One year into Democratic control of the U.S. government, adults under age 40 have a decidedly negative view of the current and future states of the nation, regardless of party and race, according to a new survey.
Two-third of respondents, who include millennials and Generation Z, have a pessimistic view of the future of the United States, according to polling by Civiqs for the Alliance for Youth Organizing. That includes 62 percent of Democrats, 63 percent of Republicans and 70 percent of independents. Only 13 percent said they were optimistic.
Sixty-eight percent of white respondents said they were pessimistic, slightly higher than Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (67 percent), Latinos (63) and Black people (60).
A significant portion of the negativity aligns with a belief that the federal government is not addressing issues important to the under-40 crowd.
More than 90 percent of young Americans are either frustrated (56 percent) or angry (37 percent) with politicians in Washington. More Democrats are frustrated, while Republicans are mostly angry, with independents nearly evenly divided.
Almost half of all respondents (48 percent), including 59 percent of independents, said the Biden administration is not working on “policies that positively impact your life.” Only 5 percent said leaders in Washington, D.C., are focused on young people and students, although 40 percent said there’s no difference among the age groups.
But three-quarters of all respondents, slightly more than half of Republicans, said politicians in D.C., are focused on wealthy people.
(Young Americans are somewhat more positive about state and local governments. Approximately one-quarter said they are “satisfied,” with only slight variations by party and race.)
“If politicians in D.C. don’t change course and start delivering on the issues that young people care about most — health care, student loan debt, climate change, and more — they risk losing the trust and support of this crucial voting bloc,” said Carmel Pryor, senior director of communications for the Alliance for Youth Organizing.
When asked to name the their top three policies for elected officials to address, respondents most often said:
- Increase taxes on corporations and the wealthy (30 percent).
- Transition to 100% clean and renewable energy (25 percent).
- Replace private insurance with Medicare for All (23 percent).
- Restore protections against racial voter discrimination (21 percent).
- Cancel student loan debt (20 percent).
The pollsters also asked about their top two priorities for voting and elections. Nearly one half of respondents prioritized ending partisan gerrymandering (47 percent) and 39 percent selected stopping voter suppression/protecting voters from racial discrimination.
“Political leaders must engage and win the trust of GenZ and millennial voters — particularly youth of color — because young people are crucial to the path to victory for any candidate running this year,” said the group’s executive director, Dakota Hall.
But respondents put much of the responsibility for getting more out of politicians on themselves. One-third said the best method is for more young people to run for office with another 22 percent saying they need to increase voter turnout among the age cohort. Republicans were a bit of an outlier. While they agreed that running for office is the best method, 18 percent countered that politicians are already doing enough for young people. Just 9 percent said to focus on turnout.
In 2020, 57 percent of citizens ages 18-34 cast a ballot, an 8-point increase from 2016 and the biggest jump of any age group.
With control of the House and Senate up for grabs this November, young voters could have a significant say in which party controls the agenda on Capitol Hill.
Data-based rankings produced by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, housed within Tufts University’s Tisch College, shows which Senate races can be most impacted by the youth vote.
Pennsylvania tops the Youth Electoral Significance Index, given its above average youth voter registration and turnout rates. According to the CIRCLE, President Biden garnered 127,000 more votes among the youth than Donald Trump in a race decided by fewer than 35,000 ballots.
The remaining top 10 Senate races are in: Wisconsin, North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona, New Hampshire, Nevada, Florida, Ohio, Colorado.ci
The survey, conducted Jan. 2-6, polled 1,936 people ages 17-39.
Eric Trump, the newly appointed ALT5 board director of World Liberty Financial, walks outside of the NASDAQ in Times Square as they mark the $1.5- billion partnership between World Liberty Financial and ALT5 Sigma with the ringing of the NASDAQ opening bell, on Aug. 13, 2025, in New York City.
Why does the Trump family always get a pass?
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche joined ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday to defend or explain a lot of controversies for the Trump administration: the Epstein files release, the events in Minneapolis, etc. He was also asked about possible conflicts of interest between President Trump’s family business and his job. Specifically, Blanche was asked about a very sketchy deal Trump’s son Eric signed with the UAE’s national security adviser, Sheikh Tahnoon.
Shortly before Trump was inaugurated in early 2025, Tahnoon invested $500 million in the Trump-owned World Liberty, a then newly launched cryptocurrency outfit. A few months later, UAE was granted permission to purchase sensitive American AI chips. According to the Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, “the deal marks something unprecedented in American politics: a foreign government official taking a major ownership stake in an incoming U.S. president’s company.”
“How do you respond to those who say this is a serious conflict of interest?” ABC host George Stephanopoulos asked.
“I love it when these papers talk about something being unprecedented or never happening before,” Blanche replied, “as if the Biden family and the Biden administration didn’t do exactly the same thing, and they were just in office.”
Blanche went on to boast about how the president is utterly transparent regarding his questionable business practices: “I don’t have a comment on it beyond Trump has been completely transparent when his family travels for business reasons. They don’t do so in secret. We don’t learn about it when we find a laptop a few years later. We learn about it when it’s happening.”
Sadly, Stephanopoulos didn’t offer the obvious response, which may have gone something like this: “OK, but the president and countless leading Republicans insisted that President Biden was the head of what they dubbed ‘the Biden Crime family’ and insisted his business dealings were corrupt, and indeed that his corruption merited impeachment. So how is being ‘transparent’ about similar corruption a defense?”
Now, I should be clear that I do think the Biden family’s business dealings were corrupt, whether or not laws were broken. Others disagree. I also think Trump’s business dealings appear to be worse in many ways than even what Biden was alleged to have done. But none of that is relevant. The standard set by Trump and Republicans is the relevant political standard, and by the deputy attorney general’s own account, the Trump administration is doing “exactly the same thing,” just more openly.
Since when is being more transparent about wrongdoing a defense? Try telling a cop or judge, “Yes, I robbed that bank. I’ve been completely transparent about that. So, what’s the big deal?”
This is just a small example of the broader dysfunction in the way we talk about politics.
Americans have a special hatred for hypocrisy. I think it goes back to the founding era. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed in “Democracy In America,” the old world had a different way of dealing with the moral shortcomings of leaders. Rank had its privileges. Nobles, never mind kings, were entitled to behave in ways that were forbidden to the little people.
In America, titles of nobility were banned in the Constitution and in our democratic culture. In a society built on notions of equality (the obvious exceptions of Black people, women, Native Americans notwithstanding) no one has access to special carve-outs or exemptions as to what is right and wrong. Claiming them, particularly in secret, feels like a betrayal against the whole idea of equality.
The problem in the modern era is that elites — of all ideological stripes — have violated that bargain. The result isn’t that we’ve abandoned any notion of right and wrong. Instead, by elevating hypocrisy to the greatest of sins, we end up weaponizing the principles, using them as a cudgel against the other side but not against our own.
Pick an issue: violent rhetoric by politicians, sexual misconduct, corruption and so on. With every revelation, almost immediately the debate becomes a riot of whataboutism. Team A says that Team B has no right to criticize because they did the same thing. Team B points out that Team A has switched positions. Everyone has a point. And everyone is missing the point.
Sure, hypocrisy is a moral failing, and partisan inconsistency is an intellectual one. But neither changes the objective facts. This is something you’re supposed to learn as a child: It doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing or saying, wrong is wrong. It’s also something lawyers like Mr. Blanche are supposed to know. Telling a judge that the hypocrisy of the prosecutor — or your client’s transparency — means your client did nothing wrong would earn you nothing but a laugh.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.