Though there is a widening gender gap between young men and women, Generation Z represents a political horseshoe. Regardless of whether they identify with the Left or Right, members of Gen Z are open to an expansionist executive branch if it means expedient assistance. They don’t want to wait for laissez-faire policies to yield incrementally better economic mobility and security. They want it now. When young people vote today, they’re making a gamble for which candidate will deliver immediate relief.
It struck some as odd that President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani hit it off during their meeting at the Oval Office last month. But to more pessimistic political observers, it made perfect sense. Like Mamdani, Trump is a populist who considers a paternalistic government a possible solution to political problems, though Mamdani supports much more drastic intervention bordering on statism. They both garnered a large share of the Gen Z vote in their respective elections.
Three out of four young voters backed Mamdani in the November 2025 mayoral race. Similarly, Gen Z supported former Vice President Kamala Harris over Trump in the 2024 presidential election by just four points, a massive drop from the 25-point margin former President Joe Biden earned in 2020. Both outcomes can be explained by young people’s rejection of the establishment. Indeed, the youth are still raging against the machine.
While the Democratic Party’s antiestablishment wing is having its day in the sun with Mamdani and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), Trump did it first. He tapped into the grievances of Americans who felt they had been left behind by globalization, including outsourcing U.S. labor and opening the border. And a surprising number of Gen Zers, burned out from the turbulent, scandal-ridden Biden era, gravitated to Trump’s burn-it-down message in 2024.
They resented the public health apparatus that locked them out of school and other social venues, deepening their mental health crisis. They struggled under crushing inflation triggered by Biden’s reckless fiscal spending. In 2024, they voted in droves for Trump, hoping he would spark an economic boom like the one from his first term.
But a year into his second term, those Gen Zers appear to regret the bet they made, according to a CBS News poll. Among Americans ages 18 to 29, Trump’s job approval rating fell from a high of 55% just after he was inaugurated to 28% in July.
Though inflation has tempered, members of Gen Z look around and see stubbornly steep prices and wages that haven’t kept pace. They wonder why the stock market is rallying and home values continue to climb, yet their friends with college degrees can’t get a job. Only 30% of 2025 graduates said they had secured a full-time job in their field, according to a survey by education technology company Cengage Group conducted over the summer.
There’s a quiet despair among some Gen Z men, who have developed gambling problems. This habit, though troubling, reveals a hope among young men that they can get rich quick and beat the system they believe has left them out to dry. A quarter of men under 30 bet on sports online, and 10% of men aged 18 to 30 have a gambling addiction, compared to just 3% of the overall population, according to an August national survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University.
No doubt this is a highly irresponsible and unproductive pastime. I ask the awkward question, then: At what point is this economic pessimism Gen Z’s own fault?
Partially due to endless peer comparison on social media, Gen Zers treat as necessities what most generations before them considered luxuries. They’re racking up obscene credit card debt so they can show off to their friends that they’re measuring up materially. They’re financing their burritos on DoorDash instead of learning how to cook at home. Almost 75% of users of “buy now pay later” platforms in the U.S. are Gen Z or millennials. They’re exercising very little fiscal restraint, forgetting the “save it for a rainy day” wisdom of their grandparents. Surely, then, their economic malaise is not solely the fault of the president in charge?
Gen Z is impatient for better socioeconomic mobility, but is what they’re asking realistic? Inflation is down to around 2.7%, close to the Federal Reserve’s target rate, in a huge drop from the 6% high under Biden. The rate of inflation has slowed, but these 20-somethings seem to misunderstand that, though the rate of inflation has declined, prices are unlikely to go back to where they were. An education system that doesn’t teach financial literacy or basic economics is partially to blame for their ignorance. These young adults lost two years of learning either during college or high school because of government mismanagement of the pandemic. And the curricula they did receive affirmed the virtues of socialism, possibly explaining Gen Z’s recent embrace of that failed ideology.
A Manhattan Institute poll of 20 Gen Z Republicans found that their “concerns about housing costs and the economy sounded more like talking points than lived traumas.” Gen Z overall seems to be looking for a quick government fix to make it easier to keep up with the Joneses. Their financial grief is real in some ways — the average age to achieve homeownership is 40 years old — but Gen Zers could also just be parroting some anti-baby boomer rage-bait they saw online. What is for sure is that they are willing to punish candidates who they feel reneged on their commitments.
In his second term, Trump has continued his America First prescriptions. Unlike Mamdani’s populist message, Trump’s is not progressive. Trump is aggressively conducting Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and mass deportations; Mamdani wants New York City to stay a sanctuary city. But on economics, Trump has not shied away from using the power of government to try to assuage young voters’ financial anxieties. He may not be advocating a national rent freeze, but his top federal housing official did propose a 50-year mortgage that would further entrench government in the business of home loans. The administration thought young people would buy it. They didn’t.
According to Gen Z, baby boomers got the deal of a lifetime when they bought their first homes for chump change in the 1970s. And they got stuck holding the bag. To Gen Z, the 50-year mortgage was not solving the problem but rubbing it in.
At face value, the proposal seemed like it would help smooth the path to home ownership. Except Gen Z saw the difference between getting to inhabit a home and actually owning a home, which the proposal makes impossible. Young people would spend at least 10 years paying interest on the loan while remaining in debt until they’re old and gray. The administration’s Band-Aid failed, as young people realized the rite of passage their parents experienced in their 20s would be a pipe dream until they reached middle age. What some members of Gen Z really hope for, though some would be reluctant to admit it, is a housing correction that resets the game itself and allows them to enter the market.
Gen Zers, including conservatives, have made it clear for years now that they’re OK with Big Brother promising to solve their problems. No doubt they saw that willingness to go big or go home in Trump, who, in his announcement for the 50-year mortgage, posted a picture of himself alongside former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, who pioneered the 30-year mortgage, under the banner “Great American Presidents.” Our only three-term president, Roosevelt is considered by traditional conservatives to be the leader who built the now-gargantuan, unaccountable administrative state, which allows unelected regulatory agencies to operate independent of Congress and public opinion.
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But Gen Z, and even Gen Z conservatives, are more jaded about the free-market system that served their elders so well. Roughly half (52%) of Gen Z Republicans say they think the government should be doing more to solve problems, compared with 38% of millennial Republicans, 29% of Gen Xers, 23% of baby boomers, and 12% of the Silent Generation, according to a 2019 Pew Research poll.
A bombshell NBC poll from September 2025 revealed that young men are becoming more conservative in their life priorities, seeking out family and marriage as major goals, while young women are becoming more liberal. But the poll didn’t ask respondents whether they think the system is “working” for them or to what extent an executive should wield authority to improve the lives of voters. A large number of Gen Z voters went for Trump in 2024, partially because they were rolling the dice that he’d revive the economy and alleviate this persistent feeling they have that they are woefully behind in life compared to their parents when they were their age. It’s fair to want that. But if I were a betting woman, I’d say it’s better to vote based on principles rather than angst.
Caroline Downey is the host of Locked In at National Review, editor-in-chief of The Conservateur, and senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum.