Something strange is happening beneath the overall stability of early 2024 voting — and it’s either a sign of a massive electoral realignment or the polls are wrong again.
Polls show former President Donald Trump leading the youngest group in the electorate, if not the president at all. Joe Biden in some surveys, as younger, less engaged voters reject Biden. Meanwhile, Biden is stronger with older people than he was four years ago, even though his personal image has deteriorated significantly since his last election.
It would be a generational change: for decades, Democratic presidential candidates have overwhelmingly won over young voters, and Republicans have done the same with the other end of the electorate. Poll after poll shows the situation is reversed this year.
If these changes are real, they would have profound effects on the coalitions both campaigns are building for November. No Republican has won young voters since George H. W. Bush’s landslide victory in 1988, and no Democrat has won the senior vote since Al Gore hammered Bush’s son, George W. Bush, on the social security in 2000.
Or something is wrong in the polls – and the mirage of an “age inversion” is actually a harbinger of a structural problem in the 2024 election.
That would mean polls are once again struggling to accurately measure the presidential race after underestimating Trump in the previous two presidential elections. Maybe the young voter numbers are wrong and the polls are underestimating Biden; or maybe the numbers for older voters are wrong and Trump is even stronger than he seems; or both.
“It seems like we know very well how to poll middle-aged white people,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and an expert on polling young voters. “But whether they’re younger, older, black, Hispanic, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on best practices these days.”
Is there a fundamental realignment underway within the American electorate? A systemic error in the polls? A bit of both?
The implications are huge, but a lot could change between now and then.
Here’s what we currently know.
What the polls show
Last week, a new NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College national poll showed Trump 2 points ahead of Biden among millennial and Gen Z voters, while Biden led among 45-year-old voters and more, including those from the silent and greatest generations.
A Fox News poll last month showed Trump leading Biden among voters under 30 by 18 points in a head-to-head matchup — and by 21 points with independent and third-party candidates included.
Not all surveys show a perfect age reversal.
Biden represents only 50% of voters under 30 in national and key Wall Street Journal polls. While that’s still about 10 points ahead of Trump, it’s a significant drop from the 2020 election — and roughly equal to his share of the vote among seniors, 48%.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last week gave Biden a 20-point lead over Trump among voters under 35, which is close to the president’s margin in 2020 according to exit polls and other estimates of voting subgroups. But that survey also gave Biden an 8-point lead among voters 65 and older, which would be a significant reversal from recent elections, when Republicans gained older voters.
On paper, this may seem like a good compromise for Biden: young people vote in significantly lower proportions than seniors. According to census data, 48 percent of voters under the age of 25 participated in the 2020 elections, compared to 73 percent of those aged 65 to 74 and 70 percent of those 75 and older.
But winning over older voters doesn’t appear to boost Biden in the polls, which show him essentially neck-and-neck with Trump, with the Republican narrowly ahead in most key states.
The wave of young Trump voters?
Some polls show Trump tied with – or slightly ahead of – Biden among young voters. But is this a change or an outlier?
The evidence is mixed and surveys of the overall electorate contain only a small sample of young voters. And as it becomes increasingly difficult for pollsters to survey young people, the risk of errors increases.
Traditional telephone surveys – which some media and academic institutions still use – could prove difficult to capture young voters.
“Even if they’re using a cell phone, they’re much less likely to respond,” said Abby Kiesa, deputy director of CIRCLE, a nonpartisan youth engagement research institute based at Tufts University in Massachusetts. . “This makes it difficult when people try to use telephone surveys to reach a representative sample of young people.”
But a decline in young support for Biden continues to show up in polls using different means of reaching respondents, a sign that it may not simply be a methodological error.
The election analysis site Split Ticket recently conducted a survey of young voters using text message interviews – a mode more familiar to people in this age group. It found Biden (35%) ahead of Trump (25%) and independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (23%), but well short of the 20-plus point margin the current president enjoyed over Trump in the 2020 elections.
The gap between Biden and Trump narrows especially when pollsters also ask about independent and third-party candidates, like Kennedy, Cornel West or Green Party candidate Jill Stein, suggesting that young voters leaving Biden are not flocking necessarily towards Trump. In these polls, young voters are much more likely than other age groups to say they would vote for candidates other than Biden and Trump.
Young Americans have voted overwhelmingly for Democrats since 2000, peaking with Barack Obama’s first election in 2008. There is no perfect source of estimates of how subgroups voted, but polls Exit polls and other surveys generally show Biden beating Trump by more than 20 percentage points in 2020.
But they also voted for third-party candidates at higher rates, including in 2016, when Trump won the presidency despite losing the popular vote. According to estimates from Catalist, the Democratic data company, 10% of voters under 30 chose a third-party candidate eight years ago, compared to 8% of voters aged 30 to 44, 5% of those aged 45-64. and 3% of voters aged 65. and older.
Polls this year clearly reveal broad dissatisfaction with Biden among young voters, even if they don’t uniformly show Trump gaining ground. The Split Ticket poll shows that both Biden (68%) and Trump (70%) are viewed unfavorably by more than two-thirds of young voters — but, notably, Trump’s “very unfavorable” figure of 61% is significantly higher than 44%. of Biden. .
Among the young voters Biden needs to win over are the 24% who have a “somewhat unfavorable” opinion of him.
Biden’s senior moment
As Biden loses support among younger voters, the oldest president in the country’s history could well solidify his position among seniors.
This would be a departure from the general – albeit imperfect – trend of political evolution: voters become more conservative as they age.
The latest New York Times/Siena College national poll, conducted in late February, shows Biden with a 9-point lead over Trump among likely voters 65 and older, 51% to 42%, even as Trump leads the poll. 4-point global survey.
And it’s not just a horse race with Trump. While younger, traditionally Democratic voters are more likely to say they disapprove of Biden’s job performance right now, older voters — even if they lean Republican overall — are not.
“We’ve certainly seen in our seniors that they’re leaning a little bit more toward Biden,” said Don Levy, director of the Siena College Research Institute. “Even with Biden’s approval, seniors in our most recent national (survey) break even on Biden’s job approval, despite the fact that the country as a whole has a lower score negative by 25 points and that young people have a negative score of 38 points with Biden’s approval. »
Symptoms of a broader realignment
Changes at opposite ends of the age spectrum may actually be part of a broader realignment along lines of race, class, and gender.
Polls show Trump is stronger than in 2020 among Black and Latino voters, while Biden is holding strong with white voters, who leaned toward Trump last time. Generally speaking, white voters tend to be older than other groups, particularly Latinos – who, especially in terms of share of the electorate, are younger.
These numbers could be real – or they could be the result of a polling error that won’t be discovered until after the election. And the changes could come from intersecting subgroups, like age, class and race.
Della Volpe, a Kennedy School pollster and expert on young voters, said public polling numbers for Hispanic voters, especially young ones, are “all over the place.” Levy, the Siena pollster, said all of Biden’s slippage with black voters came from younger black voters — older black voters continue to overwhelmingly support the Democrat.
There’s also the gender gap: Trump openly courts young men of all races and ethnicities, and there’s evidence he’s gaining ground there, while young women remain in Biden’s camp .
The next seven months will offer more data on the evolving coalitions. But don’t hold your breath wondering if these changes are real. The debate probably won’t even end on November 5, even with voter surveys like the Network Exit Polls or AP VoteCast.
It will then take weeks, if not months, for baseline post-election analyzes of voter records or the Cooperative Election Study to provide some of the answers – well after the next president has been nominated or even inaugurated.
CORRECTION: A previous version of this report incorrectly stated the year George HW Bush won the presidential election. It was in 1988.
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