According to the latest polling data highlighted on CNN, President Donald Trump's support among Gen Z voters has fallen considerably—a remarkable shift in public opinion from a cohort whose support proved crucial to his 2024 election win.
Trump's 2024 campaign received a massive boost thanks to the efforts of Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist who was assassinated in September. Kirk galvanized the youth vote but those gains have not held steady since Trump entered office.
According to CNN's lead data analyst Harry Enten, Trump's approval has since “fallen off a cliff” with Gen Z—not great news at a time when the president is facing widespread condemnation for his immigration crackdown, an ICE agent's murder of mother Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, and the recent invasion of Venezuela.
Enten said:
“[Trump] has just fallen off a cliff when it comes to Generation Z. Donald Trump’s net approval in February of 2025 was at +10 points."
"That is a drop of 42 points to -32 points on a net approval rating amongst Generation Z. My goodness gracious. This, as I said, is a very swingy group and it has swung very much away from Donald John Trump.”
Enten said the electorate has trended toward Democrats overall, with the shift most pronounced among Gen Z voters:
“That was, in fact, the largest shift – considerably more so than any other group. Yes, there was a shift in the overall electorate, but this, more than double the shift that we saw among the electorate at large, toward the Democratic Party.”
You can hear what he said in the video below.
Many weren't surprised.
Indeed, Trump was polling strongly with younger voters just weeks after returning to the White House for a second term, posting a net approval rating of +10 points among that group, according to a CBS News/YouGov poll conducted Feb. 5–7, 2025, among 2,175 U.S. adults.
The survey was weighted by gender, age, race, education and 2024 presidential vote to reflect national Census benchmarks and carried a margin of error of ±2.5 points.
That support has since evaporated. In a separate CBS News/YouGov poll conducted Jan. 5–7 of this year among 2,325 adults, Trump’s net approval rating among young voters had plunged to –32 points, a collapse of more than 40 points. The later survey had a margin of error of ±2.4 points.
Overall, an AP-NORC poll conducted in December 2025 of 1,146 adults, with a margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points, found that 67% of Americans across all age groups disapproved of Trump’s handling of the economy, while just 31% approved.
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