Hello, my name is David Runtzman and this is Talking Politics. Today we're talking about attitudes to race and injustice among young people in the United States and the UK.

What difference has a Biden victory made to them?

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We've got two conversations for you today. In a little bit, I'm going to be talking to Michael and Jiven from the Politics Jam podcast, which wrestles with questions of representation and participation.

But first, a conversation I recorded yesterday with Kathy Cohen from the University of Chicago. She runs the Gen Forward project, which has been surveying the attitudes of young people for the past four years to a whole range of questions, including questions of race and injustice.

And I'm going to be talking to her about what she's learned and what she thinks Biden means for young people in the United States.

And maybe we could start by just explaining a bit about Gen Forward, not least the cohort that you have been regularly surveying and asking questions about their political outlooks, their hopes, their fears.

It's 18 to 36 year olds. How would you characterize that age group? Because it kind of cuts across millennials and what I want to call Gen Z and you'd call Gen Z.

Yes, I would call them Gen Z years, but I like the idea of calling them Gen Z. You know, for us, our approach was that we wanted to ensure that we could amplify the voices, the policy preferences, the politics.

In particular, of young people, meaning young adults, but especially young folks of color from BIPOC communities. And so for us, we started out with traditional kind of 18 to 30 back in 2016. But again, with a focus on having enough folks of color in our sample that we could disaggregate and say something about how young African Americans thought about issues compared to young Latin X compared to Asian and Pacific Islander compared to whites.

But as we continue to do the work, continue to have more surveys, we wanted to follow the millennials that were first introduced into our sample. And so we grew our age range to 36 now.

And so you're right, we have mostly millennials, but we also have Gen Z years in our sample. But we have decided less on a framework around generations. So we don't do the millennials compared to baby boomers. We do it sometimes, but not often.

In part because that type of framework often flattens the real kind of we think are interesting differences within generations, right. We are seeing more racial and ethnic diversity in generations than we've ever seen before.

And so to not pay attention to the differences as well as the similarities within generation to us felt like it was a mistake. And that's why we use largely the framework of race and ethnicity to look at our data instead of the framework of generation.

And so we can make available to people so they can see there's some really fascinating findings here, particularly around the election that we've just had. And let's try and disaggregate some of it. So just to start with, you know, people won't be surprised if you if you speak generally across this age cohort that there's a very strong preference from people are asked to pick between Biden and Trump for Biden.

And look at the breakdown. There are big differences that emerge. So I was struck by the fact that young white men that is within this cohort. It was kind of 50 50 Trump widen.

And so there's a big gender difference there, particularly among young white voters, but then there's also a big difference across ethnicities in that in that respect.

That's exactly right. I mean, one of the things that I'll remind people they often forget is that in 2012, a plurality and maybe a majority of young whites voted for Romney.

And I believe a plurality of young whites voted for Trump in in 2016.

And so this is what I mean, if we only look at generation, we would say, oh, young people turned out for Biden. And in fact, as you just noted, based on gender and based on race, we see real differences.

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