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The Covid Kids
Kay W.
November 06, 2025
Gift link to NYT piece about Gen Z and Mamdani’s campaign:
In Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, a 29-year-old welcomed new canvassing friends to his birthday gathering. In the borough’s Flatbush neighborhood, a 27-year-old fresh off a breakup gained a whole new social group. And in the East Village, a 24-year-old landed a date with another democratic socialist.
Addicted to their screens, strapped for cash, spiritually unmoored and socially stunted by the pandemic, young New Yorkers needed a reason to get out of the house. They found it in Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run.
Volunteering for Mr. Mamdani’s campaign became a salve for members of a generation diagnosed by psychologists with anxiety and by the surgeon general with loneliness, whose religious affiliation is often “unaffiliated” and who also apparently killed drinking and having sex.
I would add, if they’re liberal or Leftist young people, that many also left rural or suburban areas and so are newer residents in cities.
My youngest son is Gen Z and to the Left of the Democratic Party and he’s currently living in Toledo. He went to high school in rural Ohio, went to college in Michigan and can’t find a job in his field so is a 1099 delivery driver for Amazon. His girlfriend is in graduate school in Madison. He has reconnected with a high school friend, now a trans woman, who (also) fled the rural Ohio county where they both grew up.
The two of them got together to go a Food Not Bombs work day in Toledo helping to prepare Toledo’s largest food bank for the anticipated rush due to people losing SNAP benefits. He’s a very social person and he had a great time with the Food not Bombs volunteers - Food Not Bombs are sort of anti war anti capitalists who also feed people.
It seems especially important for those of us on the Left to facilitate community for young people since so many of our young people made a deliberate choice and effort to leave their hometowns and relocate to places more in line with their values.
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