The 2024 election offered an early glimpse of a growing gender divide within Gen Z. Exit polls from the past three presidential contests show that while Donald Trump made modest gains among young voters overall, those increases were driven almost entirely by men. Among voters under 30, roughly half of young men supported Trump in 2024, compared with about a third of women. That 16-point is the widest within this age group over the last decade, underscoring a distinct and emerging divide within the youngest generation of voters.
Recent polling reinforces the pattern seen in November. In a 2025 national survey of Gen Z adults, 47 percent of men ages 18–29 said they somewhat or strongly approved of Trump’s job performance, compared with just 26 percent of women. Similar disparities appear across key policy issues: young men were nearly twice as likely as young women to approve of Trump’s handling of border security, immigration, and inflation. Together, these differences suggest that the 2024 vote split reflected deeper divergences in political identity and values, not just one-time electoral choices. If anything, these divides appear to be deepening. As the 2026 midterms approach, new registration data hint that the gender gap among Gen Z voters is not only persistent but widening. The figure below illustrates changes in the gender balance among newly registered voters between 2021 and 2025, based on voter file snapshots from those years.
The population is narrowly focused on Gen-Z individuals who were not eligible to vote during the 2024 and 2020 elections, but became eligible right afterwards. Since registration data is merely a snapshot of an individual’s preference at the time of registration, focusing on this newly eligible subgroup, always a cleaner picture of registration intention over the last 12 months. Additionally, only 30 states have state-sourced voter registration data available. States not shown either do not require registration by party or lacked sufficient data in one of the two comparison years to calculate a reliable change.
For each state, the gender gap is defined as the difference between the share of female and male registrants within the democratic and republican party. Positive values indicate the gender share of party registrations is larger in 2025, than in 2021. The registration data reveals that the gender divide in party registration has expanded over the last five years. This growth is driven primarily by shifts within the Democratic Party, where women account for a larger proportion of newly registered voters. The Republican gender divide, by comparison, has shifted only slightly in some places, largely remaining unchanged. As a new generation of voters enter the electorate, these early gender-based divides may offer a preview of the political realignments that could define the midterms and, notably, beyond.