Gen Z Ain’t Buying It - BY LANDER BUSSE

The Democratic Status Quo Isn’t Enough Anymore

I’m Lander, son of Ryan, and I’m writing on his Substack to sound the alarm about Democrats losing my generation of voters, to help you understand why it’s happening, and ultimately to beg that you find some courage. I want you to read this because the reasons and solutions are not what you might expect.

Many Dems have been wringing their hands over the rightward shift of Gen Z voters, particularly young men like me. Dozens of articles and podcasts on this topic are quick to draw conclusions, but few seem to actually reach out to young people to ask for answers. I’m here to change that. I’m the lab subject everyone has been talking about: a 20-year-old Gen Z white male voter.

The most credible documentation of the Gen Z shift is from David Shor, the new Nate Silver, a guru pollster with incisive analysis and cutting-edge methods. When Shor speaks, the Democratic establishment listens, and he’s been documenting what I’ve been living. Here’s the money shot from his recent New York Times interview with Ezra Klein:

Klein captured the resulting Democratic shock perfectly in their NYT conversation: “I find this part of this chart shocking... if we knew anything about Donald Trump eight years ago, it was that young people didn’t like him. And Republicans had been maybe throwing away young people for generations in order to run up their margins among seniors. But if you look at this chart, 75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than 20-year-old white men.”

Before you jump to angry conclusions about me, of course, I voted for Harris. Like many of you, I did it because I realized the real danger of a Trump presidency. But it's important that you know so many of us either didn’t vote for her or weren’t the least bit excited to do so.

I study my peers because I care, which means I also consume my fair share of podcasts, news clips, and Twitch streams. Through my advocacy, I also talk to a lot of young people. I grew up in a conservative place and went to school with conservative kids. Through it all, I’ve gotten a pretty good read on why I believe so many of us, right and left, feel our voice doesn't matter.

My fellow plaintiffs and I during the nation's first successful constitutional climate challenge case. We fought for our rights and won.

For too many of us, it seems like Democrats operate in a world where small tweaks to the status quo are enough, but we are a generation that has lived through a steady stream of massive world-changing mega-events devoid of any smallness.

We are confronting catastrophic climate change while older generations speak of minor adjustments. We lived through the once-in-a-century turmoil of COVID-19, our schools were shut down, and we missed sports, proms, and being with friends. Many of our families experienced financial disaster during the “Great Recession” of 2008-10, which was caused by human-made financial greed and lawlessness. New social media trends change our focus every week. We know that we are one car wreck or tumor away from medical expense bankruptcy. Most of us were in a grade school classroom when Sandy Hook happened and then in High School when Parkland happened. Very few of us can afford a home due to the economic system established by older Americans. I am one of many who once dreamt of having kids and now can’t imagine it. Most of us have only been conscious of politics during the Donald Trump era. In other words, we don’t even have a status quo, and when Democrats clumsily speak of small adjustments or ignore realities, we are certain they are fraudsters at worst or untrustworthy at best.

That’s the key to understanding the politics of Gen Z. We are not ok. We aren’t frightened of big change; we are desperate for it.

My generation expects the people we vote for to recognize reality and propose bold actions to address it. This was a bar too high for Democrats in 2024, and the “I’m with Joe” insanity proved it. I mean, come on, we may be young, but we could see that Biden could never contend, let alone win against Trump. The debate performance should have proved it, even to the White House insiders, but instead, the Democratic establishment wasted weeks telling us we were crazy. That was bad enough, unforgivable really, but it’s just part of the larger problem.

We aren’t stupid; many young people rightfully recoiled at the idea of a President being so weak that he could not at least demand responsibility from Israel’s current military campaign. Still, many of us also appreciated the good that Biden did. What unexpectedly united us with young people who voted for Trump was that, even before the debate, we all viewed Biden as the status quo. After all, he was an 82-year-old man involved in DC policymaking for decades. Nothing about him resonated with our future or reflected the reality of our lives.

People like me were hopeful for a significant reset after the candidate switch, but somehow, things worsened. Harris was so cautious that she became “smaller” than Biden. What exactly is an “opportunity economy,” anyway? Why didn’t she believe enough in her vision to actively promote it in every outlet? We don’t want “careful” or poll-tested generalities. We don’t care about risk. Remember what we’ve lived through? We want policies that make us proud to be Democrats, and right now, they aren’t there.

Before I go further, I want to clarify what I believe is a misconception about social issues. Frankly, I’ve had many arguments with my dad on this topic, so Dad, part of this is for you. Young voters didn’t abandon Democrats because of social issues. These topics don’t intimidate us the way they do older voters; accepting people for who they are is part of our lives. So, if those “they/them” ads had any impact, you older folks need to figure that out.

Young progressives like me don’t want our candidates to merely defeat Trump; we want them to be better so that we can win over other voters. For young people who are not politically engaged, the absence of boldness in Democrats creates an opportunity for someone like Trump since “at least he will do some big things.”

Don’t get me wrong, I detest Trump and what is happening in our country, but there was a perception in my cohort that he at least recognized the reality of a broken system. He understood how tumultuous our lives have been. Then he used a new media environment to dismantle an untrustworthy Democratic establishment that was telling us not to believe our own eyes.

I really think that’s why we got here. This explains why there is a weird and well-documented overlapping Venn diagram of voter support in my demographic: voters who support Trump and Bernie Sanders. The issue is not the right-versus-left divide; it's bold-versus-careful.

One of many articles detailing the overlap between Bernie and Trump support

Let me be blunt here. Ignoring the need for real action to fix healthcare affordability, allowing corporate fossil fuel interests to run rampant, continually catering to wealthy Wall Street corporations while they worsen the wealth gap, covering for members of Congress who profit from insider trading as long as they are Democrats, or pretending that “opportunity economies” will lead us to homeownership are all just as insane as insisting Joe Biden must stay in the race. If you condone any of this, you are destroying trust with young voters.

There are plenty of opportunities to win back young voters across the political spectrum, but it's not going to happen with lies, gimmicks, or safe, poll-tested bumper stickers. Do you think people are protesting in the streets or flocking to 83-year-old Bernie rallies because we want “careful?” No. Please just take a simple lesson from successful business innovators: give customers what they want, and they’ll buy it!