At Thanksgiving last year, a great-aunt tried to offer Kayla Cornett a reassuring example: Her older cousin had worked hard, saved and bought a house. Cornett, 24, could do the same, she said — if she tried just a little bit harder.
What stayed with her long after the turkey was cleared was the implication that her current efforts just weren’t enough. She was trying to keep up with rent and the ordinary expenses of adulthood, and it was a struggle. She recently started carrying a credit-card balance for the first time, she says, after even modest costs began piling up. Filling her gas tank was $40. “I can not eat, or I can have credit card debt,” she remembers thinking when older relatives questioned her balance.
Cornett and her partner have stayed in their Raleigh apartment even as the complex has grown less safe and cars have been broken into. They had moved in 2023 and were reluctant to do so again; other places now cost $200 or $300 more per month. Leaving would mean trading one worry for another bill they can’t afford.
“The little things are accruing in a way that feels insurmountable to me,” Cornett says.
The affordability crisis is a struggle felt by everyone in the country, but it’s hitting Cornett’s generation particularly hard as they emerge into adulthood with high inflation, little savings, a wobbly job market and a lifetime of dysfunctional politics. Transunion, a consumer credit reporting agency, found in a 2024 study that 22- to 24-year-olds in Gen Z had higher average credit-card balances, higher average auto-loan balances and higher average personal-loan balances than millennials of the same age a decade earlier, even when adjusted for inflation. Gen Z borrowers also had higher delinquency rates than their millennial counterparts.
This gap — between the promise that hard work will bring stability and the costs young adults say they can’t get ahead of — is key to understanding the politics of Gen Z, a voter group that helped President Donald Trump win in 2024, but whose longtime loyalties have yet to be won by either party.
After Trump’s victory, much was made of a vibe shift in American politics. The manosphere was ascendant and tradwives were everywhere. For a brief moment, it seemed like conservatives had captured the attention of American youth. Perhaps. Or perhaps Trump pulled in young voters because of his promises to rein in high prices, and since he failed to do so — amid his tariffs and his war with Iran — young people are preparing to reject the GOP in droves in the midterms.
Gen Z’s political behavior is often viewed through the lens of cultural issues or internet trends. But based on a dozen interviews with Gen Zers from across the country, those explanations obscure a more fundamental force: They belong to a generation coming of age with less financial security and with a growing sense that the American economy doesn’t deliver, at least not for them. A crushing debt load is the most tangible proof.
“The first time I voted was the 2024 presidential election,” says Anna Yi, a 21-year-old Democrat studying at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. “I remember being a little bit naive and being like, ‘There’s going to be a lot of change. There’s going to be a lot of sweeping social reform and whatnot.’ Now it’s: Who’s going to get me a job? Who’s going to let me afford my own place before I turn 40?”
