By Rich Baris | Commentary, Real Clear Politics
Everything Republicans thought they knew about younger voters who backed them less than two years ago is wrong. Conservative pundits and consultants have had an almost bipolar misunderstanding of these now-disaffected Americans.
When President Donald Trump made his historic political comeback in 2024, a slew of right-wing commentators repeated each other’s claims that “Zoomers” were just “more conservative” than previous cohorts. That was news to us, given BIG DATA POLL was met with fierce skepticism leading up to that election, explicitly because we led the industry in identifying trends indicating the president was making significant gains with younger, nonwhite voters.
Some of these very same consultants argued that our trends showed little more than a “polling mirage,” the result of higher sampling errors for subgroups. Their slowness in coming to the realization that these trends were in fact very real has only been rivaled by more recent attempts to reconcile that rightward shift in 2024 with events that have transpired since.
Now, following the rise of the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) and declining support for Republicans among these voters, many of those same commentators are dismissing the pleas of Gen Z as the “grievances” of “lazy” socialists. Those dismissals are typically prefaced by a lecture on how to “pull yourself up by the bootstraps,” quit looking for handouts, learn how to cook at home, and stop buying $20 burritos.
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