Why Biden is struggling with younger voters

As for climate change, Buchler called it a catchall term for a variety of policies that seldom affect young people directly. “Who benefits from giving subsidies to companies?” he asked. “Companies! It’s not an age issue.”

Medina thinks climate change is an age issue, but “the details of a massive piece of legislation aren’t getting through to young people in an accessible and understandable way.” And he said that, ironically, the young people who are the most concerned about the issue often feel the most dissatisfied and are the most likely to see Biden’s actions as insufficient.

Hot-button issues like trans rights can be highly emotional, but they directly affect only a tiny number of people and don’t tend to change many votes in practice, Smith said.

Another factor is that, even among the subset of young people who are genuinely moved by these issues, “it’s very hard for Joe Biden to look like an agent of change,” Miringhoff observed.

“Biden talks like a senator,” he explained. “He’s in the weeds. He’s more institutional. Young people aren’t necessary into that lens.” Trump, by contrast, “is rattling the cage. People think he’ll shake things up.”

Even if young people believe that Biden is marginally better than Trump on social issues, that doesn’t necessarily translate into support, Medina said. “Young people compare Biden not to Trump but to what they believe in. They often take gun violence, abortion and Gaza personally. They want a commitment that matches their own. They’re not excited by ‘I’m a little bit better than the other guy.’”

Among the youngest voters, ages 18-22, the ones who will vote in 2024 are a completely different group of people from the ones who voted in 2020 simply because of the passage of time. And it’s hard to know anything about them for sure, because they have no voting history, Buchler said.

According to Smith, young people typically become “politically socialized” into a party once they live on their own, get a job, get married, and begin to see how the political system affects them and how they can affect it. And this is happening later and later as adult children stay on their parents’ health plans until 26 and sometimes live at home until they’re 30. As a result, many more young people are flexible and willing to flirt with different parties.

Party identification is like choosing a sports team to follow, Smith said, and people often choose parties and teams on the basis of who is perceived as successful. The most loyal Republican age cohort in America is the group that came of age under Ronald Reagan, who was the last U.S. president to be widely perceived as highly successful, Smith said. But Biden has very low approval ratings and young people don’t perceive him as the star of a winning team.

“If you expect 20-year-olds to be looking at policy platforms, that’s more than they’re capable of doing because they don’t know anything,” Buchler said. What’s more important is how they’re forming a party identification, he said — and that will depend on their unique life experience.

Interestingly, one thing that’s unlikely to play a significant role in that experience is the Trump presidency, noted Miringhoff. “If you were 12 years old in 2016, you had other things on your mind,” he said. “They have no memory.”

But Covid has played a role. As a young person just coming of age, “you suddenly had three years upended in your life,” said Levy. “There’s an undiagnosed collective pandemic effect.”

Medina pointed to other “specific Gen-Z experiences that uniquely shaped them,” including school shootings, the George Floyd protests and the overturning of Roe v. Wade. These experiences “often pushed them to be more active, and created a lack of trust in institutions. They see candidates as representatives of institutions and haven’t seen them come through for them on issues they care about.”

Which could explain a reluctance to simply fall in line with a candidate who on paper might seem more supportive of their social issues. But what this means for the election is unclear. Young people historically vote at lower rates than their elders, and while young people in general appear to be drifting toward Trump, those who are rated “extremely likely” to vote are supporting Biden at near-2020 levels, Medina said.

Most current polls now target registered voters, not likely voters, and magnify the effect of a small number of young respondents, Fowler noted, so they might not be predictive.

“Young people are angry that Biden is the nominee; they don’t like being governed by a gerontocracy and they’re using the polls to express their grievances about their alternatives. But that doesn’t mean that when they get into the voting booth, they’ll vote for Trump,” she said.

“There’s still outrage among young women about Roe and all the talk of banning contraception. I’m not aware of anything that makes me think that young people are having a change of heart,” Fowler added.

The youth vote has been surprising before, though. In 1972 McGovern counted heavily on lopsided support among young first-time voters, but Richard Nixon shocked everyone by winning almost half of this group, boosted by votes from young people who didn’t go to college. And in 2000, George W. Bush tied Al Gore among voters under 25.

As for what will happen this year, “we simply don’t have enough data,” Buchler said. “We can’t extrapolate beyond the data. Anyone who does that is usually bullshitting you.”

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