Washington: US President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump will be facing each other in the rematch of the 2020 elections for the Presidency. But something exciting is happening and it is either a sign of massive electoral realignment or the polls are wrong yet again.
Recent polls in the US are showing that Former President Donald Trump is popular among the youngest bloc of the electorate, even leading President Joe Biden in some of the surveys, as less engaged young voters spurn Biden. But the President is as popular among the senior voters as he was four years ago. But whatever we say the personal image of the President has diminished since the last time he was elected.
If these changes are true then it will be a generational shift. For decades Democratic Presidential candidates have won over young voters and Republicans have done the same with the other end of the electorate. Poll after Poll is showing that this is flipped this year. If these changes are real, it 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 carried the senior vote since Al Gore hammered Bush’s son, George W. Bush, on Social Security in 2000.
Alternatively, there might be a problem with the polls; the appearance of an “age inversion” is a symptom of a structural issue with the polling for the 2024 election. This will indicate that, after underestimating Trump in the last two elections, the pollsters are once again having difficulty accurately gauging the presidential contest. Perhaps the numbers of younger voters are off, and Biden is being overstated in the polls; perhaps the numbers of older voters are off, and Trump is more powerful than he seems; or perhaps both.
Let Us Look At What The Polls Show
Last week a new poll conducted by NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College National Poll showed that Trump is two points ahead of Biden among Millenial and GenZ voters, while Biden led overall among voters aged 45 years and above, including those in silent and greatest generations.
According to a Fox News survey released last month, Trump leads Biden by a staggering 18 points among voters under 30 in a head-to-head comparison and by 21 points when independent and third-party candidates are taken into account. Not every survey displays an ideal age reversal. According to national and swing-state polls by the Wall Street Journal, Biden is just 50% of voters under thirty. Even though that puts him nearly ten points ahead of Trump, it represents a substantial drop from the 2020 election and is almost equal to his 48% vote share among seniors.
According to exit surveys and other estimates of voting subgroups, Biden led Trump by 20 points among voters under 35 in a Quinnipiac University Poll released last week. This is almost the same margin as the president’s in 2020. However, the same study also showed Biden leading by 8 points among voters 65 and older, which would be a dramatic turnaround from previous elections where Republicans had gained support from this demographic.
In theory, this could look like a fair compromise for Biden: Voter turnout is much lower among younger voters than among older ones. Census data indicates that 48 per cent of voters under 25 cast ballots in the 2020 election, compared to 73 per cent of voters between 65 and 74 and 70 per cent of voters 75 years of age and above. However, gaining over older voters doesn’t seem to be helping Biden according to the polls, which have the Republicans barely ahead in the majority of swing states and show him and Trump virtually tied.
How Are Trump And Biden performing Among Senior And Younger Voters?
Some polls show Trump pulling even with — or slightly ahead of — Biden among young voters. But is that a shift or an outlier?
There is conflicting data, and only a tiny portion of young voters are included in surveys of the general public. Additionally, the difficulties pollsters face when interviewing youth raise the possibility of inaccuracies. It could be challenging to reach young voters using traditional phone polling, which is still used by some media organizations and academic institutions.
Abby Kiesa, deputy director of CIRCLE, a nonpartisan research institution on adolescent involvement based at Tufts University in Massachusetts, said that even if they’re on a cell phone, they’re much less likely to answer it.
She added by saying that makes it hard when people are trying to use phone surveys to reach a representative sample of young people. But a drop in youth support for Biden keeps showing up in polls using different ways of reaching respondents, a sign that it may not just be a methodological error.
Recently, a study of young voters was done by the election analysis website Split Ticket using text-message interviews, a mode more common among that age group. The results showed that Biden (35%) was ahead of Trump (25%) and independent contender Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (23%), but it was still far less than the 20+ point lead the incumbent president had over Trump in the 2020 election.
The difference between Biden and Trump gets smaller, especially when pollsters include questions about independent and third-party candidates like Kennedy, Cornel West, or Jill Stein of the Green Party, indicating that young people who are abandoning Biden may not necessarily be switching to Trump. Young voters are much more likely than voters of other ages to say in those polls that they would vote for someone other than Biden and Trump.
Since 2000, young people have overwhelmingly supported the Democratic Party; this trend peaked in 2008 with Barack Obama’s first election. Estimates of how different groups have voted are difficult to come by, but exit polls and other surveys typically indicate that Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by a margin of more than 20 percentage points.
However, in some instances, like in 2016, when Trump won the presidency while losing the popular vote, they have also voted at higher percentages for third-party candidates. Catalysts, a Democratic data business, says that eight years ago, 10% of voters under thirty, 8% of votes between thirty and forty-four, 5% of voters between forty-five and sixty-four, and 3% of voters 65 and above chose a third-party candidate.
Polls this year indicate a general unhappiness with Biden among young voters, even though Trump is not consistently leading. More than two-thirds of young voters hold negative opinions of both Biden (68%) and Trump (70%), according to the Split Ticket poll. However, Trump’s percentage of “very unfavourable” voters—61 per cent—is noticeably greater than Biden’s (44%).
However, Joe Biden is doing quite well among older voters. According to a poll taken in February of this year, the President leads Trump by 9 points among potential voters 65 and older, 51 per cent to 42 per cent, even though Trump topped the survey overall by 4 points. There is also the gender gap, as young women continue to support Biden while Trump is overtly pursuing young males of all races and ethnicities, and there’s some indication he’s making progress in that regard. The next seven months will show more data until the voting happens the results are out as America gears up to choose its next President.
