Goodbye Boomers. Millennials and Zoomers have the helm.
The New York Times reports Fed Up With Politics and Struggle, Young Voters Rose Up
In swings of monumental proportion, young men aged 18 to 29 veered toward Democratic candidates by nearly 40 percentage points since 2024, according to preliminary results from Times Voter Trends. Young women, who were already inclined to support Democrats, swung by 27 points. In the Texas Senate race, men aged 18 to 44 swung nearly 50 points toward the Democrat, James Talarico.
“He is my age,” said Tristan Waumsley, 35, of Richmond, Texas, who voted straight Democratic at the state level for the first time in his life. “He sounded like I could have talked to him myself. He’s somebody normal, like me.”
The youth movement swept in or bolstered politicians who looked more like them: Abdul El-Sayed, the senator-elect of Michigan; Rob Sand, the governor-elect of Iowa; Senator Jon Ossoff in Georgia; Nithya Raman, the newly elected mayor of Los Angeles; and Sam Forstag, an incoming congressman from Montana. The next clerk of the Superior Court in Maricopa County, Ariz., the Democrat Sebastian Matta, is a 19-year-old Arizona State University sophomore. Another 19-year-old, Daniel Darris-O’Connor, unseated an eight-term Republican incumbent in the Massachusetts House.
The voters swept out the stodgy and rejected wealthy middle-aged men like Rick Jackson, who ran for governor of Georgia, and Ken Paxton, who lost to Mr. Talarico in Texas.
The discontent is global, fostering youth movements from Bangladesh and India to Serbia and France. Government resources have gone to Baby Boom retirees with free health care and subsidized retirements, while education has been stretched, health insurance costs have soared and job security has been hampered by older generations that will not get out of the way. Artificial intelligence and climate change have injected real dread into those coming of voting age.
That is scrambling the political lines that have given shape to American politics since the end of World War II.
“The traditional left-right paradigm has been broken,” said Brandon Kenig, 41, a Kansan who came of age in the College Republicans and worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign.
Voters under 30, more so than any other age group, are not tethered to a political party. More than half of Gen Z voters identify as independents, according to Gallup, far greater than the one-third of baby boomers who do not identify with a political party.
Jacob Brillhart, 27, and his wife have not voted in the last several elections.
“You get the same thing, no matter who you vote for, two wings of the same bird,” said Mr. Brillhart, who lives in Akron, Ohio, and works in heating and air conditioning.
But, he said, after this deeply ugly campaign for governor in Ohio, they want to start voting regularly. He said, “We’ll never vote Republican after seeing what the party has done.”
Karrar Al-Sadkhan, 19, a student at Wayne State University in Detroit, said he and his friends had never identified as Democrats. But he was inspired by Mr. El-Sayed, whose message was that “it’s really more of a class war, not blue or red.”
Chase Sardeson, 23, an electrician’s apprentice in Raleigh, N.C., grew up in a conservative household. But he said he became interested in liberal politics while he was working at a car dealership and learned that one of his colleagues, a Hispanic immigrant, was working three jobs to support his family.
Today, Mr. Sardeson and his girlfriend together pay $1,800 a month in rent for a two-bedroom townhouse. When he did the math for the day he could no longer be on his parents’ health insurance, he said his heart sank.
“I look at boomers and older Gen X, and I see people who had the chance to benefit from a great America at the top of the world,” Mr. Sardeson said. “I look at myself, and I see a shadow.”
He voted for one of those baby boomers, Roy Cooper, a Democrat, in the U.S. Senate race, but he would have preferred a candidate with a more forceful economic message, such as Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York.
“I feel seen and heard by Mamdani and El-Sayed — even Talarico,” he said.
Meet Sebastian Matta
A 19-year-old will be the Clerk of the Superior Court in Maricopa County Arizona, the 4th-largest county in the United States. Congratulations!
Broken Promises
MAGA Deathbed
The 2026 Midterm election was one for the ages. Boomers and MAGA both have diminishing voices.
There is no turning back. The only way MAGA could recover is to reach out to young voters and stop divisive politics.
But the cult can’t and won’t do that. MAGA’s entire existence has been racism, name calling led by Trump, and divisive politics.
Core MAGA still wants to “deport them all” a racist, economically stupid idea.
In 2026, Zoomers and Millennials were fed up enough to demand change. And change they will get it.
When Trump Is Gone, MAGA Dies
MAGA is on the death bed. The cult just don’t see it yet.
Trump can still do more damage for two more years. But that’s it. His fate is sealed. Trump will go down as one of the worst, if not the worst, presidents in US history.
Good riddance to Trump and MAGA. But that’s superfluous. MAGA Is Trump.
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