In 2018, amidst the peak of the Fridays for Future climate strikes and the March For Our Lives gun control movement, there was a very specific picture painted of Gen Z.  Activists like Greta Thunberg and Malala Yousafzai became the face of a generation that came with a promise, if you will, of a world forever changed by a future population that’s more liberal and politically engaged than ever. At the time, the oldest of Gen Z were finishing high school and entering college. The youngest, however, were too young to participate in any of those marches or movements. As younger Gen Z now enter teenagehood, we’re seeing a much more conflicted and complicated picture of the generation: when it comes to politics, there are really two Gen Zs.

Last month, Yale’s Youth Poll revealed a partisan divide between old Gen Z and young Gen Z in the US. Given a generic Democrat v Republican ballot for 2026, respondents ages 18 to 21 supported Republicans by nearly 12 points, while those ages 22 to 29 backed Democrats by about 6 points. Younger Gen Z are also more likely to approve of President Donald Trump and less likely to support transgender athletes participating in sports, according to the poll. It’s a shift we saw reflected in 2024 election polling, where there was a shift of Gen Z voters toward Republicans, driven by young men voting for Trump.

There’s always been vastly differing experiences and beliefs with each generation: 15 years is a wide category, after all. Just seven years ago, people were talking about being old Millennials versus young Millennials, with the biggest difference between the two experiences being the rapid rate of technological progress. The same applies to older and younger Gen Z, but on a tenfold scale. Older Gen Z grew up with Instagram but not TikTok, graduated before the Covid-19 pandemic, started college during Trump’s first term and joined movements like the Women’s March and Black Lives Matter. 

Laila Gardner, a 24-year-old based in Brooklyn, describes being part of “older Gen Z” as being the middle child between millennials and younger Gen Z. “I have a lot of that pre-internet nostalgia that my millennial peers have from the internet's early age, but I feel more informed and technologically advanced than them,” she says. “It probably wasn’t the best for me to be exposed to the internet without much supervision, and I see the effects of that even more so in my younger Gen-Z counterparts.” 

Gardner has a 16-year-old brother who (mostly) shares her liberal politics and values, but has a different approach to tangible acts of supporting those beliefs. “I don't shop at places like Amazon, Temu and Shien because they are bad for our environment and make billionaires richer,” she says. “My sibling may agree on all those things, but not be willing to stop shopping there, and, a lot of the time, it comes down to convenience and instant gratification.”

Younger Gen Z have only known smartphones, Snapchat and TikTok. They were in high school during the Covid-19 lockdowns and entered college during the Biden era. As such, they became more resistant to masking protocols and more susceptible to “anti-woke” movements towards free speech. With college tuition ever-rising, along with the cost of living, younger people are more financially conservative than previously thought. Sure, many still care about the climate crisis, but their priorities have shifted. A University of Chicago study found that young adults across races and party affiliations rated inflation as the most important issue related to the 2024 election.

While older Gen Z came of age alongside the invention of memes and viral internet culture, Mary, a 28-year-old whose name has been changed for the sake of anonymity, says that younger Gen Z has existed alongside the evolution and proliferation of those things, so may not have as broad of an understanding about what influences culture and ideas online. Mary’s 18-year-old cousin is a Trump supporter based in south Florida. “She had a ‘women for Trump’ flag in her room before she could even vote,” Mary says.

Mary is convinced that social media has played an enormous role in her cousin’s embrace of conservative politics. “It seems like access to a platform [TikTok] has exploded, so perhaps there is a broader spectrum of opinions at the fingertips of younger Gen Z from an earlier age,” she says. It’s a tension they don’t address in person: Mary’s cousin is apparently “glued to her phone”. “She hardly talks at all, but on her TikTok, she’s gleefully lip-syncing to country songs, captioning the post imploring anyone who threatened to leave the US if Trump won a second time to start packin' their bags,” says Mary.

When it comes to discussing younger Gen Z, Nivriti, a 20-year-old based in Washington, DC, says many of the reads, to her, feel overdone. “I feel like younger Gen Z has been gaslit and let down by millennials and the older parts of our generation,” she says. “The older people are banking on making us feel like the world is ending in order to manipulate or control us, and some of their worries come across as overbearing.” Nivriti herself voted for Trump, but does have concerns about the Trump administration. She also says she would have voted for Bernie Sanders if she could have. The main drive is for drastic, anti-establishment action, but it’s also fundamentally a search for optimism.

Nivriti once leaned heavily left: she spoke at a Black Lives Matter protest and interned at Michelle Obama's nonprofit, When We All Vote. But she lost interest in Democrats because she found them to be existentialist: constantly sending out the message that we’re in a crisis (whether that be a climate, gender or political crisis). “I just want to have control over my life,” she says. “And the right has made me feel much more empowered than the left.” Nivriti doesn’t see herself as separate from older Gen Z in terms of politics, but more so in a difference in childhood experience on social media. 

“I don’t agree with a lot of things that the right says, but at least they are answering this call to people on what younger Gen Z feels like,” says Nivriti. “We’re the most fortunate generation in terms of freedom of possibilities, but we don’t know what to do with our freedoms; we need structure and the right has structure that the left doesn’t currently have.” This is perhaps why right-leaning trad wife movements appeal to many young Gen Zers. Katherin Solis, a 25-year-old in New York, says her 16-year-old cousin’s Nara Smith obsession has become a shift in beliefs around women’s rights. “Abortion access is something I feel very strongly about, and it became a conversation over the holidays where I was shocked to hear her come out as ‘prolife,’” she says. 

As the partisan gap between young Gen Z and older Gen Z (and young men and women) widens, Solis says she no longer feels like Gen Z is “all in this together”. “It sucks to grow up thinking we're all wanting a certain level of connection with each other and see your younger cousin post something conservative," she says. However, on the other side of the hotly debated TikTok post may be a young Gen Zer who increasingly feels misunderstood by their older sisters, cousins and fellow Gen Z counterparts. Both are searching for stability within an unstable political climate, shaking their heads at the other side of their generational coin. “I wish adults in general knew we are having a crisis,” says Nivriti. In Gen Z’s case, this crisis is increasingly becoming a crisis of identity.