Millennials are inextricably linked with the idea of social progress. The generation born between 1981 and 1996 is 40 percent people of color. More than three-quarters of millennials say immigrants strengthen the country, the majority believe humans are causing climate change and only 29 percent approve of Donald Trump s performance as president. Millennials led many of the most prominent cultural and political movements of the last decade: Occupy Wall Street, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamer protests and the efforts to address campus sexual assault.

But despite being the most diverse and well-educated cohort of voters in U.S. history, the millennial generation also contains many of the countrys oldest and most persistent fault lines. In both social attitudes and voting behavior, white millennials look more like their parents and grandparents than their peers.

When you look at the millennial generation as a whole, they seem more liberal, said Candis Watts Smith, a political scientist and co-author of the book Racial Stasis: The Millennial Generation and the Stagnation of Racial Attitudes in American Politics. When you disaggregate by race, however, you see big differences.

Donald Trump won white voters between 18 and 29 in the 2016 election by a margin of 5 percentage points. While that age group includes both millennials and the oldest members of Gen Z, it is hardly an anomaly. Barack Obama is the only Democratic candidate to win young white voters in the last 15 years and even then, 58 percent of white millennials said they disapproved of his job performance by the time he left office.