Attendees pray with Pastor John Amanchukwu (out of frame) as he leads the daily prayer at Turning Point's annual AmericaFest conference, in remembrance of late right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk, in Phoenix, Arizona, on December 18, 2025. | Olivier Touron/AFP via Getty ImagesKey takeawaysAfter young voters swung toward Republicans in 2024, one popular explanation argued that there are two distinct kinds of Gen Z. Those who came of age during and after the Covid pandemic seemed more Trump-curious and conservative.New data suggests that a divide does exist, but it might not be as simple as an older, more progressive cohort and a younger, more right-wing cohort, as some conservatives describe the split.Instead, the youngest cohort of Gen Z might be leading a reactionary, anti-system trend among the young Americans, which is fueling frustration at Donald Trump.Over the last year, the youngest generation of American voters have scrambled a lot of our understanding of politics.The Gen Z cohort swung hard toward Republicans last year, moving anywhere from 6 to 21 points toward President Donald Trump (depending on the data source) compared to 2020. But, they now appear to be just as aggressively swinging away. In recent polls, they prefer Democratic congressional control by 17 points in 2026 and, now, strongly disapprove of Trump — a flip from earlier this year.This swerve back includes young men — that segment of the country that Democrats, and a lot of the media, spent the last two years fixated on understanding. After all, reports over the last few years suggested these young Americans were becoming more conservative. They were getting more religious, were more Trump-curious, and were rebelling against Democrats and popular culture for making traditional masculinity taboo — all while dealing with a mental health and loneliness crisis.Could they have become bleeding heart liberals over the course of a few months? The answer may determine more than just the midterm elections. Different segments of Gen Z may have different reasons for feeling disillusioned with party politics and the state of the nation. And that may determine what the next generation of political leaders will have to say and propose to re-spark faith in the political system.To analyze this question, I revisited one popular theory that I tried to articulate in the spring: There are two distinct kinds of Gen Z. One is an older cohort, generally born between 1995 and 2001 — more loyal to Democrats and familiar with a pre-pandemic way of life. The other is a younger one, born after 2002 — raised during and after the pandemic, more idiosyncratic politics, and seeming more friendly to Trump during the first half of the year and in 2024.Now, new data continues to back up the case that there are nuances within Gen Z that carried over from 2024. And, more specifically, a new survey published last week from the Young Men’s Research Project suggests that, at least among Gen Z men, it’s the younger cohort that is turning sharply more anti-Trump than the older cohort. While it is one data set, it adds to the body of evidence that the youngest members of the electorate are going through a tumultuous period right now.What new data suggests is happening with Gen Z menIn October, the team behind the Young Men Research Project partnered with the polling group YouGov to zero in on men aged 18–29. What they found challenges some of the theory that I laid out earlier this year, namely that the younger cohort of Gen Z is more likely to identify as “conservative” and hold traditional views of politics and society, specifically gender, than the older cohort. But, it also provides evidence that the opinions and views of these two cohorts of young people are shifting around at different rates. First, there’s some of the expected. As in their last survey in May, they found a generation of anxious and pessimistic young men. While most of the older cohort of Gen Z men thought the country was on the wrong track, those levels were even higher among the younger cohort.View LinkThis gap in cynicism also came up again in approval ratings of Donald Trump (though both cohorts disapprove of him, they found a 6 point gap between the older and younger cohort). And there were chasms in the difference of support for some of Trump’s policies. When it came to ICE tactics, school vaccination requirements, and firings of federal workers, younger Gen Z men disapproved of Trump’s position by much wider numbers than the older cohort.The biggest divergence between the groups, however, came in their views of society and traditional gender norms. Older Gen Z men actually reported more conservative views than the younger cohort. They were more likely to agree that “things are generally better when men bring in money and women take care of the home and kids” or that “feminism favors women over men.” This cohort had more skeptical views toward gay and transgender people, as well.View LinkThese findings are notable because they seem to run counter to some of the other analyses of the divisions within Gen Z, which find that it’s the younger cohort, not the older one, that tends to be more open to conservatism and the GOP.“Young men as a whole are about the least ideological generation or demographic of any voting demographic there is, in terms of their views on different policies,” Charlie Sabgir, the author of the YRMP report, told me. They might appear on paper as more conservative as whole, he explained to me, “but in terms of actual policy and ideology, they just haven’t committed themselves to any rigid set of beliefs in the same way that young women have [who are much more uniformly liberal and progressive on policy and ideology down the line.”Sabgir acknowledged that some of the differences in social attitudes require more research to examine and connect to causes. Could it be TikTok and algorithmically powered streams of content? Specific influencers and content creators informing their perspectives? The natural aging into more conservative views that tended to happen with previous generations?That causation is still unclear, he said. But, he was clear that there does seem to be an accelerating divide by age. At least when it comes to views of Trump, he said, “there’s still a sense of shock at the pace at which events are happening,” that is hitting the youngest cohort differently than an older, more-jaded cohort that has seen a Trump presidency before. It would then make sense that the younger cohort that swung to him would swing away more aggressively. “Odds are they were not aware of just how unstable everything felt during that first administration,” he said. “So they would feel buyer’s remorse.”So, are younger generations actually more conservative?Other data sources, including other polls specifically focused on young voters, have tracked similar volatility and divisions within the youngest voting generation, even if they might diverge from the YMRP findings on ideology. The fall Harvard and Yale Youth Polls, for example, both tracked growing cynicism and disenchantment with the direction of the country, views of Trump, and volatile views on society and culture.But the Yale Youth poll — which was one of the first to track a more conservative, GOP-friendly lean from younger Gen Z voters — again found a division in views in their most recent survey, published this month. The younger cohort was again less likely to say they were “liberal” and more likely to say they were “conservative” than the older cohort, according to Milan Singh, the founder and former director of the Yale Youth Poll.View LinkThey were more likely to approve of Trump’s presidency and more likely to support some of his policies. “If you look through any of these questions where there’s an age breakout, you can pretty much always see that the 18 to 22-year-olds are slightly more conservative than the 23- to 29-year olds,” Singh said. But, he emphasized that this isn’t to say that every young person is “hardcore MAGA Republican, right winger.”View LinkThis divide raises an even bigger question: Are these young men more likely to be persuaded to vote in a different way because of economic concerns and disenchantment with Trump? Or, are these ideological differences strong and durable, presenting a future MAGA or Republican movement with eager young conservatives who would continue to move their generation to the right?Singh holds that, though there is still a slightly more conservative lean — one exacerbated by gender — among 18- to 22-year-olds compared to those aged 23–29, these young men are still persuadable, as they don’t necessarily hold firm ideological convictions. To buy the argument from some on the right that there’s a rising generation of fervent right-wing youth driven by discrimination, “wokeness,” diversity initiatives, and progressive culture would be to misread the moment. “You can stitch together a pretty clean narrative that a big reason that many young people voted for Trump in 2024, even though they may have typically voted for Democrats or you would expect them to be Democrats, was that they were really fed up by the cost of living. … Of course, you have to add footnotes that some young people may have had more conservative views and were kind of out of place in the current Democratic Party coalition,” Singh said. “But they’ve seen that not only has Trump not delivered on lowering the cost of living, his signature legislation in their mind makes it worse and benefits the billionaires at their expense, and now they’re turning against it.” Instead, what these divisions within Gen Z really suggest, G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist and polling and elections expert, told me, is that the dividing line among young Americans is the degree to which one cohort or the other is willing to just tear the whole system down.“The way to reconcile these two things is to view the younger Gen Z cohort as significantly more anti-system, anti-incumbent and pessimistic [than the older cohort],” Morris said. “If you ask these two groups which direction they think the country is going, this group is much more likely to say ‘wrong track.’ If you ask them if they’re worried about their economic situation, they’re also much more pessimistic. If their job opportunities from graduating or being in college during Covid were suppressed, then they would be significantly more a anti-Democratic party, anti-Harris in 2024, and then they would in turn also be more anti-Trump in 2025, 2026.”And this becomes more obvious among young men, who are among the groups most likely to say that they are dissatisfied with Trump’s handling of affordability and the economy after ranking it as their top concern ahead of 2024. Sabgir, of the YMRP, agreed with some of this conclusion. In YMRP’s May and October surveys, a plurality of the younger Gen Z cohort were still students or not full-time workers, and they reported more of a sense of financial instability and frustration with the state of the country. Their relative inexperience with life in a more unstable world than the one older Gen Z inhabited, therefore, might be contributing to this swing.These differences will end up being consequential to future American elections — and politics, more generally. A lot of the last two years of discourse over young Americans has seemed to be pretty fatalistic or deterministic about their ideological views or swing-voter status — that they can’t be trusted as Democratic voters; that they simply require more progressive outreach; or that they are dyed-in-the-wool Republican voters or “groypers” now. It turns out that, like other subsets, young voters — and young men specifically — aren’t a monolith.