Taylor Schlitz: Want the Gen Z vote? Make adult life affordable.

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My phone buzzed three times in one afternoon. Rent due. Loan autopay confirmed. A friend texting that she was driving back to Alabama because every short-term apartment fell through. Alone, each alert was ordinary. Together, they read like the weather.

The temperature in Gen Z life is set by prices, bills and whether a door to decent work opens when we push. That is why the story of young voters is not a wave or a flip. It is a thermostat.

Plenty of people are reading our votes from the recent election like tea leaves. After showing stronger support for Trump in 2024 compared to the previous presidential election, many young voters this past November also backed democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York City and the Democratic gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey. Some say it is newfound idealism, others say it is a revolt against institutions. The truth is in the ledger, not the legend.

Where campaigns produced receipts on affordability and real routes into careers through college and apprenticeships, youth turnout and margins climbed. Where leaders offered abstractions, the room cooled. As Alberto Medina from the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University told me, “Young people are very much issue-based voters. That is what motivates them and drives them to the polls. They are not candidate or party loyalists. It is about how a campaign speaks to the issues and shows a path for their lives to get better.”

We did not become conservatives in 2024 and then progressives in 2025. We looked for leaders who could lower the cost of becoming an adult. In New York City, young voters heard full sentences about rent, groceries and transit, and they turned up the temperature for a candidate who spoke to those needs. In Virginia and New Jersey, concrete plans met real organizing, and the needle moved the same way. This is not fickleness. It is discernment.

As pollster John Della Volpe put it on election night, Gen Z remains the most progressive generation, but young men today are the most politically fluid.

Medina added that issue priorities help explain the divide. “Young women are more likely to prioritize abortion and health care. Young men more often prioritize the economy and immigration,” he said.

Call it cynicism if you want. I call it contact with reality. Our cohort came of age through overlapping shocks (school shootings, for example), then walked into an economy that made basic milestones feel exotic. The price of a first apartment. The price of a first car repair. The price of a first health plan. For many, the first job that actually used our skills never arrived, or arrived in a form that could too easily vanish with one email.

Talk to young men without a four-year degree and you hear something simple. Respect looks like a shift schedule that matches the bus. Respect looks like a credential that leads to a salary ladder, not a dead end. Respect looks like a starter home zone where a starter home can in fact be built.

If you want to understand the youth vote in 2025, start there. Where leaders paired a broken-system diagnosis with proof, young people moved. Receipts are not slogans. They are rent plans that show their math. Safe public transit that runs when shifts end. University and community college programs that place students into paid apprenticeships and internships on the way to degrees. Child care slots that open because someone funded them.

Place matters. Minneapolis just recorded the highest municipal turnout on record with its hotly contested mayoral race. That is not an accident. It shows the thermostat is set close to home. Even without the oxygen of a presidential year, people show up when the stakes are felt on their block.

So here is my ask to politicians who want to keep young Minnesotans engaged through 2026. State the real costs of becoming an adult, then show exactly how your policies lower them. Defend democracy in the abstract and you will get nods. Cut a bill by $50 a month and you will feel the room warm. Promise respect, then build the pipeline that delivers it. Pair the message with the messenger we trust most, which is a peer who can say, “This is how I did it.”

We also need to tell the truth about disillusionment without romanticizing it. Distrust of institutions is not love for strongmen. It is a demand for competence. It is a plea to connect the dots between a grocery receipt and the meeting where a rule was written. The most powerful sentence a candidate can say to a young voter might be the least glamorous. Here is what changed. Here is how many people it helped. Here is the next line item.

If you want a picture of Gen Z politics, imagine a group chat at midnight. We trade links and cost-cutting ideas. We compare an elected official’s claims to the price of food in our zip code. We decide together whether anyone earns another hour of our time. That is not apathy. It is accountability.