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There’s been plenty of attention on Gen Z voters since they swung right in 2024, but apparently assumptions were a little too premature, says Gen Z culture analyst Rachel Janfaza. They’re not the “red-pilled MAGA hardliners” they were sold to be.

“In 2020, as Gen Z voters came of age, the culture war was at its peak and it felt like every candidate, race and issue was a reflection of our values,” wrote Janfaza. “But today, young voters’ concerns are more material and far less ideological. There’s a common set of issues unifying Gen Zers across the political spectrum: the cost of living, inflation, AI, war, corruption.”

To get a sense of how young voters — including 8.5 million potential first-time voters — are feeling about the 2026 midterm elections, Janfaza and company spoke to them in a series of focus groups. And what interviews with 70 young people aged 17 to 33 in 28 states and Washington D.C. revealed was that they were not MAGA’s future as earlier reported.

“They care a lot less about being woke and a lot more about being able to get a job and pay their rent — let alone buy a home. And they’re looking for candidates who get that,” said Janfaza. “Gen Z voters really just want their politicians to be good, honest people, who work hard for their community and country. That means tackling the cost of living, working on government programs like SNAP and WIC, embracing social policies when it comes to healthcare, jobs, education, and regulating AI. It’s not that complicated. And it’s party agnostic.”

The generation doesn’t identify easily with the two political parties, but they certainly don’t identify with MAGA. In fact, according to interviews, when young voters support socialist candidates or say they favor socialism writ large, it’s really because they feel the status quo isn’t working.

“Life feels totally unaffordable, but young people believe that it doesn’t have to be this way. They want the government to provide Americans with a social safety net and endorse policies like universal or at least affordable health care, affordable housing, a higher minimum wage, affordable education, paid family leave, taxes on corporations, etc.,” Janfaza said.

And unlike other movements rotted in the past or worse, Gen Z appears to have “a hunger for forward looking policies.”

Call it “Hopemaxxing,” said Janfaza, but it means Gen Z wants to hear what a candidate’s plan is to fix the status quo, rather than preserve it. And don’t bother coming at them with the intent to “just blame the other side,” they say. This generation is “looking for candidates to inspire.”

Want to know how New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani cut inroads with the generation? He talked “pothole politics,” complete with on-the-ground repair policies for infrastructure and other endeavors.

And while MAGA isn’t about to benefit from this particular state of mind, Janfaza said Democrats shouldn’t rest easy on their laurels either. This is a results-minded generation.

“How people vote in the midterms will be all about the cost of living, but if young people don’t believe that any of the candidates can make a difference, they may not even show up,” she said.

The MAGA base that helped build Republican power in the U.S. for the past decade appears to be showing signs of rupture, according to new surveys from UMassAmherst.

The survey, conducted Aug. 21-26, has found a 9-percentage point drop among Republicans who identify with the MAGA movement since the last survey was conducted in March, reported the university, representing an extreme drop for such a short window of time. The most significant drop — 6 percentage points — was among those who reported only to be ‘somewhat’ identified as MAGA, but even those who ‘very much’ identified as MAGA fell 3 percentage points, according to surveys.

"We find a decline in the number of Republicans identifying as MAGA, suggesting cracks in the movement’s foundation," said Tatishe Nteta, director of UMass Poll.

MAGA is the name for President Donald Trump’s most loyal adherents who form the floor of approval keeping the president’s approval in the mid-thirties in national polls. So the polling revelation comes at an ill time amid the Republican Party's midterm convention underway this week in Dallas.

In any case, conservative analysts warn that the Republican Party is in trouble if they’re relying on Trump’s loyal MAGA cavalry to save them from angry voters this year.

“There’s no question the president is uniquely motivating for MAGA voters, but MAGA voters aren’t sufficient to win in swing districts or states,” Republican pollster Whit Ayres told the Wall Street Journal, adding that even “nationalizing an election does not make sense when the president is at 38 percent job approval.”

But Republican strategists are banking on the Dallas convention to “help the GOP by increasing turnout among Republican voters who have so far this cycle been less likely to say they’ll come out this November.” Only problem is, polling aggregates suggest a convention with Trump in it doesn’t appear to be stirring low-interest GOP voters to show up for the midterms.

Plus, if the high-interest MAGA contingent of the Republican Party is also shrinking, according to surveys, it could spell even more trouble for ailing Republicans this year.

The Amherst poll also found that the Republicans who were still most likely to identify as MAGA were those who attained a high school degree or less, or those making less than $40,000 a year. It was also liable to contain those over the age of 55. But among moderate Republicans, there was a nearly even split, with 51 percent identifying as MAGA and 49 percent not. Only 16 percent of moderates said they were “very much” MAGA, according to surveys.

In an additional twist, the same survey discovered that policies associated with democratic socialism have "considerably broader appeal than the DSA label itself."

Conservative columnist Nick Catoggio makes no bones about what President Donald Trump is doing to the once proud and policy-driven Republican Party — only now he says there doesn’t appear to be an end to the depth Trump has dragged it.

“Americans have stopped taking the president seriously about pretty much everything,” Catoggio told the Dispatch, referring to a poll published Thursday revealing that “trust in information from the federal government has declined since 2024, across issues ranging from the economy and health care to elections and politics.”

“Already dismally small when Trump returned to office last year, the share of people who say they have ‘a great deal’ or ‘quite a bit’ of confidence in what the feds tell them has since collapsed,” Catoggio said. In fact just 18 percent of respondents now say they have significant faith in what the government is telling them about inflation and the cost of living. And that, warned Catoggio, is the “largest share that expressed such confidence across any of the issues tested.”

“The bill has come due for 20 months of insultingly empty happy talk about tariffs as the key to prosperity and the war being over ‘soon,’” Catoggio said. “Trump is an unserious leader, and everyone whose livelihood and/or emotional well-being doesn’t depend on arguing otherwise now recognizes it.”

And Trump has done nothing for voter confidence in either the White House or political parties when he purported “to play Santa with taxpayer money,” by promising a “$5,000 bribe” if U.S. voters opt to keep the House and Senate in the hands of Republicans in November. It’s a promise that no one beyond “right-wing media types is taking … seriously,’ said Catoggio, and only then “out of obligation.”

Meanwhile the Dow and S&P 500 are revealing their own confidence in Trump by opening “down this morning despite the head of state dangling a $1.3 trillion cash stimulus for the economy on national television.”

Bondholders are also “blasé about the market,” he said and they are treating most of Trump’s claims as an “empty campaign promise.” It’s also reacting realistically to Trump’s mounting national debt.

This may explain why Trump is already laying the groundwork for massive losses in November, said Catoggio, even going so far as to scramble some of his endorsements.

“Trump was warned that endorsing the lavishly corrupt [senatorial candidate Ken] Paxton over incumbent John Cornyn would put Texas in play and potentially cost the GOP the Senate. He was also certainly warned that Paxton is a lazy campaigner and poor fundraiser whom the president would inevitably need to rescue financially with gobs of spending from his own super PAC,” said Catoggio.

“All of that has come to pass. If Paxton ends up fumbling away a gimme Senate seat in Texas, Trump will eat mountains of crow for having backed him over Cornyn. And so the new gag in his speeches is probably a preemptive attempt at disowning defeat: Alas, not even I could drag this slovenly gargoyle over the finish line,” is Catoggio’s argument.

President Donald Trump has lost the support of a former Montana governor who is not only a Republican, but used to chair the Republican National Committee.

"It's a classic bait and switch from Donald Trump," former Gov. Marc Racicot told CNN's Jake Tapper on Thursday. He was referring to Trump's promise to give $5,000 to every American adult if Republicans retain control of both houses of Congress in November. "Typical — full of holes, and frankly, impossible to accomplish without congressional approval. You're talking about $1.4 trillion being added to the deficit. Of course Congress is going to be involved, especially when you have a request from the administration for $1.4 trillion of additional defense spending."

He added, "They paid $1.4 trillion this year on the national debt. There's another trillion dollars of spending over appropriation levels. So they're spending money — he's spending money like a drunken sailor. And the fact of the matter is, I think it's going to be virtually impossible to bring about and see adopted by Congress. It's a bait and switch."

Racicot concluded, "He senses what's going on in the country, and as a consequence of that, he resorts to his typical prevarications — claiming at the very beginning of his discussion that the hall was full. Well, it wasn't full. There were hundreds, maybe thousands of seats that were empty. So the fact is, he'll make up what he has to say at the moment in time that it's necessary to say it. It's like carnival barking, and he's not the least bit concerned with what's true or untrue. If he told me that the sun was going to rise tomorrow, I'd wait till morning to make sure."

When Tapper asked Racicot about Trump's strategy of making the midterm elections an explicit referendum on himself, particularly at a midterms convention which was full of empty seats, Racicot characterized this as desperate.

"Frankly, I think everything he's done in the last 24 to 48 hours — and even preceding that — is a sign of desperation," Racicot told Tapper. "He senses his escape hatch has served him well over the course of time, and whatever he has to employ to accomplish that — whether it's untruths, half-truths, or no truths — he's going to put into the mix and tell people what they want to hear. So I think, frankly, he's desperate. And if the polls are any indication, and the public in America is seeing it turn as I have been watching it over the course of the last three to four years, I think the screw is turning, and they're going to be in some difficult times."

Trump's inability to break that despair was perhaps most evident on Wednesday night when he said that he had stopped America from being a "laughingstock," only to be met with a tepid response from the normally enthusiastic crowd. As Dr. Richard Wolff, professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts, told AlterNet earlier in September, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has gotten the advantage over the United States in the ongoing trade war that Trump started.

"It's not just Mr. Carney, he is the expression of something that he knows as a politician is now a very popular view in Canada," Wolff said to AlterNet. "He's not going to be held to blame because this or that difficulty happens. If he can show, as he often can, that the United States' hostility, tariff policy number one, is the root cause, then he gets a pass. The kind of anger that might often be addressed to a politician won't be, because they correctly perceive that the problem is something else. And so they appeal to the politician when he comes up with solutions or attempted solution to keep workers' needs in mind."

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After a week of trying to soften his own debt problems, President Donald Trump’s ploy to reduce inflation's impact has only intensified a selloff that pushed borrowing costs to multiyear highs, reports Bloomberg.

Trying to staunch the nation’s ballooning long-term borrowing costs, Trump’s Treasury Department on Thursday purchased $5.19 billion of debt maturing in 10 to 20 years. But market investors scrutinized the purchases, reports Bloomberg.

“That news took investors by surprise and temporarily helped long bonds rally, though they’ve since reversed those gains,” Bloomberg reported.

Investors and analysts saw the move as “a reflection of the Trump administration’s unease over the rise in long-term borrowing costs with weeks to go before the November congressional election,” said Bloomberg, and the rise in Treasury yields has “sent U.S. mortgage rates climbing to the highest level in more than a year.”

Worse, Thursday’s buyback resulted in disappointment among market participants, who then pushed U.S. yields even higher after the scheme was unloaded.

“Also pressured by oil prices and a deluge of fresh issuance, yields were up eight to 13 basis points across maturities — with much of the rise seen earlier in the New York trading session. The 30-year benchmark hit levels last seen in 2007, and the two-year note yield exceeded 4.5 percent for the first time since 2024,” Bloomberg reported.

Trump and his Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent are up against a market that is already pushing interest rates to painful new highs as the cost of the nation’s rising debt under Trump’s two presidential terms makes home, car and credit loans more costly. Reuters reports U.S. debt rose by $11.6 trillion during Trump's two terms in the White House, meaning Trump accounts for slightly more than 25 percent of the nation’s $40 trillion debt load.

Trump’s biographer Richard Wolff said the U.S. national debt is now “one of the many signs of an economy and of an empire that is now in decline. There is an enormous increase in defense spending, or now war spending, that is scheduled, and no comparable increase in revenue.”

Wolff said a global selloff of U.S. government bonds also meant increasing borrowing costs for everyday consumers. This concern may reflect the administration’s new buyback policy and a more activist style of US debt management that contrasts with the department’s long-held mantra of being “regular and predictable,” according to Bloomberg. But it appears the White House is willing to make unprecedented moves to deal with Trump’s bloating debt.

“It’s like Treasury created this monster that it now has to keep feeding,” said Steven Zeng, a strategist at Deutsche Bank AG.

If President Donald Trump and the Republican Party were hoping to stoke a fire under disenchanted Republicans this year, it isn’t working, according to analyst G. Elliot Morris.

“The president thinks he can activate lower-turnout voters who like his agenda. But polls show his former supporters oppose his key policies, and don’t think he’s focused on affordability,” reports Morris, citing an aggregate of polls showing moderate interest GOP voters not only being disenchanted with the midterm election but downright hostile to Trump’s policies.

Morris said Republican strategists are banking on the convention to “help the GOP by increasing turnout among Republican voters who have so far this cycle been less likely to say they’ll come out this November.”

But Morris said he has combined “all eight of this year’s monthly Strength In Numbers/Verasight polls into one mega-poll proving over 11,000 interviews with self-reported registered voters on everything from their most important issue. This includes state vote choice in the midterms, approval of Trump overall as well as a dozen issues. It also includes respondents’ demographics and reported vote choice in 2024, said Morris.

He added that his “mega-poll” provides a breakdown of how voters feel about the current administration’s performance on their most important issues according to who they voted for in 2024 and their stated likelihood to vote again this November.

“With this we can directly test the theory that low-turnout Republicans will be activated by more Trump,” said Morris—but he added: “This is unlikely.”

“According to our polling, voters who are less likely to turn out to vote are actually much less approving of Trump overall and on key issues,” said Morris, citing a graph showing reported Trump approval and disapproval overall on deportations, inflation, and health care by all respondents.

This is why Trump and the RNC’s mid-term Trump-O-Palooza in Dallas this week is likely going to fizzle when it comes to pushing so-so GOP voters to the polls. Elliot says Trump is not the draw the RNC might think he is, and this will likely translate in a November enthusiasm gap between the GOP and Democrats.

“The initial reviews of the Republicans’ midterm convention — codenamed “Trumpapalooza” — are in, and they are not pretty,” said Morris. “… If you’re puzzled by the logic of holding a national convention featuring a president with an approval rating of just 35 percent, you’re not alone.

The idea was actually Trump’s, reports Morris, quoting the president saying Wednesday night that “When I’m on the ticket, Republicans always do very well. We won the presidency three times we won. We won it big, and we also won everything else because whatever it is — people came and we won the Senate.”

A political activist group that has long supported President Donald Trump, the late Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA, is reportedly struggling with its identity as Christian nationalism has become an increasingly potent influence within its ranks.

"Jonah Scott became president of the University of Central Florida’s Turning Point chapter within months of arriving on campus in the fall of 2024, after previously founding a chapter at Seminole State College," reported The Dispatch's Eli Kronenberg on Thursday. "He said the chapter’s meetings in his first year took place in a small conference room that held 30 to 40 students, but after Kirk’s death, the chapter had to start booking the campus’s largest meeting room in order to accommodate more than 200 students."

Kronenberg added that "with a growth in attendance came a shift in tone. When Scott stood for reelection as president this spring, some new members sought to push the chapter in a different direction, and Scott lost." Scott told Kronenberg that "I think Turning Point became a lot more of a Christian organization since Charlie passed, and they wanted more Christian leadership. I myself am Jewish, so there was a lot of that. Though we did incorporate a lot of Christian stuff into the group, I think a lot of people wanted it to be a more explicitly Christian organization.”

A former chapter president also told Kronenberg that "Everything’s like, ‘Oh, God did this, God did this. If you don’t support us, you’re not a God-loving person.’ That kind of feels like the vibe. It feels like it’s more like Christian extremism now.”

Kronenberg added that "several students" who he spoke to echoed that critique. Additionally, as right-wing influencer Candace Owens spreads conspiracy theories about Kirk's death, the organization has fought radicalization from that angle too.

"Most chapters have taken a big-tent approach to discussions surrounding Owens’ criticism of Turning Point," Kronenberg wrote. "Van Lemay, a high school student who leads a Club America group at West Michigan Aviation Academy, said it was 'sickening' to hear lies about Turning Point leaders, but cited Kirk’s support for the free exchange of ideas as a reason to hear critics out in meetings. 'I think that it’s really good actually to bring these conversations into real life, because most of this is online rhetoric and kind of lives within social media,' Lemay told The Dispatch. 'When you have something completely online, that’s often when it gets spun to the more extreme.'"

He added, "Asked how he would encourage chapters to handle discussions surrounding Owens’ conspiracy theories, Kolvet pointed out that today’s high school and college students came of age during the COVID pandemic, which he said led to a collapse in trust of authority figures. 'I’m super sympathetic to young people that question … official narratives or information from government authorities,' Kolvet said. 'Yes, it’s okay to ask questions. It’s quite another thing to engage in warrantless, reckless character assassination of people who themselves are victims, in this case Erika Kirk.'"

Kirk was assassinated one year ago as of Thursday, a moment that galvanized a Christian nationalist movement that has already largely rallied behind Trump.

“The religious right has been ascendant during the second presidency of Donald Trump, and they’ve harnessed his disdain for rules and norms to blur the lines between church and state,” reported Vox's Christian Paz in May. “Inside the White House, the secretary of defense has framed the war in Iran and American military action abroad as sanctioned and guided by God. Outside the government, this alliance between church and state often skirts near the edge of outright idolatry. Conservative pastors are erecting golden statues of Trump (but insisting it does not mirror the infamous golden calf of the Old Testament). They’re extending their hands over the president in prayer after comparing him to Jesus and standing by him, with some mild criticism, after he cast himself as an AI-slop Messiah.”

Despite Christian nationalist claims, America was not founded as a Christian country.

President Thomas Jefferson, who also co-authored the Declaration of Independence, famously wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptists during his administration arguing that “believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”