- 49% of Gen Z men identify as Republican, compared to 27% of Gen Z women.
- 51% of young Latter-day Saints who left from 2020-2024 identified as liberal.
- 71% of young conservative women are parents, compared to 40% of liberal women.
The gender divide among voters under 30 hit unprecedented levels in 2026, creating a chasm between young men and women that could impact religious affiliation in a moment when political polarization has reached the pews.
The share of young women ages 18-29 identifying as Democrat rose to 66% this year, surpassing the highs of 2020 and demonstrating a rebound from the Republican Party’s female gains in the 2024 presidential race.
Meanwhile, the percentage of young men belonging to Generation Z who identify as Democrat fell to 44%, according to the highly regarded National Public Opinion Reference Survey conducted annually by Pew Research.
To state it bluntly: The gender divide in youth political affiliation has exploded.
In 2020, the gap between young men and women identifying as Republican was 6 percentage points. Now it’s 22. Nearly half of Gen Z men identify as Republican — compared to just 27% of Gen Z women, the poll found.
Why Gen Z is divided
The political gulf separating young men and women is deeper than politics, according to Dan Cox, the director of the Survey Center on American Life and the author of a forthcoming book on Gen Z divides, “Generation Uncoupled.”
“It’s inextricably intertwined with culture,” Cox told the Deseret News.
A demographic shift of women becoming more college educated coincided with increased attention to issues like LGBTQ advocacy, transgender inclusion and abortion, with the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade.
At the same time, the GOP of President Donald Trump — including his personal treatment of women — has alienated young women who Cox said may feel like the freedoms their grandmothers fought for are being stripped away.
On top of this divergence in priorities is a tech environment that segregates the sexes.
“Instead of coming together and saying, ‘Wow, younger men and women have a lot of common problems,’ they’re sort of traveling down very different social media paths, or being exposed to a lot of different types of content,” Cox said.
The impact of politics on religion
The data shows Gen Z’s political split could soon crack congregations.
Partisan identity now trumps religious affiliation for many Americans. It is also one of the top predictors of individuals abandoning religious upbringing, including among members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Political ideology was one of the main factors associated with “deidentifying” with the church for members in their early 20s, researchers at Brigham Young University found in a recent paper on Latter-day Saint trends in retention.
Not feeling God’s presence in daily life, agreeing the church should accept same-sex marriage and feeling troubled by the church’s stance on political issues were found to notably predict retention in the church after four years.
Nearly 3-in-10 young members who felt strongly the church should accept same-sex marriage “deidentified.” The survey found this was not due to sexual orientation but because they were more likely to be “politically liberal.”
Respondents who no longer placed importance on religion were more likely to fall on one end of the political spectrum: 51% of “Faith Leaving” were liberal or very liberal, compared to just 16% who were conservative or very conservative
The same study identified a lower retention rate for Latter-day Saint women under 30 than men. The retention rate was just over 40% for women 18-24 and 45% for those 25-29. For men in the same age groups it was roughly 52%.
But, taken alongside other surveys, it is not clear whether young women are leaving religion at a greater rate than men, according to Stephen Cranney, a nonresident fellow at Baylor University’s Institute for the Studies of Religion.
Cranney also believes the narrative that young women are leaving religion because church services offend their political identity is overblown. It is difficult to draw a causal line from political affiliation to church disaffiliation, he said.
“I think it’s very post-facto,” Cranney told the Deseret News. “It’s complicated, right? Do liberals leave more, or after people leave, do they ... then become super liberal, right? Causality is a little difficult to disentangle there.”
‘The No. 1 driver of non-religion’
Despite some warning signs, the Church of Jesus Christ continues to have the highest religious activity, and “active retention” rate in America, with 76% of Latter-day Saint Millennials and Gen Z attending church monthly.
But Latter-day Saints should not dismiss the long-term impact of political realignment on religiosity, according to political scientist Ryan Burge, who often reports on Latter-day Saints for his popular newsletter Graphs about Religion.
“Religion lives downstream of politics. ... That’s really become the consensus view in political science, that politics is the master identity,” Burge told the Deseret News. “People want to live sort of harmonized lives, unified lives.”
This means those left-of-center may increasingly ask themselves, “Why am I here?” as their politics are “challenged all the time” by the traditional views on family, gender and abortion taught in meetinghouses, Burge said.
The fact is “the No. 1 driver of non-religion in America is politics,” according to Burge. It might also become the opposite. Burge has interacted with young white men who feel like church is the only place where they belong.
As demographic changes and political upheaval alienate some women from conservative religion, Burge said these trends may simultaneously make religion a refuge for young men “drawn to an institution that says ‘you matter.’”
“We’ve never seen the fusion of religion and politics as tightly as we see it right now,” Burge said.
The future influence of Gen Z’s gender divide on politics and religion is hard to map out, according to Burge. The great “conservativizing force” of marriage and childbirth is also breaking down into red and blue, he pointed out.
An Institute for Family Studies report published in November found that in the 2020s, 71% of young conservative women reported being parents, compared to just 40% of liberal women between ages 25 and 35.
That is a 31 percentage point gap between conservative and liberal women.
America has entered uncharted territory when fertility achieves this level of partisanship, Burge said, especially since family formation has traditionally been what moderates young peoples’ liberal political views.
“I don’t see a world in which we depolarize that much, to be honest with you,” Burge said.