On this episode of The Depolarizers podcast, I’m in conversation about Gen Z and young voters with
.A member of Gen Z herself, Rachel is a Gen Z expert and researcher focused on youth culture and the evolving civic engagement of this generation. The founder of The Up and Up, a newsletter about young voters focused on the cohort’s civic attitude and aptitude, Rachel has convened listening sessions with hundreds of young people across the country.
In the 2024 election cycle, Rachel’s coverage of young voters included pieces on “a need for values > virality,” “Generation Dissatisfied,” and “the youth gender divide.”
You may remember Rachel as a speaker at this year’s WelcomeFest, where she joined a panel discussion following a Blueprint polling presentation by Milan Singh on young voters and the ways that political campaigns and the media portray and communicate with these voters.
Team Normal in Gen Z
In this episode of The Depolarizers, Rachel touches on some interesting topics including how to reach “Team Normal” among America’s youngest voters, and what trends she expects to see from young voters in the years to come.
On the topic of reaching the average young voter, Rachel notes:
One thing that I've tried really hard to do — and it's really tricky for this reason — is find young, moderate young people who actually represent the vast majority of the youth electorate. Because the easiest way to find the sort of political spokespeople is to go to these specific groups and reach them through these associations. But the reality is that the people who are actually opting into these associations are a very specific type of person who in college or after their work day ends, they're going to the young-whatever-it-is meeting that takes its particular type of person. Whereas there are young people who are just going about their daily lives, whether it's they're in college and they're in fraternities and sororities, or they're out of college and they're in an intramural soccer league after work ends, or they're a young mom and they're just trying to make it home to feed their kids, whatever it is, these are the young people who we need to be talking to about politics because their beliefs represent where the vast majority of young people are. And I think it's really important that these civic engagement groups and these political groups exist because it's great that young people are politically engaged — that's literally what I've written in my newsletter about — but at the same time, if we just focus on those people, that would be like talking about politics, but only focusing on the politicians, and not the voters.”
You may remember a piece on young voters I co-authored in The Liberal Patriot (back when I still qualified as a young voter), where we noted:
While you’re unlikely to hear it on the news, not only does the median young voter identify as a moderate, but the Harvard Youth Poll found that 18-29 year old Americans are a more moderate cohort than the public at large.
And, more recently, here on WelcomeStack I also wrote about “The Chart That Made Us Double-Take” this election cycle.
Where Gen Z Goes From Here
Rachel noted that, like many generations, Gen Z can be segmented into two sub-generations aptly defined by what type of phone may have been their first cell phone, and at what stage of their educational careers they experienced the covid pandemic:
For the youngest part of Gen Z, the people who are in high school now, they only know iPhones and smartphones; they only know a world where TikTok is a dominant social media platform that has literally changed culture and changed the way other platforms’ algorithms work. There are ways that they're attuned to consuming information that looks a bit different, and it's crazy because we're literally all in the same generation. I say this all the time — my sister, we're not even six years apart, we could be of two different generations because of the different events and social media trends that have shaped our perspectives and our different experiences growing up. I think that's playing into politics as well. In this post-COVID era where young people are tired of political correctness and just want an authentic messenger who is telling it like it is, when they see someone like Trump, who is able to say what he wants, some young people love that about him. And by the way, let's just be clear, young voters still voted for Harris. They're just to the right. So it's not like an overwhelming majority, but there definitely is an appetite for that. And so in thinking about moving forward, I think young people are going to be craving that from politicians and be drawn toward politicians who are able to talk to them, and meet them where they are on the platforms they're on. But also it's not just about being on the platforms; it's about using the same language and the same rhetoric, which is one of the things I think is most important.
Another postmortem on Gen Z this cycle written by Young People Alliance’s Sam Hiner suggested:
At YPA, we’ve been discussing youth disempowerment for a while, and coined “post-partisan youth power” (say that five times fast) to describe the type of movement that could achieve youth-centered policy. Our goal with this phrase was to highlight how solving youth issues isn’t necessarily partisan, and these issues have been sidelined by both parties due to a lack of young people’s political power.
As we look to the future with America’s youngest voters, we can continue to work to Win the Middle, depolarize our politics, and find ways to strike the balance on critical policy issues.
We recommend checking out Rachel’s newest project, a qualitative research and consulting firm called Up and Up Strategies.
Like what you’re hearing? Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you find your podcasts, and subscribe to hear new episodes of The Depolarizers. You can also support our work to depolarize American politics via our 501(c)3, The Welcome Democracy Institute.
Share this post