Split Ticket

If you’ve followed any of the polling from this presidential election cycle, you’re probably aware of massive purported swings in the voting behavior of the youngest and oldest voters in the electorate portended by polling. Survey after survey shows Joe Biden gaining with seniors while cratering with young voters, whom many public polls have begun to portray as exceptionally Trump-curious. In fact, some recent high-quality polls have found Biden losing voters under the age of 30 outright.

A slew of commentators have posited their own explanations for this phenomenon and its validity. Some, like Nate Cohn and Nate Silver, claim that this is caused by a real (if temporary) loss of support due to factors like Biden’s advanced age and the Israel-Hamas war. Others, like Noah Rudnick from Cygnal, have publicly attributed this to statistical noise, induced by changes in how the surveys were conducted.

Let’s be clear: if these polls are accurately capturing the movement across age groups, it would be nothing short of earth-shattering. Young voters have become an exceptionally important component of the Democratic Party — in 2020, they made up 16% of the electorate, and Biden won them by 23 points, meaning that the votes he netted with this demographic accounted for nearly 80% of his total popular vote margin. Ideologically, these voters are broadly far more liberal than their elders are, and so if Donald Trump is truly within striking distance of winning them, as some pollsters suggest, then we could be on the verge of a seismic electoral rupture that has transcended ideology.

That is an extraordinary claim, however, and it’s not something we feel comfortable running with, at least without a deeper investigation. If you’ve followed Split Ticket at all over the last two years, you’ll know that we usually try to form our opinions on these things by doing the work ourselves. That’s why we decided to conduct two polls to help test this theory.

The first poll is of the full national electorate, with an oversample of young adults done via an online, opt-in panel methodology. The second is of young voters aged 18–29, done via live text interviews, with respondents sampled from the voter file. This allows us to look at both how crosstabs of national surveys compare to a survey specifically targeting the young adult population, as well as how a live, text-based interview sample compares to a more standard, online one.

We’ll present the results of our national poll sometime late next week. Today, we want to focus on the live-text poll, because we think it offers some fascinating insights into what’s really going on with these voters. A quick point: This is meaningfully different from the “crosstab-diving” that you see in most poll writeups, specifically because we weighted our survey to be representative of the registered pool of young voters, and chose a methodology (live texting) that could be better for reaching a group that is famously difficult to contact.

The following data comes from a survey of 255 registered voters between the ages of 18 and 29. The poll was conducted between March 19–21 with a margin of error of ± 6.1%, contacted respondents via live text interviews, and was weighted for partisanship, race, and gender.

We began by polling the favorability (or more accurately, the unfavorability) of both major candidates. Biden is deeply unpopular with young voters, as 68% of them view him unfavorably. On the face of it, Biden’s standing with this group looks a lot like Donald Trump’s, who sits at a very similar 70% unfavorable rating.

But the details reveal something striking: voters under the age of 30 are significantly more likely to hold a “strongly unfavorable” view of Trump than they are of Biden. In fact, a whopping 61% of young adults have a strongly unfavorable view of Trump, compared to the 44% who feel this way about Biden. Six out of every ten young voters have an intensely negative attitude towards Trump, which likely puts a hard ceiling on his support with this demographic.

These findings hold even after limiting the sample to those who say they have at least some chance of voting in 2024 (which we use as a very simple, self-reported likely voter screen). Taken together, this suggests that if young voters are defecting from Joe Biden, they’re not doing so out of any affinity for Donald Trump. The former president’s favorability with this demographic is as low as it has always been, and the distaste many of them continue to harbor towards him is quite intense.

This is why our poll finds Biden leading Trump with young voters. Among likely voters, Biden receives 35%, Trump 25%, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. 23%. Approximately 13% say they are undecided, and the remaining 4% say they wouldn’t vote if these were their options.

Biden’s lead actually widens among voters who say they are “absolutely certain to vote”, with the president receiving 41%, compared to Trump’s 28% and Kennedy’s 18%, which supports the notion that Democratic margins may be better among the engaged portion of the electorate right now.

Importantly, our survey also clearly suggests that a dislike of Biden is not pushing young voters towards Trump — among the 40% of likely voters that view both of the two major candidates unfavorably, Trump only gets 6%, compared to Biden’s 29%. Instead, a narrow plurality of these “double-haters” go for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. (who gets 32% of them), with the rest undecided (25%) or intending to stay home (8%).

That brings us to the final point: Where does Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. draw his support from?

Although Kennedy draws non-trivial chunks of young Democrats (19%) and young Republicans (17%), his strongest demographic is independents. In fact, this is the one group he actually wins, with 30% of the vote (compared to Trump’s 23% and Biden’s 21%).

It’s worth putting a “small sample size” warning onto that last paragraph. We certainly wouldn’t use this poll as the only basis through which to make any conclusions. But the directional finding does line up with the existing evidence.

Independents being Kennedy’s strongest demographic tracks well with prior research on this topic, as those voters tend to be among the most disengaged and disaffected. It also aligns perfectly with the findings that Adam Carlson shared in his crosstab aggregation article at Split Ticket, and so we think that our survey is just one more point in support of it. Ultimately, however, the vast majority of third party candidates tend to collapse in support as the election nears and partisanship kicks in, and we don’t expect Kennedy’s supporters to be any different.

The question is, of course, to whom they will go as the campaign plays out, and while it’s impossible to predict that this far out, the bulk of the evidence suggests that they’re not likely to massively break for Trump in a two-candidate race. The majority of young voters dislike both of these candidates, and this remains true of Kennedy’s voters too. Trump’s abysmal favorables with young voters suggest that he does not uniquely stand to make gains with them.

With that said, we wouldn’t quite use this poll to say that Biden’s in good shape with young voters. Yes, young voters are still generally pro-Democrat and intensely negative towards Trump, and likely to support Biden in November. But this was a demographic that he won by over 20 points in 2020, and this poll does show him currently sliding significantly with them. In a close election, this type of collapse should be alarming for the White House.

Biden likely needs to once again generate an overwhelming vote surplus from young voters, and winning them by ten is unlikely to be enough, especially if his polling gains with seniors do not materialize. While there are a lot of reasons to think that most current polls strongly overstate his issues with the youth, the fact remains that the president still has a significant amount of work to do in order to fix his standing with them, especially in a three-way race.

At the end of the day, though, we’re still not seeing any evidence that young voters are especially inclined to vote for Donald Trump, unlike what other polls may suggest. And perhaps that might be the only point of comfort for the 81-year-old incumbent president: young people might dislike him, but they hate his opponent even more. When so many disapprove of the two presumptive nominees, you would rather be the one with softer disapproval.

Despite his polling woes, Joe Biden still fits that description best.

This survey was fielded via Survey160, and was designed and weighted by Lakshya Jain and Giacomo Squatriti. Topline results and the methodology statement can be found here, and a more detailed collection of insights may be found here