A little less than two years ago, Gen Z underwent a rebrand. Donald Trump had just been reelected. Exit polls suggested that young voters—especially young men—had helped deliver the Republican victory. Rather suddenly, a generation associated with climate activism and trigger warnings became known for manosphere podcasts, fiscal conservatism, and gender relations so icy that they’ve contributed to the national panic about fertility rates.
But a lot has changed since 2024. Trump has begun a (thus far ineffectual) war with Iran, something he said wouldn’t happen. His administration’s handling of the Epstein files, where his name appears abundantly, has been criticized by Democrats and Republicans alike. He vowed to lower gas and grocery prices; instead, they keep rising. His approval ratings have hit record lows, and he’s losing favor among crucial voting blocs such as independents and Latinos. Journalists and political commentators keep speculating and debating: Will the young men who moved rightward crawl back in the other direction?
[Read: The not-so-woke Generation Z]
That may depend, it turns out, on whether you’re talking about young men—or even younger men. The spring 2026 Yale Youth Poll, released last month, found that a majority of respondents—and roughly 70 percent of the young adults—disapproved of Trump. Even with men under 30, the president lost ground compared with Yale’s fall 2025 poll. But the data also revealed a dividing line: Among 23-to-29-year-old men, support for Democrats increased by 14 percentage points. Among 18-to-22-year-old men, it fell by a percentage point—even while their approval of Trump declined somewhat. The women in that youngest age group, meanwhile, make up the single most liberal population: further left than the slightly older Gen Z women.
Of course, you can splice and dice any cohort differently and come up with what’s called a “microgeneration.” But this poll echoed something I’ve heard in my reporting before: Gen Z, which encompasses people born from 1997 to 2012, splinters into an older and a younger group that tend to behave quite differently. Rachel Janfaza, who researches and writes about this age group, has referred to them as Gen Z 1.0 and 2.0. The generational researcher Meghan Grace described them to me as “Big Zs” and “Little Zs.” Whatever you call them, the split seems like a meaningful one. You might think of Little Zs as the angstier siblings to their Big Z counterparts: more divided, less trusting, and even readier to shatter the status quo.
When you’re young, everything around you might shape your still-nascent beliefs: your family, your neighborhood, but also the state of the world in that chapter in time, Patrick Egan, a public-policy professor at NYU, told me. Your politics, in adolescence and early adulthood, are in the process of “crystalizing.” Just look at Gen Xers, he said, who came of age when Ronald Reagan was enjoying a popular presidency in the mid-to-late 1980s; perhaps partly for that reason, the group leans Republican compared with other generations.
Little Zs and Big Zs grew up nearly at the same time—but in different worlds. Big Zs might’ve texted their friends on flip phones; Little Zs grew up with smartphones, herded toward content by TikTok algorithms. Big Zs might have looked up assigned reading on SparkNotes, but Little Zs could use AI to write a high-school paper. Perhaps most important, Big Zs were already in college, or had even graduated, by the time COVID hit. That doesn’t mean the pandemic wasn’t difficult for many of them. But they’d done some real maturing—and gained some real self-understanding—before that blow. Little Zs were in middle or high school in 2020. They were at home when they should’ve been making new friends, breaking rules and getting grounded, falling in goofy early love.
The Little Zs who resented attending Zoom class and missing prom might have appreciated that many Republicans were criticizing school shutdowns, scorning mask mandates, and talking about personal freedom. More broadly, their anger with decision makers might have fed the anti-establishment impulse that researchers have noticed especially among younger Zoomers, who are “a lot less tethered,” Egan said, “to the traditional ways that people even a little bit older than them have been thinking about politics for a long time.” Many of them, he told me, like that Trump positions himself as a norm-flouting outsider to politics—despite the fact that he’s a second-term president.
[Read: 20-somethings are in trouble]
Clearly the MAGA mentality has spoken to the men of Little Z in particular. Perhaps that’s because many Republicans put a particular brand of masculinity on a pedestal at a time when these men were still developing a sense of self. They might have heard GOP leaders on “bro podcasts,” Grace said, or seen them partner with the Ultimate Fighting Championship, and understood those efforts as an invitation: “Yes, your voice does matter. And we want it to be on our side.” Now these men have graduated from high school. They’re thinking about how they’ll make a living. They’re seeing that job growth is happening largely in traditionally female-dominated fields—health care, retail, social services—rather than in, say, manufacturing, Egan told me. And they’re still hearing Trump claim he’ll fix the economy.
Republicans might have spoken to Little Z women, too—to their money anxiety, their COVID trauma, their frustration with the status quo. But in other ways they’ve been turning those young women away. The 2021 Dobbs decision that struck down abortion protections may have been a particular blow for the women who are now in their early 20s. Grace and her colleague Corey Seemiller have been studying Zoomers’ political ideology for years, and in 2021, they identified that Little Z men were starting to shift rightward compared with Big Z men. But they didn’t see much of a shift at all among women. Then Dobbs happened, and young women lurched left. They were perhaps old enough to be having sex but young enough to be especially terrified of pregnancy, and of the thought that men would be telling them what to do about it.
Much has been written about the gender gap in Gen Z politics. But that split seems to be especially dramatic among Little Zs. Judging, in part, by the Yale poll results, “it may be more pronounced than anyone’s really anticipated,” Egan said. That divergence could have profound implications for not only future elections but also how Little Zs continue to relate to one another. Grace and Seemiller surveyed young women and found that, of the respondents who didn’t plan to marry, a third said that was because they fear losing their independence. A lot of them, she said, feel like the men around them have already voted to take away their freedom.
[Read: Young men aren’t the only ones struggling]
But the beliefs of Little Z, as much as they might be crystallizing, are not set in stone. Little Zs are different from Big Zs because they’ve been through different formative experiences—but also simply because they’re younger. And many kinds of political figures, regardless of party, could still respond to their sense of disempowerment, their skepticism of elites, their hunger for authenticity. Egan has heard young voters talk glowingly not just of Trump but of Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “There’s just tremendous choice,” Egan told me—far more than when he, a member of Gen X, was younger. In his day, a 20-year-old didn’t have nearly as many disparate voices—on TikTok, CNN, or Fox News, or in the halls of Congress—acknowledging their particular struggles. Now, he said, one “can find messages that really speak to that sense of precarity, that sense of upheaval.”
If Trump keeps breaking his campaign promises, even Little Z men might turn toward other leaders. The midterms are around the corner. Young people don’t tend to show up in great numbers, historically, but Grace reminded me that in 2018 and 2022, Zoomers had notably high midterm-election turnout for their age group. They’re not like other generations; they’re not even like one another. Someday, Little Zs won’t be so little anymore—and their elders might be surprised by who they grow into.
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