The Next Generation of Conservatives

If you Google ‘young voters’ or browse a typical midterm recap article from MSNBC or the Washington Post, you may walk away with the unremarkable conclusion that nothing has changed with young voters. For years, analysts, pundits, and political parties have lumped millennials into a bucket and called it ‘the youth vote’. Conservatives have attempted to appeal to younger voters with mixed results and largely conceded these votes to the left. Democrats have relied heavily on the millennial vote – former President Obama won 60% of the millennial vote in 2012 and a 2017 Pew Center survey confirmed he is still highly popular among millennials. The consensus appears to be that young voters are still enthusiastic liberals and instrumental in securing Democratic victories across the nation. While this was true for millennials as a whole, the upper end of the millennial cohort is now in their late-30s. They’re getting older, and while their political preferences don’t appear to be shifting substantially, the political preferences of the next generation of adults are shifting the overall direction of ‘the youth vote’.

A growing body of research indicates the generation born after 1995 – dubbed Generation Z – is significantly more conservative than millennials, and may be the most conservative generation since WWII.  Well and good, but what is the actual impact of this generation? The answer is, it could be huge. Generation Z will have a large impact on the future of the nation across two concrete measures: time and scope. First, voters in their late teens and early 20’s have an average of 60+ years ahead of them to affect the direction of the United States across a range of social, economic, privacy, security, and technology issues. Second, young adults born after 1995 outnumber every other living age cohort in the nation at 25 percent of the population. Generation Z outnumbers Baby Boomers and millennials combined.

Earlier this year, Market Research Foundation identified and began tracking a trend that appears to be accelerating worldwide: the increasingly conservative views of the youngest generation. Our preliminary research indicates a demographic shift is occurring in today’s young adults, foreshadowing a more conservative nationalist youth vote.