Despite the Brat Summer hype, all the clever and demure posts from KamalaHQ, and the promise of generational change, in the end it turned out that Gen Z wasn’t very interested in Kamala Harris. It became clear early enough on Tuesday evening, when the exit polls arrived and certain counties were going sideways for Democrats, that Harris was underperforming old man Joe Biden’s 2020 numbers with younger voters.
Back then, Biden won 18-29 year olds by a massive 25-point margin. Harris won them by only 13 points. Put bluntly, her performance among young voters was an abject disaster for Democrats and a troubling omen for the party’s political future. The youth gender gap that was supposed to favor Harris—with an army of young women showing up under the battle flag of abortion rights—never really materialized. Yes, Harris won young women by 20 points, but she was supposed to do better: The gold standard Harvard Youth Poll had her winning those women by 30 points just a few weeks ago. Meanwhile, Donald Trump won young men by 10 points, flipping them from Biden. And for the first time in decades, Republicans won young white voters outright.
The results confirmed what I’ve been seeing all year in my reporting, for Puck and Snapchat: Trump and Republicans have made real inroads with Gen Z. But not just with the “Trump bros,” who have occupied so much of the media conversation, and not just by hanging out in the manosphere talking to Joe Rogan and Theo Von. Sure, young white dudes broke for Trump. But Harris also underperformed with almost every kind of young person: white women, Black voters, and young Latinos, who went for Harris by only 6 points. Harris even ran behind Biden in cities and counties that are home to big college towns, at the University of Wisconsin, at Penn State, at East Carolina, at the University of Georgia, and so on.
As the data trickled in Tuesday night, I was reminded of so many of the conversations I had in recent weeks as I traveled across Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, talking to college students about the election. When I asked them the open-ended question of what they cared about most this year, so many of them—of all races, classes and genders—plainly told me that prices, rent, and the economy were their top concerns. Abortion, sometimes. Climate, maybe. But pretty much everyone, even some Democrats, figured that Trump could probably help their pocketbooks, whatever his flaws. Yes, there were Harris voters, mainly young Black women, who were passionate about her historic candidacy. But other Democrats, mainly white progressive women, thought Harris was just fine. I also met several young Arab and Muslim students in Detroit, who wanted Harris to lose and were giving their votes to Jill Stein in protest of the Biden administration’s ongoing support for Israel in the war in Gaza.
The energy I saw out there in flyover country simply didn’t match what the Harris campaign was selling relentlessly on TikTok and other channels, where Harris and the Democrats were straining to seem cool. There was Tim Walz, pretending to know more about football than he probably did. There were the Swifties for Kamala. The Chappell Roan-inspired Harris-Walz hats. A.O.C. showing up on Twitch. There was the avalanche of remixes and clips dunking on J.D. Vance. Ever since Harris became the nominee, Dems were hoping they could coast on good vibes. But vibes aren’t gonna pay for that car loan.
As much as they couldn’t stand Trump, there were plenty of students who told me that they didn’t have much affinity for the Democratic Party, either. Go figure: In their sentient lifetimes, the party has been led by a succession of scripted and buttoned-up Boomers like Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. Barack Obama is a fading memory. Bernie Sanders a lost cause, a curdled meme. The Harris campaign tried to plug into youth culture, but their efforts to seem cool often gave off the distinct aroma of cringe. For every Billie Eilish, Bad Bunny, and Beyoncé trotted out to validate Harris, there was also Eminem, John Legend, J.Lo., Katy Perry—an aging celebrity bullpen left over from the Obama years, a long-ago time when Democrats actually had cultural credibility, when millennials were the tastemakers. Those days are no more.
The day after Eminem appeared at a Kamala rally with Obama in Detroit in October, Alycia Tyler, a freshman at Wayne State voting for Harris, told me that she thought Slim Shady was “washed.” Dagger. But the conversation I remember the most was with a young Black woman I met at Clemson last month—a rare Harris supporter on that conservative South Carolina campus—who expressed a sentiment that’s actually pretty common among younger Americans who don’t remember much about Trump’s chaotic first presidency: That he just isn’t the sinister, dangerous, racist, sexist, democracy-ending strongman that her elders in the press and the Democratic Party have made him out to be. “When Trump was first elected, they made it seem like the world was gonna end,” she told me. “And I’m still here.”