Is Gen Z All-In for Trump? One Young Influencer Thinks So.

Being an aging Boomer, the minds of the youths of today are a little baffling at times. My wife is a first-cohort Gen X'er, my kids are all of the Millennial generation, and my grandkids fall into Generation Z. And it is Generation Z that one influencer, a reputed buddy of Barron Trump, speaks of as leaning surprisingly right, politically. He claims that his Generation Z counterparts are swinging to support the Boomer (b. 1946) candidate Donald Trump.

Let's hope he's right.

Young Americans are voicing their opinions online following the Trump-Harris debate, and according to one Gen Z influencer, the future is not looking bright for Democrats.
"Gen Z is in this massive cycle of seeing these experts on these mainstream networks tell us what we should and shouldn't believe in. Telling us how awful Trump performed in the debate. But that's not what we saw," Bo Loudon, a friend of Barron Trump, revealed during an appearance on "Mornings with Maria."
"We saw Kamala Harris lie and gaslight us into what we should believe and attack the former president for being some horrible person, saying lie after lie and not get fact-checked to have two moderators pinned against Trump. That's what we saw," Loudon continued.

Bo Loudon is, of course, correct here, as anyone with eyes to see would agree. The debate was a disgrace to the vocation of journalism, and ABC should be ashamed to have taken part in it. But there's more to swaying an entire generation than just one bad debate. Loudon has more examples - but are they enough?

We saw an incredible performance from Donald Trump listing out his policy, telling us what he's going to do, his great actions against the terrible border. And Kamala Harris telling us all about what she'll do for the border. But she's had that opportunity since 2021, and she hasn't done a thing.

There's a reason Winston Churchill (apocryphally) was reputed to have said "If a man at 20 is not a liberal, he has no heart. If a man at 40 is not a conservative, he has no brain." Apocryphal the quote may be, but that doesn't make it any less true; younger people tend to lean left more than their older counterparts if we paint with an extremely broad brush. With age comes wisdom, after all, or so we should hope.

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But while stories like this are fun and make us hopeful, some words of caution are in order.

This is just one young man, and a buddy of Barron Trump at that, which certainly can't hurt the width of the social media net he casts. Speaking of that net, Bo Loudon apparently "influences" a legion of followers, or a couple of legions, if we can take his claim of 200,000 social media followers at face value. That's a significant bloc of young people, but it's not at all clear that they all 1) agree with him and 2) will go out and vote if they do; the younger voters, historically, have not turned out to vote in as high numbers as their elders.

While we can and should remain skeptical, let's hope that Bo Loudon can at least sway a few people. It's near-certain that the 2024 presidential election is going to be a nail-biter, and every vote will count.