Young voters’ enthusiasm for Democrats waned during midterms

Tweet Facebook Email

Young voters who have been key to Democratic triumphs in previous years showed signals in November’s midterms that their excitement may be diminishing, a possible danger flag for a party that will need their strong backing moving into the 2024 presidential contest.

The AP VoteCast, a comprehensive national poll of voters, found that younger voters favored Democratic House candidates by a margin of 53%, compared to only 41% for Republican candidates. In 2020, 61% of these people favored President Joe Biden over his predecessor, Donald Trump, while just 36% supported Trump. And in 2018, when Democrats utilized a midterm surge to win control of the House, voters 18 to 29 went 64% for the party compared with 34% for the GOP.

Biden’s party still outperformed predictions in the midterm elections, retaining the Senate and ceding only a narrow House majority to the Republicans. The president himself lauded the extraordinary participation of young voters. Nonetheless, the trend among younger voters may be an early sign of the Democrats’ struggle to sustain the coalition of Black people, women, college-educated voters, city residents, and suburbanites that has bolstered the party since Trump’s election.

Weakness in any portion of this voting bloc might have consequences in the upcoming presidential election. Biden, who would be a few weeks away from his 82nd birthday on Election Day 2024, has stated that he plans to seek for re-election. Trump, 76 years old, has already declared his candidacy.

According to Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida and an expert on voting and statistics, there may have been a decline in the number of young voters.

McDonald advised against overinterpreting a possible abnormality. However, he suggested that the shift may have been exacerbated by factors such as high inflation, which has affected young people particularly hard since their incomes are less likely to grow quickly enough to keep up with rising costs.

“Youngest people also have the weakest partisan attachments, so they can be more susceptible to partisan swings nationally,” McDonald said. “There’s no reason why Republicans can’t rebound among younger people.”

In fact, according to VoteCast, just about a quarter of Democrats under 30 indicate that being a Democrat is “extremely” or “very” important to them, compared to around a third of Democrats over 30.

There was some good news for the party despite the fact that the statistics revealed that voters under 30 did not support the Democrats strongly enough to influence national critical contests. Voters under the age of 45, which includes Generation Z and millennials, supported Biden’s party at percentages that topped his 2020 support in contests for governor in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Kansas, as well as the Pennsylvania Senate campaign.

In Pennsylvania’s Senate race, Democratic Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman defeated Republican celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz with 62% of the vote from those 18 to 44. This was a minor improvement above Biden’s 56% of these votes in 2020. Democrat Josh Shapiro also won the Pennsylvania governor’s election in 2020, exceeding Biden’s support with 64% of this age group.

Search for an article