Why America’s Zoomers Are Turning MAGA

Tatem Carroll, an 18-year-old in Oregon’s Rogue Valley, just graduated high school. She used to think that once she got her diploma, she’d “get the hell out” of her parents’ house. Now, she says she’s “scared shitless” about the future.

“I’m like, am I gonna live with my parents forever because our economy is trash?” wonders Carroll, who speaks to me over Zoom from her childhood bedroom. “It’s terrifying.”

She tells me about her boyfriend, a Christian like herself. She says they’ve been dating for three years and that she can’t wait to marry him. But they will have to wait to start their life together, given inflation and the rising cost of living.

“I’m like, when is that gonna happen?” she says. “Because we couldn’t even afford to rent an apartment in my small town.”

About two years ago, she said, she first thought about politics when she started driving. Her parents told her all she had to pay for were gas and car insurance, but she says it was tough to get by—let alone save anything. Her retail job at the local mall was based fully on commission, meaning her paychecks could fluctuate from $400 to $1,000 a month.

“I was like, ‘This is terrible. I’m working so that I can pay for gas to get to school and to get to work so that I can make more money to pay for gas,’ ” says Carroll, twisting her side ponytail. “And then I thought, ‘Oh, this is because of Biden.’ ”

She remembers that under Trump, when she was around 12 years old, gasoline often hovered around $2 a gallon. Now she’s used to seeing the gas station sign read $4 or more. She says everyone she knows is in the same boat—“broke” and living with their parents. While most economists admit Biden has little control over the price of gas, voters are still prepared to punish him for it.

“I feel like I could’ve afforded a future,” she says about life under Trump. “But now I’m shit out of luck.”

Carroll is one of a growing number of Gen Z Americans, born between 1997 and 2012, who are planning to vote for Trump this November. The idea of voting Republican before 30 is like going on birth control at 60. You could, but why would you? Which is why the latest polling on the political leanings of America’s youth is so shocking.

New polls show that the Gen Z vote, which Biden won by about 20 points in 2020, is now in play. A recent New York Times/Siena College survey—taken after Biden’s disastrous debate flop—puts Trump ahead of Biden by eight points among registered voters aged 18–29. And Pew research, conducted from February 1 to June 10, 2024, shows the GOP is leading among those under 30.

“Trump is a lot more competitive than he was four years ago,” said John Della Volpe, a Harvard pollster who helped advise Biden’s 2020 campaign. Much of that, he says, boils down to young men, who data show are politically drifting away from their increasingly liberal female peers.

“They generally think of Trump as the antihero,” says Della Volpe, once known as the Biden campaign’s “Gen Z whisperer.” “He’s a voice against the establishment.”

That kind of “cult of personality,” he adds, “could be quite attractive” to young men.

Trump has recently tried to reach young voters by joining TikTok, the platform he once tried to ban but has since embraced—and that has embraced him back. After news of his criminal conviction broke on May 30, many Gen Z voters flocked to the app to proudly announce they were “voting for the felon,” turning the phrase into a TikTok trend. A few days later, Trump posted his first TikTok, showing him rubbing elbows with UFC CEO Dana White while greeting fans, a post that earned him more than a million followers overnight.

Now, after Saturday’s assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, young men are coming out of the woodwork to back the former president. Almost immediately in the wake of the news, some of Gen Z’s biggest male icons, including wrestler Jake Paul, YouTuber FaZe Banks, and Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy, rushed online to praise the former president’s “gangster” response to the shooting, which killed one rally attendee and critically injured two others. With blood on his face after a bullet clipped his right ear, Trump raised his fist to the crowd and appeared to shout, “Fight!”

In less than 24 hours, that image became an internet meme—from Trump’s face superimposed onto an iconic Matrix scene to a split screen comparing Trump’s stone-cold reaction with Biden tripping over a flight of stairs.

Jordan Miller, 22, was at an airport bar sipping a margarita when the TV flashed that gunfire had broken out at the rally.

“The guy next to me just goes, ‘holy bleep,’ ” says Miller, an operations analyst in Phoenix. “They didn’t even have all the details, like if he got shot, and in the first clip I see, it’s him getting pushed to the ground and then standing back up. It was really cool when he threw his fist up.”

He adds: “It certainly fired me up.”

Previously, he had been planning to vote for RFK Jr., given his promise to crack down on Big Pharma, but in that moment, he tells me he realized voting for Trump could do a “greater good.”

“It made me feel like I can trust him, and he’s going to stand up for this country,” Miller says of Trump. “I don’t think there’s very many people in this country that after they get shot, one inch from their brain, would be able to get up and essentially tell the country to fight—and I think that’s what he was mouthing while he had his fist up. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m ready to fight for what I believe in. For what’s right.’ ”

In Atlanta, James Crandall, 22, had a similar epiphany. He said he was already planning to vote for Trump, but the image of the former president emerging from a herd of Secret Service made him double down on his decision.

“That was the best possible reaction you probably could’ve had,” says Crandall, who works in real estate financing. “I don’t think anybody would expect the guy to get up and do anything—he could’ve just gotten hurtled away or run and everyone would’ve understood. But he definitely took a ballsy route and got up to show everybody he was okay.”

Ruy Teixeira, a demographer and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, tells me it’s too soon to judge the potential impact on the presidential race but that Saturday’s optics have the potential to bring “Democratic-leaning constituencies like young black men and young Hispanic men” onto Trump’s side.

“It leans into what some of these guys are talking about, which is, ‘Who do the Democrats got? This old dude who can barely talk.’ And Trump’s not that young either, but he looks badass.”

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