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Socialism and workers unite
Gen Z men were pivotal in electing President Trump in 2024. They made the difference, swinging hard toward Republicans. Now, less than two years later, significant numbers of them are flirting with socialism — and Republicans need to understand why before the midterms arrive.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, an avowed “Democratic Socialist,” carries a 58 percent approval rating — more than double his disapproval — after being elected in a landslide by Gen Z voters last fall. As many as eight Democratic Socialists of America members could win congressional seats this November. A recent Texas poll shows Democrat James Talarico leading Republican Ken Paxton in the Senate race by five points. Driving many of these factors are affordability and cost of living — listed by far as the top concern among voters.
That last detail is the key to understand. Gen Z isn’t turning to socialism because they’ve read Karl Marx and they’re convinced. They’re turning to it because they’re financially desperate and nobody else is speaking to that desperation in plain terms. Private college costs can top a hundred thousand dollars a year. Health insurance premiums for young couples now exceed what many of them pay in rent. Grocery prices are up thirty-three percent since 2019. Wages haven’t kept up with inflation since 2009. And young men are burying themselves in sports gambling debt at a rate that dwarfs what they spend on books, music, and movies combined.
The DSA platform is genuinely radical — it calls for abolishing the Presidency, the Senate, and the Supreme Court, emptying prisons, and imposing a race-based woke agenda under the banner of finishing Reconstruction. However, none of that has deterred young voters because no one else is offering them a credible alternative on the issues that are actually costing them sleep.
Mamdani’s government-run grocery store scheme will fail just like Chicago’s publicly subsidized Save A Lot stores, which are closing. Meanwhile the German-owned Aldi chain — private, efficient, driven by competition — sells groceries at thirty percent below market and just announced plans to expand to thirty-two hundred stores nationwide. That is the real answer. But Republicans have to say it loudly and mean it.
There is still time to put forward a new Contract with America built around what young people actually need, but that window is closing fast.
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