Is Donald Trump on track to win an unprecedented share of the youth vote?
Months of polling, and thousands of words of political writing based on that polling, seem to suggest just that. If those polls are to be believed, President Joe Biden isn’t just in trouble with dissatisfied young voters. He’s facing the possibility Trump could do better with young voters than any other Republican candidate of the modern era.
A recent warning sign came from USA Today/Suffolk University’s poll of registered voters on the first of the month: “A fraying coalition: Black, Hispanic, young voters abandon Biden as election year begins,” read the headline of the accompanying piece. Under the hood, the numbers look dire: “Among voters under 35, a generation largely at odds with the GOP on issues such as abortion access and climate change, Trump now leads 37%-33%,” USA Today notes. The poll of 1,000 registered voters was conducted in the last week of the year, December 26–29.
That finding echoes the December results from the New York Times/Siena College poll that also triggered a fierce debate among political strategists, pundits, and pollsters over just how much to believe the poll’s findings among subsets of American voters, like Black, Latino, and young voters. In that December survey, the weak support for Biden from young people registered as a Trump lead. Among registered voters between the ages of 18–29, Trump actually led Biden 49 to 43 percent.
As Nate Cohn, the Times’s chief political analyst, explained, a near-even split between Trump and Biden among young voters has been the “basic story about young voters … in nearly every major survey” by the end of 2023. The Times’s poll of battleground states from earlier in the year showed a similar conclusion: Biden was up just 1 point over Trump (47 to 46 percent) among 18- to 29-year-old registered voters. And more recently, a Quinnipiac poll of registered voters in Pennsylvania found Biden up 5…
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