5mo ago

Donald Trump's Gen Z popularity plunges

www.newsweek.com

Summary

Donald Trump’s popularity among Generation Z voters has sharply declined since the 2024 election, according to a new Economist/YouGov poll.

His net favorability among 18-29-year-olds has dropped from +19 in November to -18, raising concerns for Republicans about sustaining youth support.

While Trump gained ground with young voters in 2024, recent policies—such as his mass deportation plan and targeting of DEI initiatives—may have contributed to this decline.

News @lemmy.world

Sine_Fine_Belli @lemmy.world

5mo ago

Donald Trump's Gen Z popularity plunges

www.newsweek.com /donald-trump-gen-z-popularity-favorable-rating-yougov-2030595

161 comments

Good news, having such an eye-awakening experience at an impressionable age can drive people left-wing for their lifetime. Same has happened during Trump-1, Bush-2 and Bush-3, (now in Canadian politics) the Walkerton Crisis, the Mulroney days, and now hopefully with Doug Ford.
Bad news: They already got played, and they might get played again in 4 years with billions of big tech money intended to distract the masses.
- We're going to be damned lucky if we get the chance for people to be played again.
  
  It will happen, might take a generation or three.
  This is all so depressing... Its like there needs to be a massive war every so many years so people remember why it's important to have a democracy and be kind to one another.
  
  Question of when, not if. Fascism isn't sustainable, it will fail eventually (but gods is depressing to think of it getting real bad)
  
  It won't be luck that will save your democracy, it will be determination.
- We'll probably find out in 2 years when seats of Congress are up for election again.
  
  You still think there are going to be free and open elections?
  
  Theres 3 seats up for special elections here soon because of appointments for the house I believe
- If that were true, trump wouldn't have won his first term or his second.
  Republicans can rest easy, they will forget by 2028, 2030 at the latest.
- Harper and Mike Harris for me.
- There’s a Bush-3? In Canada? Sounds like the sequel to a really bad movie nobody liked and everyone is wondering why it even got made.
  
  If we're counting election cycles there were 4 bushes. none in canada afaik though
  
  I count Bush-1 as 1989, Bush-2 as 2001 and Bush-3 as 2005.
We thought GenZ was going to save us, but that was bullshit.
I work with a few in a DEEP BLUE state in a field in which the majority of my co-workers have been liberal and they're Trumpers. Morons who grew up on social media and had their minds warped by it. Fell for the alpha male bullshit too.
They aren't going to save us. They're pretty dumb.
- Surprise the iPad kid generation that were brought up on 4chsn derived troll culture are not bastions of virtue.
  Like I have a zoomer nephew, and he's genuinely a good kid at heart, and his mum raised him well, but he also showed me things like videos of people harassing kids in video games until they meltdown like it was the funniest shit in the world, and also thinks Trump is super funny.
  Being a shitty person is just good "content".
  
  gen z is literally the wrong generation to use 4chan lmao
  
  Seeing this with my own kids. We strictly manage their YouTube time, and that's fucking hard because there's million stupid ways to sneak on to YouTube. I wish there was a way to set them up with an allowlist feed instead of having to go and block every single bullshit video and channel, but then they couldn't feed my kids to the algorithm to make it shit out money, I guess.
- Sitting around and waiting for someone else to save you is defeatist. There's no magic fix to this. You have to get up and do it yourself.
  
  I'll do what I can but I can't stop the zoomers from listening to Rogan any more than I could stop the boomers from listening to Limbaugh.
- its not social media that causes this, it's the political brainwashing and propaganda, idk why people are so blindly ignorant to this fact. Does social media propagate and disperse it? Yes, is it entirely the reason behind it? No.
- Yeah. I've got a high school teacher in my life, they told me recently that many of their Seniors can't do what Freshmen could just ten years ago, and they have a shocking amount of Seniors who can't even read at a second grade level (they teach general ed, not special ed). I mean, not five or twelve of them, but like 30 or 40 percent. They say the kids struggle super hard these days (again, relative to Freshmen a decade ago) to analyze text and form original thoughts, and it's almost like they've all been trained to just be told what to think. In a way, I guess that's true, thanks to the Algorithm. I think we're seeing the fruit of that; the algorithm has told these boys what to think, and now they get to find out for themselves what the consequences of that is.
It’s almost like a ton of zoomers weren’t paying attention to what the fuck he was doing last time around.
- He's the funny guy from all their memes. They love those memes!
  
  formidable years
  I think you meant “formative”.
- A lot of people were the same age when GWB was signing the Patriot Act and didn't realize the consequences of his presidency until much later. Young people are impressionable but they do change.
  
  Problem is there are too many old people misguiding young people, the capacity for change doesn't matter if the same mistakes will be repeated by the next generation.
- It's not just the zoomers
  did biden drop out
  
  this is what i like the call "the stupidity of the crowd"
- They were kids. Their parents blamed Biden for the lockdown. They hated the lockdown.
  But, many people are easily swayed by emotions. That’s why that whole “genocide Joe” influence worked so well.
  Very few people can see the forest through the trees.
- I was 16 at the start of the last time, so yeah quite a few of the middle and younger zoomers may legit not remember or were too young to understand.
- the unfortunate truth is that most zoomers got politically engaged during the biden admin, most zoomers were in elementary, maybe middle MAYBE highschool during the first trump term. This was most definitely an expected result to some degree.
  best we can hope for is a significant demographic shift.
- In it for the jokes.
I mean who knew he would be against DEI and immigrants?
- I think these polls are bullshit. The same gen Z kids who voted Trump after being brainwashed for years watching Rogan, Shapiro, etc rail on DEI, trans, 'wokeism' and 'open borders' haven't suddenly changed their opinion once Trump's started enacting policies that aim to enact those goals.
  These kids just recognize how unpopular these actions are in the wider community and are lying to pollsters now. It's virtue signalling. They'll continue to vote right-wing imho
  
  It could be as simple as losing access to grants, scholarships, and general funding. Add to that any of them hoping for a government job doing something they're passionate about (wildlife/park/environmental sciences) only to have their future prospects crushed by an ignorant foreigner.
  
  Could be.
- You mean that?
  
  Well these days I'm starting to think I have to put
  /s
  behind every statement since I'm hearing so many people say things so friggin bizarre I never suspected I would ever hear such a thing and expect they were actually serious.
I don't trust polls anymore. Trump wasn't supposed to win '16 and it wasn't supposed to be a blowout '24 according to polls.
- What sucks is he only won the popular vote by about 2 million votes. A lot of these states misrepresent their population with the electoral college and gerrymandering.
  
  Gerrymandering doesn't affect statewide elections.
  
  it's almost entirely up to the fact that we use FPTP voting structures in the electoral college, not the electoral college itself.
  granted getting rid of FPTP is going to be easier said than done, but it would definitely benefit us in the long run.
  
  Gerrymandering would only change a state's electoral college votes meaningfully in one or two states.
  It's more often an issue of:
  Citizen becomes voter via "motor-votor" registration.
  Later, state sends postcard asking to confirm voter's address.
  Voter sees postcard, looks like junkmail or fraudulent mail, discards without response.
  State, not checking anything else, drops voter from roll.
- Hillary had an 80% chance of winning according to polls. That's a lot, but Trump still had a 20% chance. That doesn't really detract from the polls as much as from the reporting on said polls.
Cannot wait for the types of gen z voters that voted for a dipshit like donvict to turn around and blame "boomers" for their issues.
- They kinda already are. Though they seem to be blaming the Democrats for not doing enough to convince them to not be stupid.
  Being raised by social media has caused some issues with them. They seem to value the ability to say whatever you need to say to get to the top of the algorithm and aren't able to question the algorithm itself.
- The zoomers are just like the boomers. They will blame anyone but themselves for their problems.
  
  Millennials voted for trump and Republicans more than zoomers. There is plenty of blame to go around.
  
  Only us millennials are victims. /s
- It's okay they don't bother coming out of their sofas to vote
I hate articles like this. He won, he is in power. He will be in power for 4 years. His popularity doesn't matter anymore.
- Does if you want a revolution.
  
  I envy the optimism.
- The popularity of the President has a great effect on what happens in the midterm elections.
  Ofc that's dependant on us having a free and fair midterm election by then
- He will be in power for 4 years
  minimum
  
  Not necessarily. His lifestyle is atrocious
- He'll be in power for only the next 23 months if we can get a supermajority of sane, congresspeople with backbones elected in 2026. So yeah, he'll be in power for 4+ years.
- If he were a normal president who cared about Congress and the future of his party in fair and free elections this would matter a lot. Unfortunately he isn't and his plan is to make certain there aren't any free and fair elections, so we'll see what happens.
  
  Need to rejoin England, go back to a proper parliamentary system. Everybody who saw the American Constitutional, from it's first publication, said "this will end up as a dictatorship, as the role of president has too much power''. Finally that scenario has played out.
- Democracy happens whether governments want it to or not.
  Elections are just a form of democracy where all parties involved agree that its going to happen.
  Either way, the will of the people will ultimately decide the direction of every nation, regardless of what kind of government they have.
Be aware: Newsweek put out a string of content before the election, making it clear that Harris was winning and that Democrats were in the clear when few other news outlets were being that optimistic. Recently, they've been putting out a lot of articles talking about how the Orange One is losing popularity. While I hope that's true, they definitely have a weird angle. Take their content with a big grain of salt.
- Where can I buy large grained salt?
  
  You can put a bunch of it in the microwave with a bowl of water to make a humid environment that might help it to form into a huge chunk. Then you can put it in a sock to persuade your local billionaire to stop fucking up society and the planet. I may have left out a few steps, what were we talking about again?
  
  Kosher salt is large grained.
That's odd because the only Gen z people who liked Trump were the paid Russian propogandists that were creating all the fake bullshit memes for him
- I listened in on a conversation between two young male Kroger union members before the election (the store is unionized so maybe that was an assumption, it's a right to work state...)
  They both agreed they were voting for Trump. I can't speak to their unspoken motivations but what I can tell you is they absolutely voted on vibes and didn't have a goddamn clue what was coming for them.
  I don't know what brain rotted the Gen Z boys in a way that didn't work on the Gen Z girls but I can tell you it wasn't fake, those kids are not alright.
  Maybe this will be Gen Z's Afghanistan and Iraq, the events that push them left against Republican abuse, but I'm not sure they'll have a chance when they're getting a steady diet of algorithmic propaganda.
  
  Hate to say this but there are a lot of young white men who feel unheard and unseen. Trump and the right wing podcasting network really resonates with them.
  The reality is society is so much better now than it was in 1995 or 2005 but many young white men feel left out because the advantages they once held are disappearing.
  It used to be a that the only right person for the job was a white man or another white man. They didn't have to compete with other races or genders cuz the game was rigged to only take them seriously. Now, having to fairly compete against women and PoC, a lot of the less capable folk are tapping out and saying "no let's go back to the old way" because they were more competitive back then.
  
  I don’t know what brain rotted the Gen Z boys in a way that didn’t work on the Gen Z girls but I can tell you it wasn’t fake, those kids are not alright.
  its nothing to do with brainrot, its the same shit that makes your dad the single dumbest person you've ever seen whenever he speaks on politics.
  
  I don’t know what brain rotted the Gen Z boys in a way that didn’t work on the Gen Z girls but I can tell you it wasn’t fake, those kids are not alright.
  A lot of it is all that "manosphere" grievance propaganda shit -- reels them right in.
  
  The people that constructed the hate radio machine that takes a daily dump in the skull of millions of magazombies would have loooooved to have something like The Algorithm at their disposal.
  When you look at the damage they managed to do with decades of the Poutrage Industrial Complex they had with radio/cable, just imagine the shitshow they will manage with decades more of The Algorithm...
  
  There was a pipeline of radicalization to the right that specifically targeted young men starting with young millennials. In my day it was gamergate, these days it's tate
- Don't underestimate right wing populism
Little too late for that…
- been kind of sad for me, the process of realizing these kids were fucking stupid.
  i had really high hopes for some reason.
  
  Growing up with social media.
How was he popular in the first place
- Gen Z desperately wants change, any change and Dems were against change.
  That's my take at least.
  
  It's more that Gen Z wants change without putting in effort. They (and millennials too) aren't voting in primaries at all let alone showing up in non Presidental elections so all parties are putting money and effort into candidates that appeal to older, more conservative voters that actual show up.
  The younger people I work with and interact with on a regular basis that admit they voted for Trump say they didn't do it because he appealed to them but because they had some protest against Harris or Biden. Dems dropped the ball entirely this election but the majority of voters fail to turn out and prove their desire for change and progressive candidates is anything but talk.
  
  There's also a lot of incel Zoomers. I think that's where the bulk or his youth support came from.
  
  Racist parents have racist kids. That's my take.
One would think watching Nazi salutes on inauguration day of a GOP president going blitzkrieg all around the world, would be enough to forget about them reaching the White House again... but, seriously, this is the USA.
- You assume they read about history and know what Nazis were beyond tiktok memes.
  
  Looks like they missed that year in school.
While an overload of mindless far-right, conservative, bigoted, and transphobic videos on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram, and similar posts on Facebook and Twitter, undoubtedly played a large part in indoctrinating so many people (as has been the case in countries such as Hungary and Turkey), it's still crazy that so many people were suckered in by Trump's lies about reducing inflation, when his first term in office proved how shitty he was, as well as the reason why Roe vs. Wade was overturned. It shouldn't have taken countless constitutional violations in only the first month of a second term as president for people to realize that.
If corporate oligarchs haven't fully dismantled what remains of the country's severely flawed democracy in four years' time, then there's every chance that they'll buy the presidency again in 2028, apathetic to the rise of fascism and the dismantlement of civil rights.
- Why would they have to buy it again? They already own it.
  I agree it is disappointing, but not enough people remember what it was like to be a confused and arrogant teenager. Let alone in the modern era where all their media comes from platforms funded by billionaires 24/7, politics hasn't had a shred of decorum in their conscious lifetimes, and the planet is undergoing multiple unprecedented crises.
Well yeah, the memes have stopped.
- Glad we chose a candidate on important metrics. Such as how lit their meme game is ...
I get that these kids were brainwashed a little but what bothers me is that it was never any secret what was happening to women's rights and LGBTQ+ rights but they went for it anyway. It wasn't some secret plot or trick, these people told us all exactly what they're about.
Even if they don't care about queer people, they happily sold out the rights of their own mothers because the word of some ex reality TV star meat head was more important to them. I feel like even if I was that age being bombarded by propaganda, I would've woken the fuck up the moment they started going after my mother and my sisters.
I actually saw a story on Reddit shortly after the election, that's a double whammy in this regard. It was a divorced woman who is currently in a relationship with another woman, telling the story of how her own son visited her and fessed up to voting for Trump and happily said out loud "I don't agree with gay people." Based on the reactions she described afterwards, this dumb piece of shit kid only realised that the people he was hating included his own mother, after it was already too late.
It's all fucked. I forgive these kids to an extent but I know that when I was that age, I did in fact have a sense of morality and could in fact use my own brains to figure things out for myself.
- They voted for the memes, and are now in the process of realizing real life is not a meme
  
  Yes but meme man named the department DOGE (/s)
Either all of the polling sites are lying or that impotent clown still has a 47% approval rating. Why? I have no idea.
I shouldn't be surprised that so many kids liked the Orange Idiot, but I am somehow. Barely, but I am.
- He has that TV personality rizz.
Too bad they voted for him before realizing they made a stupid choice. Now I hope Gen X figures that out.
Leopard... Face... etc.
FAFO...
But credit, at least, for waking up, realizing, and responding. 👏
- Responding? How, where?
  
  "popularity plunges"... That's a response... 🤷‍♂️
good, gen z stays winning, mostly..
What do these numbers mean? How is there negatives?
I would expect a scale from 0-100
Edit: its a scale from -100 to +100
- Levels of dislike (-100 towards zero), levels of like (levels of like towards +100), would be my interpretation. It is an overly complex way of doing it though.
- Well, that's kinda dumb.
I don't think it is young people that are the problem. Recall, it is largely billionaires and elderly statesmen that either supported the coup, or stood aside. Of all people, they should understand the consequences and it is their job to guide the nation. That includes telling people how neat government programs can be.
Our most influential people either failed to communicate, or are aligned with the plot to some degree. Young folks are too busy slaving away to dedicate time to politics, which requires time, money, and education. Things that society has consistently transferred towards the wealthy, while denying the poor.
Glad it is crumbling.
Either USSA 18-29-years-old are weird, or newsweek is corporate shill. Mix in one bag
mass deportation plan, targeting of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, and suggesting that the U.S. will "take over" the Gaza Strip and resettle Palestinians from the area while it is rebuilt.
and ignore everything else.
Well, thank Faust, I am not in Memericas.

161 comments