Joe Biden's Other Age Problem

Towards a unified theory of why half of Gen Zers are threatening to vote for Donald Trump.

Photo by Arnaud Jaegers on Unsplash

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Joe Biden has a young voter problem. Poll after poll shows that young voters are nearly divided between Biden and Donald Trump — shocking, given that Democrats have historically had a huge advantage among young voters, and given that young voters are the most politically liberal age group.

So what’s going on?

Many half-cocked theories abound, so here’s mine. These poll numbers are reflective of a few dynamics: a general nihilism among young adults; genuine dissatisfaction with the Biden administration’s actual policies or lack thereof; social-media-driven dissatisfaction with what young voters believe to be the Biden administration’s policies or lack thereof; a repeated-nearly-every-generation narcissism among the young that can lead to murder-suicide politics; a desire to send a signal that doesn’t necessarily translate into what people do in the privacy of the ballot box; and a Trump-driven anti-feminist backlash that has a lot of male voters moving right.

Generational Nihilism

First, a disclaimer: Writing about generations is pretty unscientific, and writing about the culture of generations is very much a practice of reading vibes. But having done this once at book length, I’ll give it a go here. Millennials (my generation) were generally characterized as optimistic achievers. Sure, according to our critics we ate so much avocado toast we couldn’t afford a house and we were so entitled that once we entered the workforce we expected an annual promotion and a participation trophy, but Millennials were the generation that watched the horror of 9/11, gritted it out through a recession, and then helped elect Barack Obama to the presidency. We were the generation of hustle culture and girl bosses, people who took out staggering student loan debt in pursuit of upper-middle-class stability, and we really believed it when our elders told us that if we just followed our dreams and worked hard enough, we’d succeed. We wanted our workplaces to embrace diversity and we wanted our jobs to feel meaningful. We worked hard — and we also stayed single for a long time, moved to big dynamic cities, delayed having kids, traveled more than our parents did at our age. We, largely the children of the similarly once-optimistic and change-driven Baby Boomers, collectively wanted to make the world a better place.

Gen Zers are different. They are mostly the children of the famously cynical (and largely ignored) Gen X. They came up behind Millennials, and while they inherited our progressive politics, they also came into adulthood hearing about all of the ways in which we (and they) were screwed: That a college degree often meant astounding debt rather than significant income; that home ownership was largely out of reach; the inequality was only widening; that children were unaffordable and the state had no plans to help out; that work demands scaled up while benefits were slashed down. These are real reflections of widening inequality and unmet promises. But I worry that Gen Z has interpreted these shifts as universal and unavoidable truths, and critiques of structural inequalities as evidence that hard work and individual grit don’t really matter. Gen Z clearly feels insecure, in their finances, in their mental health, in their futures, and in their sense of America’s goodness and place in the world. This has manifested in opinions about higher education, which an astonishing number of people now believe is simply not worth it, as well as in their sense of financial precariousness: three-quarters of Gen Zers say that homelessness could happen to anyone.

They’ve also observed the widespread mockery and cynicism toward the Millennials who did try hard — the hustlers, the girl bosses, the earnest activists. And, like every generation of young people before them, they have an urge to divide the world into neat categories of good and bad. On the bad side: Capitalism; center-left politics; mainstream media; some long-standing liberal norms; Millennials and Boomers, workism.

My sense is that, if the definitional Millennial quality was “I want to change the world for the better,” the general Gen Z worldview is something closer to “fuck it.” As in: Capitalism has screwed us, so fuck it, why should I work beyond the bare minimum of what my job requires? Democratic politicians have not delivered on much of what I want, so fuck it, why should I vote for them?

Notably, this is a really different tack than the one taken by Millennials when we were younger. At roughly this same time in the 2012 electoral cycle, when the election was a year away and pollsters were arguing that Obama was facing rough prospects and some analysts were suggesting that Democrats replace him on the ticket, Millennials — then the youngest voters — backed Obama over Romney by 26 points.

The Biden Administration’s Actual Policies