Copy Link Share Comment

Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.

For those hoping that Gen Z would usher in a new era of progressive politics in America, the past two years have been a whipsaw. In 2024 there was great panic over young voters’ drift toward Donald Trump. But in 2025, after young voters in New York City, New Jersey, and Virginia helped deliver Democratic wins, there was a reassessment. In light of these liberal victories, many put forward amended evaluations, stating that Gen Z is both more participatory and progressive than it has been given credit for, and that concerns about Democratic erosion among young men, spurred by the influence of the “manosphere,” have been exaggerated. In fact, Gen Z was lauded for being the most progressive generation ever based on recent measures of racial attitudes from the 2024 Cooperative Election Study dataset, a nationally representative survey of over 60,000 Americans.

So which is it? Is Gen Z a bastion of progressives who are immune to the manosphere’s toxicity? Or is 2025 a blip, and is Gen Z bucking the long-running trend of younger generations moving left?

The short answer is that it’s complicated, and neither of those dueling narratives gets to the truth.

The slightly longer answer is this: According to the best available data, on issues of race, members of Gen Z are, on average, far more progressive than any of their older counterparts. But when it comes to attitudes toward gender, Gen Z members are no more progressive than the rest of us.

It’s a sobering finding with large-scale implications, both for the future of U.S. politics and for our understanding of how the first generation to grow up online is processing the modern media ecosystem.

© Slate