Gen Z is Ready for Hope and Change
The youngest cohort of voters is ‘hopemaxxing’ politics.
THE KIDS ARE NOT ALL RIGHT, or so they say. For years, the prevailing narrative about young adults has been that their mental health is in the dumps. Social media and short-form video collapsed their attention spans. Algorithms sorted girls and boys into different chambers of the internet, resulting in a clearly defined gap in how young men and women view the world—and their futures. The political landscape (dominated by President Donald Trump since they’ve been old enough to pay attention to it) is bleak, if not outright toxic. And now, as AI disrupts school and work, economic stability for Gen Z-ers feels like a pipe dream.
A Gallup study from February shows that American optimism is at an all-time low. When things in general seem so bad, it can feel inauthentic or out of touch to be hopeful. So, Gen Z adopted a jaded and ironic sense of humor to cope. The hope-and-change optimism that galvanized Millennials before them was hard to comprehend, so cynicism ruled the day.
Not anymore.
Lately, after years of hearing how anxious and lonely Gen Z-ers feel, I’m starting to detect a shift in my listening sessions with young adults. There’s a growing sense that the doom and gloom have gone on too long. There’s a desire for things to get better. And there’s a hope that politicians might just be able to help us get there. My focus group participants are recruited using non-probabilistic sampling, so they aren’t necessarily representative of their generation as a whole. But take it from someone who has studied Gen Z public opinion in depth: The vibe shift is real.
Gen Z is taking a lesson from Millennials: They’re hopemaxxing.
“After twelve years of Trump where it’s always fighting and it’s always resistance, it’s always things being super escalatory, [I’m looking for] someone that’s more of a unifier, someone who’s more of just optimism, a happy warrior, is going to be really refreshing,” a 20-year-old man in New York told me in a recent listening session. “Someone who’s a Mister Rogers in politics. That doesn’t mean that you need to necessarily be weak or acquiesce, but someone that has a bit more hope and joy to them. I think it would just be refreshing.”
Kamala Harris, whose whole presidential campaign theme was “joy” and yet underperformed with the youngest cohort of voters, must be seething. Or perhaps, as the saying goes, she wasn’t wrong—just early. Lately, Gen Z is turning to optimism—more so out of necessity than anything else. After growing up awash in toxic politics, being earnest is now considered countercultural.
Some of the Gen Z-ers I spoke with dated the start of this shift in attitude to the rise last year of “Millennial optimism,” a TikTok trend rooted in nostalgia for the 2010s and the Obama era.
The oldest Gen Z-ers, part of what I call Gen Z 1.0 (i.e., those ages 29–23), were just 11-year-olds when Obama was first elected; the youngest in Gen Z 2.0 (those roughly 22–14) weren’t even born yet. To a generation whose coming of age was shaped by the Trump era and the COVID pandemic it seems like the Obama years were the last time things felt calm in America—politically speaking, at least.
But hopemaxxing isn’t just about nostalgia for a time most of Gen Z doesn’t personally remember—it’s a coping mechanism to deal with the present. Fed up with a combative style of politics that has gotten totally out of hand, young adults are now looking for Americans to come together.
“[What] I definitely want to see is just less polarization. I feel like that is literally the root of most if not all of the problems that we see in politics,” said a 19-year-old man in Baltimore. “It promotes hostility, and that hostility is not what a government needs. That’s not what we need our country to be running off of. I think if we could get that in order, we’d be going in the right direction.”
It’s no wonder politicians who campaign in this style—and who are Millennials—are having a moment, too. You can see it in the rise of politicians like New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani, 34, and Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, 36. (Both candidates were boosted by young voters.)
“He had a great personality. He was charismatic,” an 18-year-old man from Arizona said about Mamdani, adding that the mayor proposed bold, forward-thinking solutions to current problems. This young man was even willing to admit that it was unrealistic to expect all of Mamdani’s policies to work out. But he was enticed by the mayor’s willingness to think unconventionally and big.
“You heard his opposition saying, ‘You know, these grocery prices, freezing the rent, it’s not going to work,’” said the Arizonan. “But he’s saying, ‘I’m going to make it work, and we can talk about it after I get elected.’ People were saying that’s better.”
Asked what she’s looking for from politicians these days, a 23-year-old in Pennsylvanian said “more humanization.” She said that when politicians are developing policy, they need to be thinking about the “normal average everyday person, and how does that really translate to real-life policy and how does that benefit everyday people?”
Meanwhile, a 21-year-old in D.C. said she’s looking for a good role model. “I would want to vote for someone that I would trust with, like, my younger sibling,” she said.
For the 20-year-old New Yorker, it wasn’t just about responsibility and trust. It was about hope: “If you can promise me a better tomorrow I think that’s the biggest thing. If you don’t tell me, ‘Everything sucks right now, everything is going to hell,’ but if you say ‘No, things can get better, here’s how it gets better,’ that vision is what I’m going to enjoy. If you come from a position of strength and you’re saying how we’re going to get stronger and how we’re going to get healthier, that would really speak to me.”
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