WSJ What’s News - Why Gen Z Voters Are Reconsidering Their Support for Trump

Episode Date: October 11, 2026

To stave off a blue wave in the U.S. midterm elections, Republicans hope to retain a group they overperformed with two years ago: voters under 30. But President Trump is beset by low approval ratings and a historical midterm trend that favors the party not holding the Oval Office. White House correspondent Natalie Andrews and WSJ editor Aaron Zitner join host Pierre Bienaimé to discuss how young voters are shifting away from the GOP. They consider conservative podcasters’ criticism of the president, Trump’s slipping poll numbers and use of AI memes, Gen Z’s growing disillusionment over foreign policy and economic pressures, and whether Republicans can hold on to their 2024 gains. Sign up for the WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

I want to take you back to November 2024. CNN projects that Donald Trump has been elected president, defeating Vice President Kamala Harris. One big reason for Trump's victory, young voters. The youth vote traditionally goes to the Democrats. Not so much in this one. Yeah, big movement here. From college campuses to urban voting lines, a sizable shift red from one of the most reliably blue voting blocks. President-elect Trump.

According to the Associated Press, Trump took in 47% of voters under 30. That's really good for a Republican candidate compared to other recent elections. And it showed that the youth vote is a little more up for grabs than we may have thought. In fact, Trump won the majority of male voters in this age group by a clear margin, 15 points. But that was two years ago, and Trump now faces the historical headwinds of a midterm election and really low approval ratings, including among the young voters who helped carry him back to the White House.

Polls suggest they're going to choose differently this time around. I do not agree with a lot of what Trump has been doing in the past year or so. Nothing that was promised has come to fruition, and I'm very disappointed in that. And in the media, prominent conservative voices who once championed Trump's campaign, from Joe Rogan to Tucker Carlson, people with big online followings and sway with young voters

have turned to criticizing the president over his foreign policy, and promises they say have gone unfulfilled. This is why a lot of people feel betrayed, right? He ran on no more wars and these stupid senseless wars, and then we have one that we can't even really clearly define why we did it. I don't recognize this administration right now. I don't recognize what's happening.

His negotiation tactic is to kill an entire country full of civilians, men, women, and children. So where does this leave the GOP and those crucial young voters? less than a month from the midterms. It's Sunday, October 11th. I'm Pierre BNMA for the Wall Street Journal. This is What's News Sunday. Today, we're launching a special two-part series looking at the youngest voting bloc in the U.S.

Gen Zers are between the ages of 14 and 29. Coincidentally, that means this year, the adults among them are the youth vote, also known as voters under 30, and nearly 50 million of them are eligible to cast ballots next month. I wanted to find out more about this. this group and what both the Democratic and Republican parties are doing to attract it. And here to speak with me now about the Republican side of the aisle is our White House correspondent Natalie Andrews, who's been on the GOP campaign trail for the last many months.

So Natalie, Donald Trump pulled off a major shift with young voters back in 2024. And a huge part of that was his not-so legacy media strategy. You know, he skipped traditional outlets like 60 minutes. Instead, he was doing these multi-hour sit-downs on podcasts like Flagrant and the Joe Rogan experience. that proved to be a good media strategy in 2024. It's a lot of what the discussion from right after the election was about. Are Republicans doing that again this year? You know, we've seen J.D. Vance, the vice president, do a huge podcast tour.

He is acknowledging that they've lost a lot of these voters. He's often saying, hey, just give us two more years, guys. Just give us two more years as he did on the All In podcast. There's a lot of good that's been done, but there's a lot of work left to do. Don't give power to the people who call. cause the problems that we're fixing, give us another chance or give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we've been doing for the past two years. And he also has kind of framed the election as, hey, even if we haven't given you everything

you want, the other side is crazy. So he's really trying to appeal to these voters that came along in 24 that maybe he's acknowledging they've lost. Yeah, and on that question of Gen Z as a swing vote, I spoke to Michael Alfonso, the Republican Party's candidate in Wisconsin's rural 7th district. He's the son-in-law of Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, and he's running to fill the seat, Duffy himself once held. He told me Gen Z is open to either party's arguments as long as they speak to affordability. Gen Z is the most politically fluid generation in modern history. 50% of that generation doesn't identify with either party, meaning 50% of them are swing voters. They're all listening and they're listening to see which side has.

is the best pitch for affordability. Now, of course, a lot of independents do tend to lean toward one party or the other, but yes, young voters have shown they can evolve and vote differently from one election to the next. Recent polling, though, shows that the support from Gen Z for President Trump and his party is slipping. But it isn't just everyday voters. It's those high-profile voices we just mentioned, like Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson. Some of them are now criticizing the administration. Others are talking about Trump a lot less.

That's something we saw in some recent analysis of some numbers from the Wall Street Journal. I recently spoke with Rachel Jan Faza. She's the founder of the Up and Up. It's a research firm focused on Gen Z. She says it's hard to know whether conservative podcasters are reflecting Trump's low numbers or maybe contributing to them. These podcasters were never really hardcore Republicans to begin with. They more sort of bought on to the Trump train in 2024, just like a lot of the young men that I've spoken to over the years. So I think that the podcasters' reaction and commentary is actually pretty reflective of where the average young person is at.

You know, you could debate whether that's chicken or egg. But I think they go hand in hand. Natalie, not a question about cause and effect, but does this disillusionment among people with those big platforms, does it matter much? I mean, Donald Trump made a lot of promises on the campaign trial in 2024. And he hasn't been able to fulfill those. And midterm elections don't have the same energy as a presidential anyway. A huge part of Republican strategy was these voters who don't usually turn out. Young men who may not have gotten in a habit of voting yet.

And this group is really hard to get to turn out into a midterm. So the Yale youth poll that looked at young voters found that voters of this generation, they're not tied to a party as much as they're connecting it to issues. So they're directly looking at things like affordability. They're looking at what the president has done and then they're making a decision. One major driver of young votes to the GOP has been the group Turning Point USA. It's the political organization that grew a conservative base of support in high schools and colleges. Its founder, of course, Charlie Kirk was murdered last year during a public event.

Are college campus still a big focus for Republican candidates? Certainly Turning Point has had some membership surging and both parties are going to to be working college campuses. They've been out in football games and tailgates and things like that. It's just a matter of whether or not they can get those voters to the polls. I think Turning Point had harnessed and was really building something. If you talk to people who knew Charlie Kirk well, they thought he was going to run for president someday. He had really developed something that was cause-focused. And Democrats are still out there looking for a message. And that includes a message that young voters can rally around.

Another change since the last election has been the rise of AI. President Trump has taken to sharing a whole lot of visuals made by artificial intelligence. Yes. You know, things like images of him overseeing a naval battle or looming over Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. There was the AI made footage of him dropping excrement on protesters from his perch, piling a fighter jet, you know, while wearing a crown. It's strange to talk about and it's all really different from what Americans might be used to seeing from their presidents. Rachel Janfanzah, we heard from earlier, she told me that she's heard from young voters' responses to that kind of image.

We are really hearing that Genzi has passed these culture wars. Young people are pretty frustrated by the levity with which some of the White House accounts have posted about things as serious as war, or the fact that it seems like, you know, they're not necessarily taking people's economic concerns seriously. That can feel frustrating to a young person who is really trying to set up. the rest of their lives and feels like it's impossible to do. Natalie, what do you think Gen Ziers, who are, of course, super online make of that kind of communication, that kind of meme making? There is a sense of people finding humor in it, and I think that's where the White

House comes from. They are also very online. But you think about how fast your life moves when you're in your 20s and people who were in college are now graduated. They're realizing how expensive life is. There's a direct corollary to gas prices increasing after the, you know, war or conflict started with Iran. And at the end of the day, you can go hard on the memes. But if voters aren't seeing prices go down or feeling better about themselves, the memes do not

fill that gap. That was Wall Street Journal, politics reporter Natalie Andrews. Natalie, thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me. Coming up, Gen Z voters may be turning away from President Trump, but how much will that actually affect the midterms results? That's after the break. So the Republican Party is trying to keep the young voters it did so well with two years ago. How likely is that? Aaron Zittner leads our polling coverage, including of the journal's own polls. Aaron, what do we know about how Gen Z is going to vote? This is the headline thing. Who are you going to vote for? When we ask, do you plan to support a Democrat for Congress or

a Republican for Congress in your district? Democrats are ahead by 20 points among Gen Z. That compares to an eight-point Democratic lead in the overall sample. So a group that Trump lost by only four points in 2024, I mean, that was a remarkably close. Now it's a Democratic lead of 20, and that's well above what we're seeing among voters overall. This was one of the biggest shifts in the electorate, and you spin forward now, and oh my God, in our new poll that was done just a few weeks ago in late September, young people had a negative image of Donald Trump's job performance was 23% approve, 73% disapprove. That's a 50-point negative margin. And most of those disapproving strongly. That's right. That's right. And so, you know, when we talk about movement of a group

in the electorate, we often say, is the party that's getting them, did they buy them or are they renting them? Well, young people were just rented by the Republican. party in 2024 and they're shifting away. And the trends that we see in views of the economy and pessimism, it's magnified among this young group. Tell me more about what we learned and what you learned from these polls. I'm seeing a nice array of papers in front of you here. I'm sure there's a lot of stuff in here. Well, you know, Americans overall are pretty pessimistic about the economy, about where this country is headed. It's something we've wrestled with for about three, four years at the Wall Street Journal. The economic metrics are pretty good.

good. Stock market at record highs. The AI boom is lifting the economy. Inflation isn't where the Fed wants, but it's not, certainly not where it was in the COVID period. And yet people feel lousy. And Gen Z feels really lousy. I mean, a headline number here is, how do you view the strength of the economy? Is the economy in good shape or bad shape? It's about 20 good shape, 80% bad shape. and the 80% in negative view compares to 65% in the sample overall. Yeah, I recently spoke to Drew Belcher. He's in leadership at the College Republicans group at Miami University, which is in Ohio, not Florida. He thinks Gen Z is largely up for grabs politically, but he says a lot of them have checked out too.

I think we can make a lot of headway with Gen C. But right now, I think there's still this large amount of disillusion that the system, the quote-unquote, system is broken and that nobody can really get ahead. And I don't think that's necessarily true, but the perception is absolutely real. And that's what you were talking about, perception versus reality of these economic numbers. But you're saying that the polls show this, some cynicism about politics and society. Oh, yes, overall. And look, when it comes to the economy, every age group is living in its own successes and struggles. And young people certainly have their struggles, certainly worry about the economy. And one place we see that is we asked an open-ended question, meaning, you know, just

tell us what your response is to this question. And the question was, what is the top priority that you think the Democratic Party should fight for? What is the top priority that the Republican party should fight for? And the number one answer among everyone was cost of living and the economy, but it was more so among young people. And about 60% of people said that Donald Trump's policies made the economy worse. That's not good. And about 16% of young voters who voted for Trump said they regretted their vote. You know, case in point, I recently drove down to Charlottesville, Virginia, to meet with young voters. One of them, a conservative college student, his name is John Atkins.

He was 19. He's too young to have voted two years ago. But if he could have, he told me he would have voted for Trump. And now he would be regretting it. He also added this just about his overall take on the presidency of Donald Trump. We were promised with no new wars. We're in an endless conflict in the Middle East that not a lot of people care about. I don't think it's any of our business in the Middle East. I don't think any of the economy has gotten any better.

The job market is terrible for people my age. I know tons of that I go to school with who asking me to help get them jobs at my store or wherever I work. Nothing that was promised has come to fruition. And I'm very disappointed in that. Well, you listen to a voice like that and you wonder, is that person even going to vote at all? You know, about two-thirds of Gen Z say they're highly motivated to vote. But that two-thirds is well below other age groups. Turnout rates are very low.

among young people in midterm elections. So young voters, they need an extra push to vote in a midterm to begin with and hear with this pessimism and the kind of voter that you talked to. You might think that more of them would sit out the election this year. So there's the economy and perceptions of what President Trump is doing to shepherd that for good or ill. What else is driving some disapproval? What is really the issue mix this year for young voters? Well, issue mix is the great phrase to use, Pierre, because it really has changed. Do you think back two years to 2024? And yeah, the economy and inflation were top of mind. But we were also talking about, you know, immigrants coming illegally across the border. And Republicans have won on some of the issues that were salient in 2024. Even Gina Hinojosa, the Democrat running for governor in Texas said just the other day, the border is secure and we thank Donald Trump for that. And specifically, border crossings have dropped to very low.

Crossings have dropped, and we talked about trans issues and women's sports. Republicans are running ads on the trans issue, but because a lot of states have acted to keep trans women out of women's sports, to keep what they say, men out of women's sports, there hasn't been a fresh case to provide outrage. That hasn't happened. Instead, what are we talking about? We're talking about, gee, should the U.S. be providing military aid to Israel? We're talking about data centers. And those are places. where young people, they're more worried about AI and data centers than voters overall, and they're much more opposed to U.S. military aid to Israel than voters overall. Whatever trend we see in the public, young people are more so.

Young people are magnified. Aaron Zittner leads the Wall Street Journal's polling coverage. Thanks so much, Aaron, for joining me. Good to be with you. Next Sunday, we look at the other side of the aisle, at the Democrats, including the Democratic Socialists of America, and the young voters that have propelled them to success in, primaries this past year. Michael Alfonso, the GOP candidate in Wisconsin we heard from earlier,

thinks the contrast between Republicans and Democrats will be obvious for young voters. I think Republicans, especially lately, have been doing a good job of showing, hey, look, this pitch of free stuff from the left, you know, we'll give you free health care, free houses, it doesn't work. And, you know, my grandparents came to this country from Cuba. So when I hear the free stuff pitch, I know that's communism. But I think that's the key. going to win young people. We need to make that contrast very clear. We look at how the Democratic Party is looking to make that contrast work for them next week. And that's it for What's News Sunday for October 11th. Today's show is produced by Hattie Moyer with supervising producer Sandra Kilhoff

and deputy editor Chris Sinsley. It was mixed by Michael LaVal, who also created our music. I'm Piwb Yename, and we'll be back tomorrow morning with a brand new show. Until then, thanks for listening.