A new poll has found that Gen Z voters under 21 lean Republican by 11.7 points.
The poll’s findings are particularly shocking given that young voters have traditionally leaned to the left.
According to the new Yale Youth Poll, voters aged 22 to 29 lean Democrat by 6.4 points.
“When asked whether they would vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the 2026 congressional elections in their district, voters aged 22–29 favored the Democratic candidate by a margin of 6.4 points, but voters aged 18–21 favored the Republican by a margin of 11.7 points.”
Though the young voters plan to vote Republican, they do not necessarily agree with the GOP on all issues.
The pollsters report:
The survey included a range of questions on subjects from higher education to immigration to what the federal budget is spent on. The poll also implemented two A/B tests to gauge the effect of framing progressive policies as “human rights” and whether providing voters with basic information about government finances changes their views on the federal deficit, tax rates, and spending levels. The first message test found that arguing for progressive policies on homelessness on the grounds of “human rights” reduced support for the progressive position by 22 points.
The widest generational divides appeared on immigration and protest rights. While voters overall opposed allowing asylum seekers who enter the country illegally to stay by a 2-point margin, young voters supported allowing them to remain by a 25-point margin. On the question of whether international students should be deported for protesting the war in Gaza, voters overall opposed deportation by 36 points, while young voters opposed deportation by 65 points.
Voters under 30 were nearly split on whether teens aged 13 to 17 should be allowed access to gender transition treatments, opposing it by just a 0.1-point margin in comparison to the broader electorate, which opposed it by 24 points. They also differed on campus speech, with young voters supporting universities making political or social statements by a 6-point margin, while the broader electorate opposed such statements by a 13-point margin.
Young voters’ views on institutional trust and democratic reform followed a similar pattern. Young voters were more likely to say the Supreme Court rules based on ideology or partisanship rather than legal reasoning, whereas voters overall saw the Supreme Court as ruling based on the legal merits of cases.
These positions, which seem to swing left on some issues and right on others, suggest that young people are becoming increasingly unpredictable in their political alliances — possibly due to a lack of trust in the Democrat Party.
The Yale Youth Poll surveyed 4,100 registered voters from April 1 to April 3, with an oversample of 2,024 voters between 18 and 29. The margin of error was +/- 1.9 percentage points for the full sample and +/- 1.8 percentage points for the young voters.
