Republicans grapple with their weakness among Generation Z voters

Republicans are grappling with their weaknesses with Generation Z, as the voting bloc continues to flex its strength ahead of 2024.

Generation Z voters overwhelmingly align with Democrats on issues like gun control, abortion, climate change, and LGBTQ issues, posing a challenge for the GOP as it looks to appeal to the younger demographic.

Seventy-seven percent of Generation Z voters said they voted for a Democratic candidate for Congress, compared to only 21 percent who said they voted for a Republican, according to a Pew Research study released late last year.

Karoline Leavitt, a former Generation Z GOP congressional candidate in New Hampshire, called her party’s challenge with her generation “colossal.”

“That’s part of the reason why I decided to run for office,” Leavitt told The Hill.

The New Hampshire Republican was one of the first members of her generation to run for Congress, along with Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.). Leavitt’s first congressional bid is not easily comparable to Frost’s. Leavitt challenged incumbent Rep. Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) in New Hampshire’s competitive 1st Congressional District, while Frost ran in Florida’s reliably blue, open 10th Congressional District – and won.

Frost made gun control a central message of his campaign, speaking about his own experience as a gun violence survivor. And polling shows that Generation Z is largely in line with Democrats’ support for gun control policy. Sixty-three percent of 18 to 29 year olds say they believe gun laws in the U.S. should be stricter, according to a recent poll conducted by the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School.

Polls also indicate that Generation Z voters have prioritized abortion access at the ballot box. The generation was the only one to rank “abortion and reproductive rights” as the issue they were most concerned about in 2022 at 29 percent, according to a Walton Family Foundation/Murmuration survey. The economy and inflation combined followed at 12 percent.

“Those are what I would call the table stakes,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics.

“For a young person to seriously consider voting for you, there’s a list of issues that need to be recognized. Climate was one of them for a long time, accessibility of health care, and now serious proposals to reduce gun violence,” he continued, referring to stricter background checks at the state level and assault weapons bans.

Della Volpe argued that the GOP’s problem with Generation Z and millennial voters is rooted in the party’s differences with the generation over values.

“Republicans don’t have a messaging problem with younger voters, they have a values problem with younger voters,” Della Volpe said. “The problem is their values and vision are misaligned and the messengers are not trustworthy currently.”

However, Generation Z conservatives offer the opposite point of view, suggesting the solution lies not in changing their values but their messaging.

“We don’t need to sacrifice our conservative values to cater to this demographic. What we need to do is hone in on our messaging and be better messengers of these values and beliefs,” Leavitt said.

The former congressional candidate said that Republicans and conservatives need to do a better job of amplifying their message to younger voters and giving them an alternative to the liberal point of view on issues like gun violence.

“Young people in America, many of them, the majority of them in my opinion have not even ever heard of what the conservative solutions are to shootings, to violence in our country,” she said.

Generation Z conservatives and Republicans argue that the way to do this is through becoming savvier on social media.

“[There’s] more than room for improvement, there’s room to really start winning Gen Z,” said Isabel Brown, a contributor at Turning Point USA, an organization that engages young conservatives and Republicans.

“You can’t win over culture if you’re not willing to go where culture is and the vast, vast majority of our generation is obtaining our news, our opinion commentary, and just all our information dissemination through our social media feeds,” Brown said, referring to platforms like Instagram and TikTok.

Leavitt echoed this sentiment, pointing to the head start Democrats have gotten in investment in digital marketing and advertising on social media.

“That’s an instrumental problem that the GOP needs to get on board with. We have to meet these voters where they are or else we’re never going to persuade them into believing in our policies and our conservative solutions,” she said.

The Republican Party has proposed some solutions to their Generation Z problem. The Republican National Committee announced the formation of its Youth Advisory Council after last year’s midterm elections, with the goal of engaging younger voters.

“When we do that and we talk about economic opportunity, the things our party stands for, we’ll win those voters over. We just have to compete for them,” McDaniel told The Hill during a virtual Women’s History Month event last month.

While the values of most Generation Z voters may align with Democrats, there is broad agreement that the voting bloc is not interested in being attached to a particular political party.

“Democrats have been winning somewhere between 60 and 75 percent of the youth vote,” Della Volpe said. “It’s not because of some undying love or connection to the Democratic Party. It’s because the values of the Democratic Party today are more aligned with the values of younger people today, so they choose Democrats over Republicans.”

Brown pointed to environmental issues as an area that she says is a nonpartisan, yet urgent issue for Generation Z.

“I think there are so many issues with our generation that just truly are nonpartisan and both parties are learning that Gen Z doesn’t look at these things as a left issue or a right issue but just as a human interest issue or a human rights issue and the more that we continue to play into those as a bipartisan effort to lead not as a political win on the campaign trail but as something that we are actually able to accomplish in office,” Brown said.

According to a Pew Research poll released in 2021, 49 percent of Generation Z and 48 percent of Millennial Republicans said action to reduce the effects of climate change need to be prioritized.

Brown also noted what she says has been the lack of empathy in political discourse, especially around issues like gun violence.

“When we talk about issues like gun control, school safety, and mass shootings, that’s an incredibly empathy-driven conversation that needs to lead with the heart first rather than jumping to speak on policy on both sides of the issue,” Brown said.

“We often say as conservatives that facts don’t care about your feelings and I think that has been a really successful tagline in years and decades past, but Generation Z is a feelings-oriented generation.”