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Some Republicans Want to Raise Voting Age to Thwart Gen Z
“This new generation is totally brainwashed,” a Fox News commentator complained.
www.thedailybeast.com
Tuesday’s midterm election saw Gen Z come out strong for Democrats, including for their generation’s first U.S. representative: Maxwell Frost, a 25-year-old Democrat from Florida. The young blue bloc left Fox News personalities dismayed, with other conservative voices suggesting that the minimum voting age be raised from 18 (currently enshrined in the Constitution) to 21 or 28.
“The fact that these youth voters are coming in so strong in an off-year is very concerning,” Fox News commentator Jesse Watters lamented on Wednesday night. “It looks like they’ve been brainwashed. This new generation is totally brainwashed ‘cause a lot of these single women [who] vote 37 spreads for Democrats, are teaching all of our younger generation in these schools and they’re polluting their minds and then they grow up and they’re in their twenties and then they vote for leftists.”
Exit polling shows strong youth support for Democrats, typically on issues like climate change, reproductive rights, and guns. Voters aged 18-24 (all of whom fall into Gen Z) voted 61 percent for Democrats, while the 25-29 age group, some of whom are Gen Z, voted 65 percent blue, exit polls show.
Other conservative voices were less rosy on winning the youth vote. In a now-viral series of tweets, anti-Muslim activist Brigitte Gabriel suggested barring America’s youngest voters from the polls.
“Raise the voting age to 21,” Gabriel tweeted, immediately after noting that “We were promised a red wave and we got a red puddle.”
She went on to tweet that “Generation Z thinks doing drugs in the street should be legal. Generation Z also thinks speech that offends them should be illegal.”
Though Gabriel didn’t specify which drugs, a Gallup poll last year found that 68 percent of Americans (including 50 percent of Republicans) support legalizing marijuana. And despite a strong push by Republican legislatures to ban educational material about race and gender issues, Gen Z students overwhelmingly favor strong free speech rights, 2022 polling shows.