Young voters flocked to Team Biden in 2020 in droves, giving Joe Biden a 20-point lead over Donald Trump among the 18-to-29 set. That doesn't seem to be the case this time around, with a new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll showing the current president and former president in a statistical tie, with Biden narrowly leading, 50% to 48%. Among the Gen Z/millenial group, Biden has just a 6-point lead, and only a 4-point lead among those under 45. Things get worse for Biden once third-party candidates are thrown into the polling mix, reports US News & World Report.
Add in independent contenders RFK Jr., Jill Stein, and Cornel West, and Trump pulls ahead of Biden in the overall matchup by 4 points. And in this scenario, among the Gen Z/millennial set, Trump actually takes the lead over Biden by 6 points, and by 8 points with individuals under 45. Biden's approval rating among the 18-to-29 group is just 24%, with how the 81-year-old president is handling the economy, immigration, Israel's war against Hamas, and his age among younger voters' gripes.
Apathy and disdain for today's politics are hitting young voters hard: A new poll by the Democratic firm Blueprint finds that "young voters overwhelmingly believe that almost all politicians are corrupt and that the country will end up worse off than when they were born," per Semafor. In the online survey of nearly 1,000 registered voters ages 18 to 30, 65% of respondents concurred strongly or somewhat that "nearly all politicians are corrupt, and make money from their political power." "Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys," Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint's lead pollster, tells Semafor. "They see a dying empire led by bad people."
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CNN also has more on what it says is the "unusual turnout dynamic" (including young voters) that could decide what happens on Nov. 5, and the challenges that both major parties face in trying to sway voters to their side. "This election has volatility," University of Pennsylvania political scientist Daniel Hopkins says, lending insight into the current partisanship among people who consistently vote and those who are more irregular voters. One of the outlet's conclusions: "There are strong reasons to believe that Trump may benefit more from a very large overall turnout this year than Biden would." Much more on that here. (More Election 2024 stories.)
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