Personal Politics

The two most visible student political groups at the University of Texas at Austin are also the most opposed.

“There's College Republicans, which is rah-rah Republicans, and there's College Democrats, which is rah-rah Democrats,” soon-to-be senior Carson Domey said. He gravitated towards neither and wondered how an in-between space could be so hard to come by among more than 40,000 undergraduates.

The 21-year-old eventually arrived at a solution, the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Life, a leadership development group that promotes “people instead of partisanship.” The “room for exchange of ideas” drew him in, Domey said, but the difficulty getting there explains his interest in a new insight from the Harvard Youth Poll, a semi-annual, national survey from the Institute of Politics (IOP) at the Harvard Kennedy School. This spring’s poll, released in April, offers a window into youth politics, including that only 34 percent of young people who identify as Independent or unaffiliated report a sense of belonging, compared to 51 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans. 

This latest iteration of the Harvard poll homes in on the impact of mental health in more ways than one. When it comes to today’s youngest — and most anxious and depressed — voters, the intersection of personal wellbeing and political formation is the object of growing concern. 

In 2000, the Harvard Youth Poll emerged after two undergraduates noticed a curious trend among their classmates: They seemed interested in public service but also appeared to prefer community service activities over more traditional political engagement. Was there something different, the students wondered, about their generation’s relationship with politics?  

To find out, they approached John Della Volpe, then-president of an opinion research firm with ties to the IOP, to help design and conduct a survey of their peers’ political attitudes and activities.

Fifty polls later, the project has stayed true to its original mission, although the form changes every time. Della Volpe, now director of polling at the IOP, said the different questions season-to-season reflect “each cohort’s unique views” and how “they’re interested in understanding perspectives of their generation.”

While the poll’s founders delved into trends in political engagement, the students of 2025 probed more personal categories. In addition to views on federal leadership, DEI initiatives, and foreign policy, this spring’s survey inquires about social connections, financial stress, and life goals.

One of the resounding themes this time is, as Carson Domey pointed out, feelings of belonging. Among its major findings, the final report highlights that fewer than half of respondents say they feel a sense of community, and only 17 percent feel “deeply connected” to a community.

From there, the survey correlates sense of belonging and civic engagement. Forty percent of those who report feeling “deeply connected” to a community say they consider themselves politically engaged, compared to 14 percent of those without a strong sense of belonging.

To Domey, the struggle for belonging among young Independents seems to reflect the impact of polarization on Gen Z and the longing for community and the pressure to identify with a party as a result. Party affiliation, from his standpoint, may have as much to do with political theory as want of personal connection. 

The Covid-19 pandemic certainly didn’t help these feelings of disconnect. One in five respondents to the Harvard poll indicate they became more socially isolated during the 2020 lockdown, and these people are in turn more likely to be dealing with symptoms of depression now — five years later.

Those at major transition points, either starting high school or college, during the initial quarantine are most likely to report a lasting negative impact on their social lives. They are now 19 and 23 years old, respectively. 

John Della Volpe said he is wary of the over-attribution of certain political trends among Gen Z to their experience during the pandemic. Yet the way that the emergency disrupted their lives is important, and all the more for being just one of many crises they’ve encountered so far.

For Della Volpe, the real eye opening moment on the weight so many young people carry came before the term “Covid-19” existed. He was conducting a focus group, not long after the 2016 mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla. that left 49 killed and 53 wounded. 

“The way you think about your taxes or your finances,” one student told him, “that's the way we think about living and dying every time we walk into a classroom.” 

Within around two years, the same young people read about, or perhaps witnessed, the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va. during which a car attack killed one and injured 35 others, including students from the University of Virginia; the mass shooting at a concert in Las Vegas, Nev. that killed 58; and the mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Fla. that killed 17 staff and students.

“This generation's not monolithic, and everyone's experience is different,” said Rachel Janfaza, a youth politics expert. “But across the board, it would be hard to say that their politics is not at least somewhat interwoven with the fact that they have grown up amid crisis, and it is taking a toll on their mental health.”

Overfamiliarity with catastrophe does seem to dovetail with another major finding of the Harvard survey: widespread disapproval and distrust in the government. Only 15 percent say they think the country is “heading in the right direction,” and 19 percent say they trust the federal government to do the right thing most or all the time.

This discontent does not discriminate by party. While Donald Trump’s approval rating is about the same (31 percent) as in 2017, approval of Democrats in Congress dropped from 42 to 23 percent.

Janfaza imagines young people have become suspicious that “adults, elected officials pretend to know what they're doing and have it all figured out.” Following the trials of the Covid-19 pandemic, she said, “the curtain has been peeled back.” 

“What I will definitely say is there is a mass feeling of uncertainty that’s on both sides of the aisle.” Domey said. 

Now that uncertainty seems to be affecting young people’s plans for the future. In what might be the most important finding for generations to come, less than half of the Harvard poll respondents rated having children as “important.”  

This trend may be the result of financial anxiety, with a quarter of respondents saying they are “barely getting by.” But Janfaza mentioned a conglomeration of factors: “Less stigmatization around not wanting to have kids, paired with rising cost of living, and fear about climate change, and just overall gloom and doom.”

Still, if frustrated, Gen Z-ers are not resigned. “They are showing up. They are saying they want to be involved,” Janfaza said. “Their lives are affected by these issues in their communities, and they are speaking up and out about it in a number of ways.”

To Domey, the Harvard poll feels like a call to help students cultivate new sources of much-needed certainty in their lives, whether through community or other senses of purpose.

“Like, how do we care for the whole person in college?” he said.