Young Voters Massively Disapprove Of Trump - Prefer Democrats In Coming Election

 

The charts above are from the Yale Youth Poll -- done between March 9th and 23rd of a nationwide sample of 3,429 registered voters. The margin of error is 1.4 for all voters and 2.0 for youth voters.

New Poll Has Harris With A 20-Point Lead Over Trump Among Young Voters

The chart above reflects the results of the CNBC / Generation Lab / Youth and Money Poll -- released on October 22nd of a nationwide sample of 1,021 respondents (age 18 to 34), with a 3.1 point margin of error.

Harris Has A 21-Point Lead Over Trump Among Voters Under 30

 

The chart above reflects the results of the Yale Youth Poll -- done on October 7th and 8th of a nationwide sample of 2,750 voters under the age of 30, with a 2.4 point margin of error.

Young Voters, Women, & Blacks Trending Toward Harris

 

The charts above are from the NBC News Poll -- done between September 13th and 17th of a nationwide sample of 1,000 registered voters, with a 3.1 point margin of error.

Harris Has A Huge Advantage Among Young Voters

 

The charts above are from the NBC News Stay Tuned Gen Z Poll -- done between August 23rd and 30th of a nationwide sample of young voters (age 18 to 29), with a 3.1 point margin of error.

Young Voters Are Solidly Supporting President Biden

The chart above is from the CBS News / YouGov Poll -- done between June 17th and 21st of a nationwide sample of 743 people age 18 to 29, with a 5.2 point margin of error.

Refusing To Vote Is Just A Vote For Trump

In the last few months, there have been demonstrations on many college campuses across the country. The participants were mainly young progressives that were unhappy with what is going on in Gaza. To them, it looks more like Netanyahu is waging war on innocent civilians in Gaza rather than taking action to defend themselves from terrorism.

I agree. While Israel has the right to exist and protect themselves from terrorism, the indiscriminate bombing of densely pack areas is a bad way to do it. They claim they are trying to destroy Hamas, but the way they are conducting the war will most likely just create new terrorists.

These young people want President Biden to take stronger action to stop the Israeli actions. I understand that, but I don't understand something they are threatening to do this November. Many of them are threatening to not vote.

They believe that withholding their votes will punish President Biden. They may be right, but it also could easily punish the entire nation by letting Trump get elected. And it would also punish the innocent citizens of Gaza (who they are trying to help).

If Trump gets back in the White House, he will go all-in to support Netanyahu. There will be no U.S. action to slow or stop the Israeli attacks, and there will be less aid for the people of Gaza. It would be a disaster for Gaza!

The winner of the election in November will be either Biden or Trump. Pinning any hope on a third party candidate is just a ludicrous dream. Trump would be disastrous not only for Gaza, but also for the United States and its democracy. Preventing Trump from winning is of primary importance - and it will take every vote that can be mustered to get it done.

Young progressives we're important in defeating Trump in 2020, and they are needed to defeat him in 2024. They should;d not throw away this power on a gesture that could only make things worse. 

Young Voters Need To Vote In Large Numbers This Year

 The following is part of a post by Dan Rather:

The youth vote saved this country in 2020. And if I may be so bold … we need young people and first-time voters to step up again. . . .

In the last presidential election, 50 percent — yes, half — of Americans aged 18-29 cast ballots. That’s a huge increase from 2016, when only 39 percent voted. The youth of this country quite literally saved us from four more years of Trump. 

In the upcoming election, 41 million members of Gen Z (those born 1995-2012) will be eligible to vote, 8 million for the first time. A survey from Harvard found that the majority support President Biden, though that support isn’t as strong as it was in 2020. When you break it down by gender, Biden leads by 6 points among young men and 30 points among young women. 

Recently my friend Jon Stewart posted an illuminating discussion he had with a young voter. . . .

An audience member told Stewart she thinks a lot of people her age (she’s 22), are “not happy with the choice of candidates we have in November.” She went on to explain, “We feel like our vote, our voice doesn’t matter.”. . .

Stewart emphatically told her that her voice counts. “Oh, it so matters,” he assured her. “Advertisers look at demographics, but the largest demographic that they look at is 18-24. That’s the one that means everything to them — use that power. I’m 61, I’m not even listed anymore. Don’t discount the power that you guys have. This is the fight. No generation ever feels empowered, or seen, or any of those things.”

I think Stewart hit the proverbial nail, hard. 

It’s understandable that a group of people new to the voting rolls might not recognize their political clout. Gen Z is not a monolith — no voting bloc is — but one thing its members do have in common is a naivete about the power they can wield. They will decide one of the most important elections in our history, if they vote. And on the issues most important to them — the economy, climate change, gun control, and abortion — they are more closely aligned with President Biden than Donald Trump. But they have to be assured, convinced that their vote will make a difference. That is a tall order when they get most of their news from doom scrolling on social media. 

So Stewart met them where they are, leaning into rather than discounting the malaise that many are feeling.

“I suggest trusting your discomfort, because you clearly feel it. But discomfort is a wonderful motivator,” he advised. “Action is the antidote to anxiety. And if you feel anxiety, it will lessen as you take action. Small actions, like a little bit every day. Honestly, that discomfort will spur you on. I am sure of it and your generation.”

Great advice, and I couldn’t agree more. Small actions can yield big dividends. Encourage the young people you know to register to vote, learn where candidates stand on issues, volunteer at a local food bank … anything that will engage this new generation of voters and show them that their votes and their voices can and will make a difference. Democracy depends on it.

Voters Under 30 Strongly Favor Biden Over Trump

The Hill shows this chart - taken from an Economist / YouGov Poll done between December 16th and 18th.

Young People's Faith In Democracy Is Waning

The chart above is a year old, but other polls showing the disappointment of youth in today's politics show that the feeling probably has not changed. Only 53% of Generation Z (age 18-25) believes democracy is the best form of government, while 28% have no preference between democracy or dictatorship and 19% think a dictatorship could be good.

The thinking of Millennials is only slightly better -- with 67% believing democracy is best, while 16% have no preference and 18% thinking a dictatorship could be a good thing.

This is very troubling, but I can sort of understand their feelings. They have recently seen our democratic form of government deal them some blows. They have seen abortion rights disappear in many states. They have seen the rich getting much richer while their opportunities and wages are not improving. They have seen the government blocking improvement in the rights of minorities and LGBTQ's. They have seen help with student loans disappear thanks to Congress and the courts.

It is understandable that many of them might think democracy in not working out for them. But they are wrong if they think a dictatorship would be better -- especially if it was a Trump/Republican dictatorship. It is those Republicans that are denying rights and opportunities, while giving a much bigger slice of the American pie to the rich.

Democracy is the best form of government, but it is far from perfect. While our democracy has resulted in more rights and better living conditions, it has been a series of advances and regressions. Currently, we seem to be in a period of regression. But a dictatorship cannot fix that. Only more democracy can (as it has done in the past).

And young voters must be a big part of saving (and improving) our democracy. Young voters were a huge help in kicking Trump out of the White House, and they must be a big part if we are to keep Trump (and his MAGA adherents) from regaining majority status in our government. Trump and his MAGA adherents are not believers in our democracy, and the dictatorship they want to install would not be good for young people -- or anyone else!

Democrats must make a massive effort to reach young voters. They must convince them that not only is democracy best, but they are the ones who can save it -- and avoid a bleak future for the country.

The choice in 2024 is not just between two political parties, but a choice in what kind of government we will have -- democracy or dictatorship. We need young people to make the right choice.

Young Voters Should Give Democrats Hope For The Future

The 2022 election turned out better than many Democrats feared, but not as good as they had hoped. However, thanks to the young voters (who turned out in greater numbers and voted overwhelmingly for Democrats), there is a great hope for the future of our country and our democracy.

Here is how Robert Reich sees it:

The aspect of the midterm elections that gives me most hope for the future is the growing ranks of the young — as well as people of color and women — among American voters and in American politics. 

By 2028, Millennials & Gen Z’rs will dominate U.S. elections. 

This is why the GOP is pulling out all the stops to entrench Republican power. They know they don't stand a chance against a multi-racial, progressive generation of young people that will make the GOP’s backwards ideas irrelevant.

They are the Republican Party’s worst nightmare.

The latest data prove the point. In this weeks’ midterm elections, 27 percent of young people (ages 18 to 29) turned out — the second-highest youth voter turnout in almost three decades.

These young people helped decide critical races. 

In a group of nine electorally competitive states for which exit poll data is available (Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), the aggregate youth voter turnout was 31%.

In Michigan, the early youth vote was up 207 percent from 2018. In Pennsylvania, up 318 percent. In Wisconsin, up 360 percent.

Young people were a critical force in holding back a “red wave.” They supported Democratic House candidates by 62 percent to 35 percent.

According to AP VoteCast, an in-depth survey of more than 94,000 voters nationwide, 61 percent of voters younger than 45 backed Democrat John Fetterman in his  Pennsylvania Senate race. 

What accounts for these astounding numbers?

Start with Trump, who continues to be deeply and justifiably despised by most young people. He wasn’t on any ballot, but he made his presence as conspicuous as he always does. Trump insisted on campaigning loudly and belligerently. Most Republican candidates joined in his big lie that he won the 2020 election.

Next is the stark political reality that young people -- the first generation in America to be subject in school to active shooter drills – want action on gun violence. 

They also want progress on the climate crisis, presumably because they’ll be living longer with its consequences than anyone else. 

And they’re passionate about preserving reproductive rights.

Don’t get me wrong. The growing numbers and political power of young people, as well as people of color and women, is not an argument for complacency.

To the contrary, it means Republicans will now be even more determined to suppress their votes. Fighting voter suppression in all its forms -- making it easier rather than harder to vote – should continue to be among our highest priorities.

We can also expect more cruel divisiveness from the Trumpian Republicans, especially if, as seems most likely, they take back control of the House. How to fight this? Not with more belligerence, which only kindles more of the same. No, we fight it with openness and civility. 

 

Third, we must continue to do everything possible to relieve the economic burdens borne by young people, women, and people of color – especially the escalating costs of housing, childcare, and higher education, and the scarcity of good jobs paying a living wage.

The encouraging reality is the inevitability of these long-term demographic trends: a nation that’s younger, more female, and with more people of color -- and, largely as a result, more progressive.

“History was made tonight,” tweeted Maxwell Alejandro Frost, the first Gen Z’r to be elected to Congress Tuesday night, at the ripe age of 25. “We made history for Floridians, for Gen Z, and for everyone who believes we deserve a better future.”

Indeed. 

Anyone worried about the direction this nation is heading still has much to be worried about. But we should find some solace in the young people who are committed to redirecting it toward social justice and democracy.

Young Voters Are Voting More And Voting Left

 

The charts above are from Axios.com. The figures are from exit poll data from John Della Volpe. These figures shows that young voters (18-29) are voting more now, and they are mainly voting for Democrats (60% to 36%).

This is good, because political scientists have shown that lifetime voting habits are set in youth years, and these voters will likely vote that same way as they grow older.

This is one reason why Republicans want to suppress the votes of young voters.

Trump And His Supporters Are Losing Their "Culture War"

Beyond cutting taxes for himself and his rich buddies, Trump's administration can be boiled down to one thing -- an effort to send the United States back to the Fifties, when white men held all the power and other groups had few if any rights. It was an effort to appease white supremacists and evangelicals (many of which are also on the white supremacy bandwagon). In short, they are trying to wage a culture war. They are losing it, in spite of the massive coverage they get in the media.

Here is just part of an excellent article on this subject by Leonard Steinhorn in The Washington Post:

Despite being a one-term twice-impeached president who lost reelection and never won the popular vote, Trump looms as an outsize political and cultural figure in our historical imagination. Some have even described us as living in “the Trump era.”

Yet, this focus on Trump may miss the real story of our times. Media preoccupation does not signify historical consequence, and despite the breathless attention we lavish on him now, it’s wholly possible that future historians may view Trump less as a major force in our nation’s narrative and more as a sidebar whose disruption, nativism and anti-democratic impulses distracted us from the real changes underway in our country, ones driven by the very younger Americans who are in the forefront of rejecting Trump and Trumpism.

We’ve been down this path before, most notably in the 1980s when Ronald Reagan dominated U.S. politics and both journalists and scholars characterized those years as a time of conservative ascendancy. But were they?

Beginning in the 1960s, the United States seemed to move dramatically leftward on cultural issues, a change largely driven by young Americans holding different values than their Greatest Generation parents. Sixties youth were moving America from the monochromatic, religious and traditional society of the 1950s to one that would increasingly resemble the more diverse, multicultural and secular culture of today. . . .

This transformation, however, seemed to hit a wall with Reagan’s election in 1980. The press focused on the rise of religious conservatives as a major force in American politics. Reporters viewed their activation as evidence of a conservative resurgence that was repudiating the very cultural changes young Americans had fueled during the previous two decades and demanding the restoration of “traditional values” and Christianity in the public square. . . .

 Rather than the restoration of traditional values, the opposite happened. Although Reagan tried to turn back the clock on civil rights, women’s rights, environmental policy and religion, it didn’t work. In every respect attitudes, values, norms, practices and expectations in these areas instead grew far more liberal than what Reagan advocated — and have become increasingly liberal since.

Rather than return to traditional gender roles and domesticity, for example, women, empowered by the feminist movement, began seizing opportunities in sports, education and business. Female-owned companies nearly tripled in the Reagan years, and by the end of the 1980s, the number of young women playing interscholastic sports increased more than sixfold from 20 years before, from less than 300,000 to nearly 2 million. Women received only 39 percent of MA degrees in 1970, but by the early 1990s it had increased to 53 percent — now it’s over 60 percent.

Attitudes and institutions followed a similar path. Despite the hostility of religious conservatives and the Reagan administration — and their callous disregard for the AIDS epidemic — support for LGBTQ Americans steadily rose throughout the 1980s; this gradual liberalization eventually produced legal and cultural acceptance of marriage equality. Colleges and universities, recognizing their responsibility to tell the nation’s story through a lens far more inclusive than ever before, diversified their curriculum and added more female and minority voices and stories to their courses and canon. The media — both entertainment and news — increasingly did the same. . . .

The age of Reagan, therefore, was actually anything but.

Something similar is happening today. Young Americans, this time millennials and Gen Z, are confronting ongoing racial, cultural, social, environmental and economic challenges that their elders have been unable to solve. And instead of rejecting liberalism, they have doubled down. Widespread disdain for Trump may have been an accelerant for their deep-rooted liberalism, but young people were moving in that direction long before he became president.

Again, if one looks beyond political rhetoric and Washington politics, the picture of this era in America is far more complex. At work, millennials and Gen Z insist that companies show — and not just express — a commitment to diversity, inclusion, equal opportunity, work-life balance and the environment. Black Lives Matter and LGBTQ equality are not just movements to them — they are unshakable values.

They demand a commitment to gender equality that will translate to equity in their personal relationships, jobs, parenting and institutions. Among Gen Z, many say that gender should no longer define people as it used to. They are also the most religiously unaffiliated generation in our history — more secular, less Christian, less likely to attend religious services, what one research organization called America’s “first truly ‘post-Christian‘ generation.” Even younger evangelicals are moving in a more liberal direction, far more protective of the environment and accepting of LGBTQ rights than their elders.

This does not mean that a path to a more liberal America is inevitable or will be friction-free. Trump’s damage to our democratic institutions could be massive especially if he and his supporters in Republican-run states continue to interfere with elections and voting rights. And his impact on the courts and fights over manufactured issues such as critical race theory and transgender athletes may delay changes, or make them more difficult to enact.

Yet, the “age of Reagan” taught us that those who shout the loudest about a world that’s passing them by may not be the ones wielding the most influence when it comes to the social and cultural metamorphosis that will reshape our lives and country in the years and decades ahead.

Young Voters Prefer Biden Over Trump By 30 Points

The charts above are from the Harvard Youth Poll -- done between March 11th and March 23rd of a national sample of 2,546 undergraduate students between the ages of 18 and 29, with a 2.78 point margin of error.

It shows that young voters support Joe Biden by a 30 point edge over Donald Trump. That's similar to the 31 point edge they would have given Bernie Sanders over Trump. About 61% say this election is important and will make a difference in their lives. And 66% say they disapprove of how Trump is handling his job.

Trump Is In Deep Trouble With Young Voters (18-29)

These charts reflect the results of the Fall poll of the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. They questioned 2,075 18 to 29 year olds between October 15th and 28th, and the survey has a 3 point margin of error.

The two charts above show what young voters think of Donald Trump -- and it is not good. Only 39% approve of the job he is doing, and he gets even less on most of the issues. And a whopping 59% say they are sure to vote against him in the 2020 election, while only 19% say they are sure to vote for him.

The chart below shows the candidate preference of the poll's 588 likely Democratic primary voters (with a 4 point margin of error). The blue bars show the current support for candidates, while the green bars show the support in this same poll  in the Spring of 2019.

Both Sanders and Biden show about the same support now as they had in the Spring. The candidate that has shown the most improvement is Elizabeth Warren -- who jumped from fourth place with 3% last Spring to second place with 22% currently. That's a huge 19 point gain, and shows a lot of young voters are starting to move toward Warren.

College Student Voting Doubled From 2014 to 2018

The chart above is from the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education. It is their report titled National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement -- and it is good news for Democrats.

Much has been made in the past about how young voters prefer Democrats, but don't vote in large numbers. This shows that is changing. While only 19.3% of college students voted in 2014, that doubled in 2018 to 40.3%. And the rise in college student voting was across the board -- in both two-year and four-year colleges, and in both private and public colleges.

I'm betting that percentage rises again in 2020!

Does Sanders Have Overwhelming Support Of Young Voters?

The Hill / HarrisX Poll was done of a national sample of 18-34 year olds of May 3rd and 4th.

The Morning Consult Poll was done of a national sample of 18 to 29 year olds between April 25th and May 10th.

Recently, I had a friend (who keeps up with politics and who I respect) tell me that he thinks young voters will give Bernie Sanders the Democratic nomination. He thought the you voters overwhelmingly supported Sanders, and since other age groups were split among the candidates, that gave Bernie the edge.

I checked on the most recent polls that gave results for younger voters, and I found that was just not true. Those young voters are also split among candidates.

The Morning Consult Poll did have Sanders with 33% among young voters, but that is far from a majority -- and they note that he has fallen from 46% back in February (a drop of 13 points).

The Hill / HarrisX Poll had Bernie Sanders with only 27.2% among 18 to 34 year olds, trailing Biden by 12.4 points.

It's still early, and Sanders may or may not end up with a majority of young voters, but he's not there yet. I don't think he's going to do it. There are just too many other good choices, and young voters want Trump out of the White House as much as older voters do.