WTH Are Young Gen Z Voters Turning Conservative? The Yale Youth Poll’s Milan Singh Explains
What the Hell Is Going On
AEI Podcasts
4.4 • 633 Ratings
🗓️ 1 May 2025
⏱️ 45 minutes
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Summary
Gen Z may not be the liberal base of support many on the left hoped they would be. Today, there is a growing split between voters under 30, with 22-29 year olds favoring Democrats by 6.4 points and 18-21 year olds favoring Republicans by almost 12 points. As America’s youngest voters are growing up in the age of COVID lockdowns, social media, and cancel culture, conservative and MAGA ideology is emerging as the new counter-culture, giving young men in particular an opportunity to escape the world around them. How will the youngest voter cohort change the bases of both parties? And how will young voters change as they grow older?
Milan Singh is the founder and Director of the Yale Youth Poll. Originally from Cambridge, Massachusetts, he is a junior in Pierson majoring in Economics. He has previously worked as a researcher at Slow Boring; a data science fellow at Decision Desk HQ; and social policy intern at the Niskanen Center. This past summer, he worked as a consultant for Blueprint and WelcomePAC. Outside of the classroom, he is one of the Opinion Editors for the Yale Daily News.
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| 0:00.0 | This podcast is brought to you by the American Enterprise Institute. |
| 0:03.0 | If you like what you hear, please subscribe, rate, review, and share. |
| 0:07.0 | Thanks for listening. Here's our show. |
| 0:08.7 | What the hell is going on? |
| 0:10.4 | What's really going on? |
| 0:12.0 | We said, what the hell happened? |
| 0:13.5 | You don't have to know what the hell is on it. |
| 0:15.6 | They see what's going on. |
| 0:16.7 | I don't know what's going on. |
| 0:18.2 | What is going on? |
| 0:19.6 | We must find out what's going on. What is going on? We must find out what is going on. |
| 0:28.7 | Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka. I'm Mark Teeson. Welcome to our podcast. What the hell is going on? Mark, the youth version. What the hell is going on? |
| 0:39.0 | Well, that's what we're trying to find out what's happening with these young people. |
| 0:42.3 | It seems that they have very unconventional views. |
| 0:46.1 | The Yale Youth Poll just came out, and it had some fascinating data on the breakdown, |
| 0:52.5 | not just between Gen Z and the rest of the country, but within Gen Z, |
| 0:58.5 | the differences of point of view. And the data point that absolutely jumped out at me was that |
| 1:03.3 | voters, age 22 to 29, favored Democrats in the upcoming midterm elections, so generic ballot, |
| 1:09.5 | which do you favor? Republicans or Democrats? |
| 1:11.7 | Favor Democrats by 6.4 points, but those 18 to 21, the younger cohort, leaned Republican by 11.7 points, |
| 1:20.6 | almost 12 points. So you're talking a huge, huge demographic swing within Gen Z. And so we wanted to get to the bottom of what's going on with these younger Gen Z voters. |
| 1:32.5 | And so we got the guy who founded the Yale Youth Poll to come in and talk to us about it. |
... |
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