For Alitzel Olvera, Facebook’s “memories” feature occasionally reminds her that politics was always on her mind as a teenager. From 2016 to 2020, she frequently posted on social media against former President Donald Trump and for Democrats—presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and then President Joe Biden.
But now, at age 23, Olvera not only doesn’t identify as a Democrat anymore, but she says she may not vote at all this year. That’s even though her parents—both immigrants from Mexico—have been battling for U.S. citizenship for years. “I just really don’t care for [partisan politics]. I voted for Biden, but he hasn’t really done much of anything, and I feel like things have gotten worse,” said Olvera, a senior at Kennesaw State University. “So, I don’t know what I am anymore.”
Olvera is far from the only one. There are signs everywhere that the voting-age members of Generation Z—those ages 27 and under—have soured on Biden and the Democrats. Many are saying they may vote for Trump or a third-party candidate instead, or that they’ll simply skip this year’s presidential election entirely—even in deep blue Fulton County, where Biden won 72% of the vote in 2020.
That matters because Gen Z voters, numbering 40.8 million, make up almost one-fifth of the electorate, and they skew Democratic. According to a Dec. 5 Harvard Institute of Politics poll of 18- to 29-year olds, 35% identified as Democrats, with just 26% as Republicans and another 38% as independent.
The 2020 presidential election drew record turnout across age groups, with 54.1% of youth under 30 voting. But the Harvard poll found that the number of youth under 30 who say they will “definitely” vote in the November presidential election has dropped eight percentage points since 2019—from 57% to 49%. This decline is most steep among young Black Americans (from 50% to 38%) and Latinos (from 56% to 40%). That’s significant, since…
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