Young voters strongly favour Joe Biden, but will they turn out?

Fretting about the youth vote is a Democratic pastime. This year, there are obvious causes. At the top of the ticket, 81-year-old Joe Biden struggles to convey the vitality that his 78-year-old opponent musters. Student protesters chanting “Genocide Joe” blame Mr Biden for civilian suffering in Gaza. On TikTok, young leftist influencers attract millions of views for videos urging voters to reject him.

Tour college campuses, however, and you will find plenty of young voters ready—excited, even—to cast a ballot for Mr Biden. “He has been the most progressive president we’ve ever had,” raves Ian Moore, a 20-year-old student executive-board member of the University of Michigan’s College Democrats, an arm of the Democratic National Committee. “Yeah, he’s a little older, he’s a little less exciting,” he acknowledges, “but he gets the job done.”

Mr Moore’s exuberance may be unusual but his preference for Mr Biden over Donald Trump is not. Recent findings from YouGov, an online pollster, suggest that across June those aged 18 to 29 prefer the incumbent president to his predecessor by an average of 20 points, just less than the 23-point advantage Mr Biden enjoyed in 2020. But young voters represent one of the wobbliest legs of the Democratic stool. They have the lowest and most variable turnout rates of all age groups. And polls suggest that when compared with previous presidential elections, and particularly the last one, young voters are less enthusiastic about voting this time. So if Mr Biden is indeed still winning them by a healthy margin, each young voter who stays home hurts him more than Mr Trump.

Young Americans have long been unreliable voters. At most, around half of those eligible cast ballots in presidential-election years. The figure for those aged 45 or older is roughly 70% (see chart 1). In 2008 Barack Obama—the magnetic youth-whisperer who filled college-football stadiums with supporters—enjoyed a youth-turnout rate of just over 51%. That was a mere two points higher than the percentage who turned out in 2004 for the race between the decidedly less charismatic George W. Bush and John Kerry.

It was the polarising matchup in 2020 between Messrs Trump and Biden that broke recent records: youth turnout that year reached 54%. Expansive covid-era postal and early-voting policies played a role; younger voters are disproportionately likely to mail in their ballots. Even so, the youth-turnout rate was still a whopping 18 points less than that of voters 45 and older.

And that increase might prove to be short-lived. When the pandemic ended, Republicans restored restrictions on postal and early voting in many states. And if youth turnout more closely resembles the much lower levels of 2016, Mr Biden would lose around 850,000 votes from his margin over Mr Trump, even if he holds the 23-point advantage he enjoyed last time.

Pundits have attributed much of young voters’ mix of apathy and disdain for Mr Biden to the war in Gaza. Half of those under 30 tell pollsters at YouGov that they disapprove of his handling of the conflict. Their views of Mr Biden’s performance have soured dramatically since the war’s early days in October. And yet the great majority of these unhappy young voters say they still intend to vote for Mr Biden. At the start of the war registered voters under 30 preferred Mr Biden to Mr Trump by a 28-point margin. In June the same group said they favoured Mr Biden by an average of 20 points.

The decline in Mr Biden’s popularity may not be dramatic, but it could be significant in a close race. The available data are unclear about whether Gaza is the cause, however. Other White House policies unpopular with young people, such as the forced sale of TikTok within a year that the House of Representatives passed in March with Mr Biden’s support, may also matter. According to a poll in May from Generation Lab only 13% of college students say that the conflict in the Middle East is one of their three most important issues, despite a tumultuous springtime of protests on many American campuses.

TikTok tow

The evidence is clearer about two other problems Mr Biden has with young voters. One is his low standing with independents. The president’s current polling advantage among young Democrats is the same as it was at this stage in 2020. Yet he is attracting a scant 27% of young independents. (Mr Trump and Robert F. Kennedy junior are performing even worse; and 16% of young independents tell pollsters they are undecided.)

Young independent voters are especially fuzzy about Mr Biden’s policies. That points to Mr Biden’s second problem: he is struggling on TikTok, where one-third of Americans under 30 get their news, according to a poll last year. Mr Trump joined the platform only three weeks ago but has already garnered 252m views. His content generates more engagement than Mr Biden’s (see chart 2). “Content around Biden just doesn’t pop off on TikTok,” says Ben Darr, of CredoIQ, a TikTok-analytics firm. “It’s not inflammatory, it’s not counterculture…and that’s what the TikTok algorithm is looking for.”

In terms of issues, young voters are not so different from everyone else. In April’s Harvard Youth Poll, the three most important issues they cited were inflation, health care and housing. These are priorities for all voters. Young Republicans prioritise immigration more than their Democratic counterparts, while those Democrats prioritise women’s reproductive rights.

Overall, Mr Biden’s vulnerability with young voters is not a consequence of the policies he promotes. According to a recent YouGov poll, the great majority of policies preferred by young Democrats and independents are ones that Mr Biden favours and Mr Trump rejects. Overwhelming majorities say they want expanded background checks for all gun purchases and increased federal funding for affordable housing and the Affordable Care Act, for instance.

Mr Biden’s boomer backers may wring their hands over young voters’ seeming apathy about Mr Trump’s xenophobic populism. Yet the reality is that for a growing share of young voters, Trumpism is the norm. This year’s youngest eligible voter was just nine years old when Mr Trump declared that Mexicans were rapists as he launched his 2016 campaign. And that same voter was only in their first year of high school as his presidency concluded with hundreds of his supporters attacking the Capitol. Younger voters, like generations before them, are focused on their own futures. Quite reasonably, they want to know what Mr Biden will do for them if he is re-elected. ■