Gen Z Is Ready to Vote. Will Democracy Meet Them There?
by
Angela Valenzuela, Ph.D.
September 7, 2026
Happy Labor Day, everybody and happy to share this encouraging recent piece in The Hill on Gen Z and the 2026 midterms. Gen Zers—or “Zoomers”—matter deeply to me because they, together with younger Millennials, are the young people I teach in college. I do not experience them primarily as a demographic category or a voting bloc. I know them as students: thoughtful, worried about their futures, impatient with hypocrisy, sometimes cynical about politics, but also remarkably attentive to the world around them.
Just behind them is Gen Alpha, today's children and younger teenagers, the oldest of whom are now in their mid-teens. They, too, are watching. They are coming of age amid financial insecurity, political polarization, climate anxiety, war, attacks on public education, rapidly changing technologies, and an affordability crisis that they already understand through their own families. They may not yet be old enough to vote, but they are hardly oblivious to what is going on.
All of this is why the new polling on Gen Z caught my attention.
The Hill article reports that 31 percent of Gen Z voters who supported Donald Trump in 2024 now say they regret that vote, a higher share than among older generations. Trump's approval among Gen Z stood at only 33 percent.
But the finding I find more interesting is that 40 percent of Gen Z respondents describe politics as “very important” to their personal identity—the highest percentage of any generation surveyed (Feldstein et al., 2026; Smedley & Hamberg, 2026).
Navigator Research aptly titled its report Anything But Apathy. That strikes me as exactly right. Gen Z may be frustrated with politics, but frustration should not be confused with disengagement. These young adults appear to be watching closely, assessing what political leaders promised against what has actually happened, and making judgments accordingly.
Nor do they appear ready to give either political party their unconditional allegiance. Nor should they. This alliegance must be earned by those running for office.
Navigator found considerable dissatisfaction with Trump and pessimism about the economy, but that does not translate automatically into confidence in Democrats. Younger adults are disproportionately represented among what the researchers call “economic persuadables”—people unhappy with Trump's handling of the economy who nevertheless remain unconvinced that Democrats would do better (Smedley & Hamberg, 2026).
Again, I find something encouraging in this.
Young people ought to question what they inherit from us. They should notice when rhetoric and reality do not match. They should be free to change their minds about a candidate or a party without being accused of inconsistency. A vote cast at 18, 20, or 25 should not become a lifetime political identity simply because it was one's first choice.
There is such a thing as political learning.
It happens when experience complicates what we thought we knew. It happens when the consequences of policy show up in rent, grocery bills, tuition, wages, health care, or one's ability to imagine owning a home someday. And sometimes it happens when a voter looks at the person they supported and decides, This is not what I thought I was voting for.
There is another reason to pay attention to Gen Z in 2026. A survey cited by The Hill, conducted by URGE and HIT Strategies, found that 93 percent of the young people surveyed said they would “certainly” or “probably” vote in the midterm elections. Intentions do not always become votes, of course, and youth turnout has historically lagged behind that of older Americans. But nearly 49 million young people ages 18 to 29 will be eligible to vote this November. CIRCLE estimates that roughly 8.5 million of them have entered the electorate since the 2024 presidential election (Stetkiewicz & Searles, 2026).
That is a remarkable amount of potential political power.
Nearly half of these eligible young voters are young people of color, including approximately 10.8 million Latino youth and 6.6 million Black youth. For someone who has spent a career thinking about education, race, citizenship, and inequality, these numbers are difficult to regard as merely electoral statistics. They represent a generation increasingly capable of affecting who governs and, potentially, what government is expected to do.
This is where my optimism about Gen Z collides with something happening right now in Texas.
It would be remiss of me not to mention Tarrant County.
The significance of Tarrant County to this story lies in the convergence of population growth, demographic change, political competitiveness, and access to the ballot. More than two million people live there, and some 1.3 million are registered to vote.
For decades, Tarrant County was considered reliably Republican. That description fits less comfortably today. Democratic candidates have made significant gains there, and Democrat Taylor Rehmet's striking special-election victory earlier this year in a state Senate district in northern Tarrant County only added to the sense that this once-predictable Republican stronghold has become genuinely competitive (Lenzen, 2026).
Against that backdrop, what happened on September 1 deserves attention well beyond North Texas.
By a 3–2 vote along party lines, the Tarrant County Commissioners Court approved an Election Day plan containing 224 polling sites. During the 2022 midterms, the county had 316. In other words, a growing county with 1.3 million registered voters will go into this November's election with 92 fewer Election Day polling locations—nearly a 30 percent reduction. Early-voting locations will decline as well, from 50 to 47 (Armas & Jenkins, 2026; Lenzen, 2026).
County Judge Tim O'Hare and Commissioners Matt Krause and Manny
There are competing accounts of what these cuts mean, and it is important to represent them accurately. Elections Administrator Clint Ludwig has described the reductions in terms of efficiency, site availability, statutory requirements, and accessibility issues. O'Hare has argued that the county will still provide sufficient opportunities to vote and that the plan exceeds statutory requirements. Some poll workers have also pointed to historically lower turnout in midterm elections (Armas & Jenkins, 2026).
Opponents see something quite different. Voting-rights advocates, Democratic commissioners, students, and many residents have called the reductions voter suppression, warning that fewer voting locations will mean longer travel, greater inconvenience, confusion, and additional burdens that will not be experienced equally across the county.
And there is an obvious tension here that deserves to be stated plainly. CBS Texas reported that O'Hare himself said higher voter turnout is expected in the upcoming election (Armas & Jenkins, 2026).
So why would a county anticipating higher turnout provide nearly one-third fewer Election Day polling places than it did during the last midterm election?
That is not an accusation of hidden motive. It is a legitimate public-policy question.
The locations at issue also matter. The University of Texas at Arlington's Maverick Activity Center will no longer serve as an Election Day polling place, and efforts to restore voting sites at UTA and Tarrant County College campuses were defeated 3–2. Residents have also expressed concerns about the loss of sites serving Black and Brown neighborhoods.
This is where Tarrant County connects directly to the Gen Z story for me.
A university polling site is more than a dot on an election administrator's map. For a student who may be voting in their first election, the difference between walking across campus after class and figuring out transportation to an unfamiliar off-campus site can matter. So can a work shift, an evening seminar, childcare responsibilities, not owning a car, or simply not knowing the geography of a county where one recently moved to attend college.
None of these obstacles formally takes away a person's right to vote. That is precisely why voting access needs to be understood in more than formal terms. A right can remain intact on paper while becoming considerably more burdensome to exercise.
And those burdens do not fall evenly.
CIRCLE's research is especially relevant here (Stetkiewicz & Searles, 2026). Young voters without college experience already participate at lower rates than their college-going counterparts, and Black and Latino youth have historically voted at lower rates than white youth. Nearly half of the 2026 youth electorate consists of young people of color.
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| Source: CIRCLE |
The practical architecture of voting—where sites are placed, how easy they are to reach, how much information young voters receive—therefore has equity consequences.
The intensity of the public response in Tarrant County tells us that residents understand what is at stake. More than 100 people addressed the Commissioners Court before the September 1 vote, most of them opposing the cuts, and representatives of some 30 civic groups rallied outside the courthouse. The meeting lasted more than eight hours. After the vote, people in the audience chanted “shame” (Lenzen, 2026).
One voice I particularly hope people will hear is that of Tarrant County resident Laney Hawes, who joined Jacob Soboroff on MS NOW following the commissioners' decision.
The title of the segment captures her urgency: “‘PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND’: Tarrant County voter after removal of 92 polling sites.” Hawes' larger point was that people outside Tarrant County should not assume this is someone else's problem (MS NOW, 2026).
I think she is right.
The issue before us is bigger than whether one agrees with the political choices Gen Z made in 2024—or which choices young voters make in 2026. Democracy is not meaningful only when citizens vote the way we hope they will.
For educators especially, there is an obligation here that I find difficult to escape. We spend years telling young people that their voices matter. We teach them about citizenship, civil rights, the Constitution, social movements, elections, and the responsibilities accompanying life in a democracy. We encourage them to become informed, question authority, debate ideas, participate in their communities, and vote.
When they decide to take us seriously, the answer cannot be to make participation harder.
That is what worries me about the juxtaposition between these two stories. On one side is a generation that may be becoming more politically engaged than many people realize. Young adults are reconsidering previous choices, questioning both political parties, worrying about affordability and their economic futures, and showing signs that they may turn out in significant numbers this November.
On the other side, in one of the largest and most politically competitive counties in Texas, voters will find substantially fewer places to cast an Election Day ballot than they had four years ago.
Perhaps what we should be talking about is the troubling contradiction between urging young people to participate in democracy and simultaneously making that participation more difficult.
I remain hopeful about Gen Z—not because I expect young people to think as I do or vote as I might wish, but because I see questioning itself as a democratic virtue. They are watching us. They are watching what institutions do, not simply what leaders say. They are discovering that politics has consequences, and some are reconsidering assumptions formed only a few years ago.
Gen Alpha is watching, too.
What these generations eventually conclude about democracy will depend partly on what they see us doing with it.
If we tell them their voices matter, we should make sure there is a ballot box waiting when they arrive.
References
Armas, M., & Jenkins, S. E. (2026, September 1). Tarrant County commissioners vote to cut election polling sites, CBS Texas. https://www.channel3000.com/news/national-and-world-news/tarrant-county-commissioners-vote-to-cut-election-polling-sites/article_38d3ae73-e40c-5295-bb41-1ba1849f77ba.html
Feldstein, J., Leibowitz, C., & Walker, A. (2026, August 28). Gen Z regrets Trump support and is midterm motivated. The Hill. https://thehill.com/homenews/6056216-gen-z-trump-voter-regret-midterm-clipping/
Lenzen, C. (2026, September 1). Tarrant County removes 92 polling sites ahead of November election, The Texas Tribune. https://www.texastribune.org/2026/09/01/tarrant-county-removes-polling-sites/
MS NOW. (2026, September 6). ‘PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF THE SAND’: Tarrant County voter after removal of 92 polling sites [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=552dYGlCoEQ
Smedley, A., & Hamberg, T. (2026, August 25). Anything but apathy: Young Americans digest and dissect politics differently. Navigator Research. https://navigatorresearch.org/anything-but-apathy-young-americans-digest-and-dissect-politics-differently/
Stetkiewicz, S., & Searles, S. (2026, May 20). 49 million young people will be eligible to vote in the 2026 midterms. Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/49-million-young-people-will-be-eligible-vote-2026-midterms
