The Persuadable Gen Z Voter No One Wants to Persuade

By Noah Rothman

Monday, October 05, 2026

 

Depending on your political persuasion, the Wall Street Journal’s informal focus group featuring six “Democratic voters,” two of whom expressed irreconcilable objections to Abdul El-Sayed’s candidacy for U.S. Senate in Michigan, might produce one of two reactions: Wow, two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed, or, My God, only two out of six Democrats won’t back El-Sayed.

 

“Being on this panel made me lose all faith in the party,” one of the two dissenters on the panel, 18-year-old Stanford University student Samson Cain, wrote last week.

 

I asked him what he meant by that.

 

“This is not an isolated event but, rather, part of a broader trend,” Cain explained in a Monday interview with National Review. “I feel like the party is going in a very dangerous direction.”

 

“It seemed first of all like the DSA [Democratic Socialists of America] in the progressive wing of the party was not just a fringe idea but very popular,” he added. Cain spoke with disdain about the DSA agenda: “abolishing police and prisons, nationalizing essential industries, abolishing the Senate, abolishing the Supreme Court.” To Cain, most participants on that call seemed either supportive of those specific policies or at least enthusiastic about what he called the DSA’s “mission.”

 

“This didn’t make it into the final video, but I found myself having to defend capitalism as an institution,” Cain continued. “We got to a point where there was a discussion not just about reforming capitalism but whether it was the right system.”

 

The university student confessed: “I walked away from this call thinking to myself, ‘Wow, I really don’t agree with these people on just about [anything].’”

 

Democratic partisans will take solace in Cain’s admission that he does not see himself as a rock-solid Democratic voter (his billing by WSJ notwithstanding). “I didn’t exactly consider myself a true Democrat walking in,” he said. Cain says he identifies as a centrist independent and identified himself as such on that call. Yet he conceded that there was no point in this election cycle in which he “seriously considered” voting for Democratic candidates.

 

The Democratic Party would, however, be fooling itself if members conclude that Cain — and young men like him — were never persuadable. He caught the Journal’s eye because of his work with Promise to America, a center-left advocacy organization dedicated to beating back the far left’s influence from within the Democratic milieu. “I have a very fundamental belief in free markets and, you know, a strong national defense,” Cain explained. That those have become “right-of-center” views, in Cain’s words, reflects less on him than on the Democratic Party.

 

When it comes to El-Sayed, Cain told the Journal that his problem was with the company the candidate keeps — in particular, the incendiary streamer Hasan Piker. But Israel did not feature prominently in our discussion of the Michigan candidate’s demerits.

 

“I think you see a huge mischaracterization of how the economy works on the progressive left,” Cain explained. “Just recently, he gave an interview saying he’d rather have one thousand millionaires than one billionaire. Like, sure. Okay. But the reality is, the economy doesn’t work that way. In fact, they feed off each other. And, in fact, the more billionaires you have, the more millionaires you have as well.”

 

When the Journal’s panelists were asked to look ahead to the 2028 presidential nominating contest, Cain emphasized his preference for a candidate with “electability.” He cited Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear as an example of that kind of candidate. If the party goes in a different direction, though, and assuming the GOP does not alienate him further, “there’s quite a good chance that, in 2028, it is, in fact, a Republican that I end up voting for.”

 

Cain does not, however, have many kind words for the GOP. “People don’t feel that they’ve taken the affordability issue seriously,” he said. Say what you will about the DSA, for Cain “it’s very obvious” that the socialist left “is taking the affordability issue very seriously,” even if he opposes the DSA’s approach. By contrast, when it comes to Democratic leaders like Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, “you have no idea what they believe other than that they don’t like Trump.”

 

Cain, who recently published a taxonomy of the primary political outlooks among his generational cohort, expressed his concern that Gen Z’s inclination toward “conspiratorial” and “anti-establishment” thinking “paves the way for more dangerous ideologies.” Nothing about that outlook would be alien to the Democratic Party as it was conceived a generation ago. Today, however, Cain’s political outlook — his support for the capitalist enterprise and a strong national defense, and his rejection of radicalism of all stripes — is all but anathema to the center- and far-left alike.

 

“If the Democratic Party could make a concerted effort to get rid of the crazy progressive wing, get rid of the DSA, unequivocally condemn a lot of these policies and ideas, and reform themselves to a more Clintonian 1990s version of the party, that would make me a gettable voter,” he concluded. “But at this point, I feel that we’re going in the exact opposite direction.”

 

Cain conceded that the Democratic Party didn’t actually lose him this year, but that’s partly because it never set out to win him over in the first place. The party that sets out to get Samson Cain may find that he represents more voters than either party seems to understand.