The majority of Americans feel more politically connected to other people in their generation instead of people of the same race or sex, according to a CNN poll released Friday.
The poll found that almost 6 in 10 U.S. adults responded that they have “a lot” in common with other people of their generation. By comparison, less than half of Americans, 43%, said they felt politically connected to others of the same gender, and 39% said the same about other individuals of the same race, the survey shows.
“My generation is one of the first ones looking at an economy that will be worse for us than for our parents,” Gabriel, a 21-year-old college senior from California who participated in the survey said, CNN reported. “Affordability and home ownership and growing up during the pandemic and all those issues make what’s important to my generation probably very different than older ones.”
Moreover, respondents aged 65 and older were 10 points more likely than adults under the age of 35 to say that their generation is politically relevant to them, according to the poll. The survey also found that about 1 in 5 Americans said they felt politically connected across all three aforementioned categories – generation, gender and race – while 46% of respondents said that they felt politically connected to others across more than one of those demographics.
“Everyone identifies with a ton of different social groups at different times – throughout the day, even,” Samara Klar, a political scientist at the University of Arizona who studies political identity, told CNN.
The poll indicates that a slightly higher share of women thought gender was politically important than men did, 46% to 40%. Meanwhile, the majority of black Americans, 64%, along with 55% of Latino Americans said they had the same political concerns with others of the same race, compared to just 28% among white adults, the survey states.
A Yale Youth Poll released in April 2025 found that most college-aged Americans now favor the GOP more than they do the Democratic Party. Former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg publicly critiqued the Democratic Party in November 2025, claiming that members of his own party have “defined everything by identity,” The Texas Tribune reported.
Additionally, a Harvard Youth Poll released on Dec. 4 found that just 13% of young Americans feel that the U.S. is generally headed in the right direction, compared with 57% who said things in the nation are off on the wrong track and 28% were unsure.
The CNN poll was conducted by SSRS from Aug. 21 to Sept. 1, 2025 among a random sample of 2,077 U.S. adults, and was drawn from either a probability-based panel or a registration-based sample. The surveys were conducted online or by telephone with a live interviewer and results have a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points.
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