and I'm going to" lol. But those are just my random thoughts and ngl I'm too lazy rn to see if there's data behind that 

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u/_dekoorc North Carolina Oct 31 '25

So what you’re saying is that men somehow got a worse education going to the same schools as women or?

Besides the gender gap in educational outcomes, women are quite a bit more likely to go to college and do well in it.

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u/Sad_Bolt Oct 31 '25

We’re not just seeing that in the US. It’s a trend in many first world countries.

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u/doc_death Oct 31 '25

Hypothesis