“I miss them.” 21-year-old Kieghan Nangle is telling me about a falling out with two of her friends—and sorority sisters—at the University of Alabama last spring. “I thought the friendship was able to be prioritized over differences in political beliefs.” But, she recalls, “At least one of them said if we were to move forward in our friendship, I would need you to not talk about politics ever again.” Which, Nangle says, “is asking too much for me.”
The dispute was sparked after Nangle, a conservative who believes only those assigned female at birth should be allowed to play women’s sports, hosted an event on campus for Riley Gaines—a collegiate swimmer who, along with other athletes, sued the NCAA over its transgender policy, accusing the organization of violating their Title IX rights after it allowed transgender woman Lia Thomas to compete in the women’s division during a national swimming championship. The event led to a television news appearance for Nangle, which in turn sparked the beginning of the end of her friendships. “Me saying that men don’t belong in women’s sports on Fox News was too much for them,” she says, noting that they told her her stance “hurt people that they love.”
Nangle, from Texas, says her beliefs—that include being pro-life—were shaped by her Christian faith and upbringing; she now works on Trump’s reelection as part of the Republican National Committee. But despite her now very public views, she was initially extremely wary of sharing her true political perspective on campus. “I had the idea that I was conservative, but I had been made to feel nervous to talk about anything politics at all,” she says with an air of frustration.
Nangle explains that even in Alabama—a red state where abortion is illegal—she feared social retribution for sharing her unfiltered opinions on campus despite the fact, she says, “I’m a firm believer in having tough skin and being able to hear things that you don’t like, and still love somebody at the end of the day.” It’s an experience many other conservative women on college campuses likely face, given that most of their peers lean further left. A Glamour poll conducted with YouGov in January 2024 found that 60% of women aged 18 through 29 who are registered to vote and plan to cast a ballot in November intend to vote Democrat, versus 40% who say they’ll vote Republican. This is significantly higher than the general population of women, where a much narrower share of 53% of women say they intend to vote Democrat. Being a young woman on the right can be socially isolating.
To the interested observer, in the wake of a year of headline-making student protests and action, it might seem that campuses today reflect a new uprising of activists. That the winner of the upcoming election—be it former president Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris—could be carried to victory on a wave of young voters. As a result, both parties have made a concerted effort to court this massive voting bloc: There are 41 million members of Gen Z eligible to vote this fall.
But I have discovered a different story. For the last two years, ahead of the 2024 presidential election, I have traveled thousands of miles around America to hear from hundreds of young people. And alongside the intense political discourse, there is also intense disaffection.
The conversations I’ve had with college students around the country paint an image of campus culture in crisis. Issues such as the war in Gaza, abortion, and LGBTQ+ rights have activated students on the left, but these same students are often increasingly disenfranchised—feeling that politicians aren’t hearing their concerns and that even the Democrats aren’t delivering strong enough action. Those on the right often feel they cannot speak freely and that they are demonized for political beliefs which they should have the freedom express and which simply differ from their peers—pushing them further into their corner. And in today’s America, there’s also a silent cohort of young people who exist somewhere in the middle—who don’t necessarily want to spend their college years taking a stance on political issues, or who mourn the lack of multisided discourse, recognizing they don’t fit neatly into partisan categories—and who are too often ignored while political and university leaders fixate on more-partisan extremes.
The result: a political untethering that could reverberate for generations. According to the Glamour/YouGov poll, just 56% of 18-to-29-year-olds are registered and intend to vote. This is the lowest percentage of any age group by a wide margin. And at the time of the poll, 25% of that group said they still didn’t know who they would vote for if the election was held that day.
For many young adults, the transition to college marks their foray into life away from home, among classmates they may have little in common with and at first know nothing about—evoking a wide range of emotions amid a period of immense social and sexual exploration.
Campuses are, and always have been, intimately woven into the fabric of American culture and serve as a microcosm for so much of the country’s prized diversity: of race, religion, and what should be political discourse. These institutions, lauded as bastions of free thinking, have birthed some of the most influential social and political movements throughout history and can shape a generation’s collective ideology. The experience can also be insular, riddled with privilege, and self-righteousness.
In turn, it can sometimes be easy to dismiss the experiences of students on campus. But today there is a new set of circumstances, and so much—maybe too much—pressure on those four years. There is now the added intensity of social media magnifying issues of injustice and gruesome global conflicts, often painting them as black-and-white—with young people fighting each other rather than looking to find middle ground. And a hyperpolarized climate that insists democracy is at stake but sees students shunning their right to vote.
Amid an election cycle that’s been anything but ordinary, young people are once again being told their votes could be the difference maker. But when you zoom in and actually listen to young women across the country—who have felt the push and pull of campus politics intimately over the past four years—their stories illuminate that while today’s leaders often tell young people they could save us all, students are struggling to navigate their own beliefs, their friendships, and the emotional toll resulting from campus activism.
Claudia Nachega, a Democrat and a sophomore at Barnard College in NYC, is one of many students I have spoken to whose left-wing political views have fractured her life on campus. Nachega, who says she is “ecstatic about Kamala Harris” becoming the presidential nominee, is an active member of Columbia University’s Christian Union and its Catholic Ministry and an organizer in the pro-Palestinian movement.
The 19-year-old’s views on Israel’s war in Gaza and her time spent at the university encampment last spring put a “strain,” she says, on some of her relationships with students in her cherished religious community, including a friend she had grown close to over a shared interest in foreign policy. “He said that he respected a lot of my foreign policy takes, but when it came to Israel-Palestine, it was completely different. It was so, so charged,” Nachega recalls. “I tried not to take it personally…but there is absolutely no middle ground. I thought he had been brainwashed, and he thought I had been brainwashed. It was really hard to get past that, and it is very frustrating when it feels like you’re talking to a wall.”
Nachega described what some students feel is at stake. “I don’t think students going through these kinds of difficulties with relationships with other people are particularly focused on having lost friends over politics; they’re most concerned with Columbia’s complicity with the issues,” she explained—demonstrating that many students feel their university has a responsibility to uphold certain ideals that could extend beyond Israel’s war in Gaza.
“Young people, especially Gen Z, have built such strong political power that we’ll do anything we have the resources to do in order to effect what we see as positive change,” says Nachega, who describes herself as a feminist activist. “A lot of us, even just as students, spoke to this kind of activism and theory of change that we already had in mind when we applied to these schools and they admitted us.”
But there are others who recoil at the pressure they feel from the social normality of student protest. “Everyone is expected to take a stance on an issue, especially if you’re in the political science department or the humanities sector,” says Lucy Cox, a junior at the University of California, Berkeley, studying political science and history. Cox, 20, falls “a bit more on the conservative side,” she says, and resents the pressure to share her positions publicly—which for many extends to social media. “I think people are starting with politics first and then becoming friends.”
Though she’s involved on campus as the president of the Berkeley chapter of BridgeUSA, which bills itself as a youth movement to fight political division, Cox has a personal rule: “I never post about politics, ever.” She admits that her leadership role on campus and her aversion to public displays of politics can, at times, feel at odds: “It’s definitely a balancing act.” And that was ultimately the reason she decided not to run for the student senate, despite being approached by friends who told her she’d be great at it: “I know that my whole record would be scrutinized, who I’ve worked for in the past, who I’ve followed.”
That social shaming she says she experiences from the left has had its own consequences—pushing Cox, an “old-school Republican,” further into her beliefs. “I always say I got more conservative when I went to Berkeley because there was not even a willingness to listen to the other side,” she says. “It made me more confident, because I knew I would have to sharpen my argument if someone wanted to talk about it.”
Those dynamics have impacted the calculus around who she hangs out with too. “Freshman year was definitely a big adjustment, finding out who I could talk to and who I couldn’t talk to. But going into my sophomore year, I generally felt I could have fun on campus, and I generally felt included,” she explains. “That’s because I knew what relationships to build.” Cox “hates” having to be so cautious. “College campuses are supposed to be a place where you challenge each other’s ideas and you are open to hearing what everyone has to say and where you can jump around and have fun. And I feel like a lot of people don’t embrace that.”
When it comes to the election, Cox is undecided. Foreign policy and “culture issues” are her top concerns, she says, citing what she sees as extremism amongst her classmates. “I’m very worried about my generation.”
At Arizona State University, Isabel Hiserodt, 21, is the president of the campus chapter of Young Democrats. Her political experience on campus has been mostly positive, and the majority of any “tension” she’s felt has been with the school’s administration rather than other students—another example of this generation’s disaffection with campus life.
When the controversial Jared Taylor, who pushes “white advocacy,” spoke at the school, the Young Democrats put out a statement condemning the talk. Asked why, Hiserodt says her concerns lie with hateful rhetoric, not stifling free speech. “By allowing speakers who espouse xenophobic and racist rhetoric, you’re putting your students who are in the most at-risk, marginalized communities, in danger,” she argues. “I think the university should have drawn the line between free speech and hate speech, Taylor’s rhetoric falling under the latter.”
Despite the fact that the university said allowing the talk fell under its commitment to free speech, Hiserodt remains frustrated, saying she’s seen the administration shut down other events with other speakers very swiftly: “Yet for some reason, we have so many student organizations saying that they don’t want a white nationalist on campus, and it didn’t really feel like we were listened to.”
While Hiserodt may have been angered by not being heard, she is acutely aware that Arizona itself is being closely watched in the run-up to the election—and young Arizonans could prove decisive in state. “There are so many eyes on Arizona, and the Arizona youth vote in particular, because Arizona youth were the reason that Joe Biden did so well in our state in the past election,” she says.
And there is a certain thrill that comes from her leadership position in the Young Democrats in such a crucial state: “I’ve met some of my best friends through political engagement, which is awesome. It’s given me a new community.” Though she admits that “for people who aren’t personally involved with it, it can be probably a bit of a nuisance to interact with so much political action and people approaching you every day.”
It’s certainly impacting students’ interactions with their peers. According to the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics spring 2024 youth poll, nearly one third of college students are uncomfortable sharing their political opinions on campuses due to fear of retribution or censorship—this is significantly higher than in 2015 (before Trump’s first term) when only 13% of young people said the same. The Harvard poll shows that young Democrats are more open to sharing their beliefs on campus than Republicans and independents.
A perceived campus hostility to a more conservative position has also encouraged many students with those viewpoints to champion their First Amendment rights. For Ellie Porte, a conservative graduate of American University in Washington, DC, freedom of speech is her number one issue. “That comes from college,” she says. On one occasion, she says, a friend’s sorority sister questioned their friendship because of Porte’s political affiliation and race. “One of my friends belongs to a Black sorority on campus, and some of her sorority sisters were like, ‘I don’t know how you’re friends with her.’ People would say that I’m not Black enough, because I have white parents, too, and because of my beliefs,” says Porte, who was adopted.
Porte’s parents—divorced with very different political opinions from each other—pushed her to hone her own ideology. “They would always get into debates with each other, and they would be like, ‘What do you think, Ellie?’
“By the time I got to American, I did know that I was more conservative. I think partially it was [because] I went to an all-girls school in Virginia, and a lot of the girls there were more conservative leaning,” she says. At American, Porte says, she was the only woman on the board of the campus chapter of College Republicans. She was also a part of the Network of Enlightened Women, a group for conservative women on college campuses.
Porte appreciated the friend who had her back despite their divergent opinions and says she learned a lot during her four years at American because she was “exposed” to differing viewpoints. But in the end, her experiences on campus only strengthened her political convictions, and over her college years, Porte became “less tolerant” of what she saw as the shade directed at campus conservatives. “I’m never going to compromise my values because other people don’t agree with it.”
Many of the campus rifts boil down to a question of just how personal the political is, students say. That was the case for Nangle, Nachega, and countless others I have met over the last two years.
“The length to which our generation embraces personal attacks and ad hominem attacks because of political views will make the polarization we’re seeing now worse,” says Cox.
What does this mean, then, for the election—and beyond? Though more young women still lean to the left, on the whole, this is a generation that appears less willing to accept traditional political labels, perhaps in part because of the stigma associated with both and a dissatisfaction for the division that partisan ideology often creates.
The data shows that when it comes to party affiliation, young women are less likely than older women to identify with either political party. According to the Glamour and YouGov survey, 29% of young women under 30 said they have no political lean at all—the largest percentage to say so of all age groups polled. And yet on college campuses ahead of November, some students have told me it feels as though they have to pick one party or the other, which they are reluctant to do. But when many stay silent, only the most vocal partisan viewpoints dominate the conversation, reflecting an uneven and unrealistic reality, with the median students’ perspectives nowhere to be found. It may seem that all of today’s college students exist in these silos, but this is truly not the case.
For Jahnavi Kirkire, a senior at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a registered independent who’s also involved with BridgeUSA, existing in that political no-man’s-land can be bizarre. “I’ve gotten that people feel uncomfortable when they hear other political opinions, which is a little disheartening,” she says. “It’s become more hush-hush sharing your opinions.”
She particularly dislikes the pressure to pick a side. “It makes politics feel very binary. Like there’s a yes or a no, and there’s a right and a wrong answer.” She also highlights the consequences of the constant political dialogue on campus. “I wish I could say I was allowed to be a student again. But there is that peer pressure of, ‘Oh, you’re not paying attention to this? You’re not doing anything?’ I feel that I’ve lost the ability to be a carefree student. Finding moments of joy is extraordinarily difficult when your campus feels like it’s internally ideologically warring with itself.”
Beyond aggravation, which Kirkire voiced, the silencing of those who do not necessarily seek or want a binary political home has consequences, leaving students like her shying away from having a robust conversation about the stakes at play in the 2024 election, or from speaking about politics at all.
“It’s difficult walking around campus day-to-day because you can’t share what you’re really thinking because you’re scared of what people will say to you,” Kirkire says. “So I try to refrain from sharing my political opinions…. The fact that I have to do that, it’s a little sad.”
When students self-censor, emboldened voices on both sides fill the gap. The perception of how young people may vote is tainted by moderates’ absence. Many young people have abandoned voting altogether—and that’s a warning worth heeding. For not only will this impact the results of the election in November, but disenfranchising a whole bloc of potential voters could shape this generation’s political participation for years to come.
Ellie Porte: Photographed by Alyssa Schukar
Nangle: Courtesy of Kali Sturgis; Hiserodt and Cox: Courtesy of subjects
