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Trump won over more young voters in the 2024 election than in his two previous runs for president
Rachel Dobkin in New York Wednesday 14 January 2026 23:29 GMT- Bookmark
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President Donald Trump’s approval rating among Gen Z has dropped a massive 42 points in the past year, new polling has found.
Trump won over more young voters in the 2024 election than in his two previous runs for president, helping him return to the White House. But nearly a year into Trump’s second presidency, Gen Z, those born between 1997 and 2012, are turning on him.
On Wednesday, CNN Chief Data Analyst Harry Enten announced shocking results from new polling, which showed Trump’s net approval rating among Gen Z at negative 32 percentage points. That is a huge dip from his plus-10 net approval rating with young people in February 2025, shortly after the start of his second term.
Enten said Trump was “falling off that cliff” among Gen Z.
“My goodness gracious. This is, I said, a very swinging group and it has swung very much away from Donald John Trump,” the data guru said.
open image in galleryPresident Donald Trump’s approval rating among Gen Z has dropped a massive 42 points in the past year, new polling has found (Samuel Corum/Getty Images)According to the Pew Research Center, Trump had 42 percent of the vote among Americans born between the 1990s and 2000s in the 2024 election. While this was still 13 percentage points lower than his Democratic opponent, former Vice President Kamala Harris, he did better with this cohort than in previous years.
In his 2020 race against former President Joe Biden, Trump only got 35 percent of the vote among this cohort, and when he was up against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2016, he received just 25 percent.
One major issue that concerns Gen Z, like many other Americans, is the cost of living. Trump’s approval rating on the economy, one of the main issues he campaigned on during the 2024 election, has sunk.
open image in galleryTrump won over more young voters in the 2024 election than in his two previous runs for president, helping him return to the White House (Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images)An AP-NORC poll from last December found 67 percent of U.S. adults disapprove of how Trump is handling the economy, while just 31 percent approve. This gap was smaller in March, when 58 percent of people disapproved of the president’s job on the economy and 40 percent approved.
Despite the polling, Trump bragged about the state of the economy during an annual appearance before the Detroit Economic Club on Tuesday. The president said the U.S. had experienced “the strongest and fastest economic turnaround in our country's history.”
Inflation held steady in December at 2.7 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics Consumer Price Index, but grocery prices remained high. Home sales in 2025 remained at a 30-year low amid high prices and mortgage rates, the Associated Press reported.
open image in galleryOne major issue that Gen Z, like many other Americans, is concerned with is the cost of living, and polling suggests that Trump has been struggling to convince voters of what he sees as his success with the economy (Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images)More about
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