Why Biden’s weakness among young voters should be taken seriously

Could President Biden and Donald J. Trump really be locked in a close race among young voters — a group Democrats typically monitor by double digits — as the recent Times/Siena polls suggest?

For many of our readers and others, it’s a little hard to believe – so hard to believe that to them it seems like the polls are just plain wrong.

Of course, it’s always possible that the polls are wrong. I’ve thought before that our own polls might be wrong, and I’d be very concerned if it was just about our poll. But this isn’t about one Times/Siena poll: Almost every poll shows a close race between Mr Biden and Mr Trump among young voters.

When dozens of polls all say the same thing, it’s worth taking the polls seriously. It’s easy to remember that the poll may be wrong, but it can be easy to forget that the poll is wrong usual in the baseball field. It is a lost cause to dismiss all polls simply because they do not meet expectations.

That doesn’t mean I don’t sympathize with those who wonder whether the final election results will resemble recent polls. Personally, I’m skeptical that the final results will look anything like these polls. But even if you think the final results will be very different, that doesn’t mean the polls are “wrong” today.

In fact, the belief that Biden will ultimately win over young voters with ease next year does nothing to distinguish two very different explanations for what we’re seeing in the polls:

• The polls are largely wrong. They are biased. For whatever reason, they are failing to reach the Democratic-leaning young voters who propelled Biden to victory in 2020.

• The polls are largely right. They are reaching the young voters who supported Mr. Biden. But for now, these voters don’t support him. Things may change in the coming year.

When it comes to the Times/Siena survey, we put forward a lot of of evidence consistent with the theory that the polls are largely right, but things can change.

Due to the measures at our disposal, voters aged 18 to 29 in our study ‘look’ good. They say they supported Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump by a wide margin, 57-35, in the last presidential election, right in line with our expectations. They also “look” good when it comes to other measures of partisanship. For example, in states with party registration, the Times/Siena’s young voters registered as Democrats by a 13-point margin, 35 percent to 22 percent. That almost exactly matches their actual registration advantage of 13 points, 36 percent to 23 percent.

It is important to emphasize that just because the polls “look good” does not mean they are right. Our polls looked ‘good’ in 2020 based on these types of indicators. They were still wrong on important points (although they were also right on many points, including racial and generational depolarization). But these data points nonetheless increase the burden on those who claim it’s a partisan nonresponse bias, where young Democrats simply don’t answer their cell phones (99.8 percent of our young respondents were reached by cell phone).

We see no evidence of that. In our polls, the problem for Mr. Biden is not that there are too few young Democrats. It’s that many young Democrats don’t like him. Mr. Biden has only a 76-20 lead among young voters who are either registered as Democrats or who have previously voted in a Democratic primary. It’s only a 69-24 lead among young, nonwhite Democrats. The dissent exists among self-identified Democrats, Democrats, Biden ’20 voters, and so on.

These kinds of intra-party disagreements are rare, but not without precedent in our polls. I’ve seen it in our congressional polls of highly educated suburbs full of Romney-Clinton voters. And I’ve seen it once before in a statewide presidential race: our last polls in 2016, when Trump suddenly surged and captured 30 percent of white, working-class registered Democrats. It was hard to believe, but it was quite easy to explain and it raised the serious possibility of a Trump victory.

In the same way, I think it’s pretty easy to explain Biden’s weakness among today’s young voters, just as it was easy to explain Mrs. Clinton’s among white working-class voters in 2016. Young voters will by far the most likely to say he’s just too old. to be an effective president. Many are angry about his handling of the war between Israel and Hamas. And all this against the backdrop of Mr. Biden’s long-term weakness among young voters, who were unenthusiastic about him in 2020, and Mr. Trump’s gains among nonwhite voters, who are disproportionately young.

But even if you don’t believe these statements, that’s usually just a reason to believe the numbers will shift in the coming year, not a reason to dismiss the poll.

After all, these polls do not reflect the usual, stable basis for voting choice that we have become accustomed to in our polarized country. This is not an election where almost all voters like their own party’s candidate while disliking the opposing party’s candidate and disagreeing with them on the issues. Instead, we have an unstable arrangement: millions of voters dislike both candidates, preoccupy themselves with minor-party candidates, and often say that, if pressed, they would vote for someone from the other major political party with whom they disagree on many important issues. These are the textbook conditions for volatility, and it is entirely reasonable to doubt whether the arrangement will hold once the campaign gets underway.

We tried to illustrate more concretely the abstract possibility that “things can change” with an article calling back the Kamala-not-Joe voters — the young voters who support Vice President Kamala Harris over Mr. Trump, but not the Mr Biden. Mr. Trump. It’s worth noting that these are the kinds of voters we’d expect to see in the data if Mr. Biden really were doing that poorly among an otherwise typical sample of young voters — just as the 2016 polls showed many white working-class Trump voters. who endorsed Barack Obama and said they voted for him in 2012.

There’s another way the results could be “normal” even with today’s polls: low turnout among young people. Almost all polling these days is among registered voters, probably not voters, and most of Mr. Biden’s weakness is among disengaged voters on the fringes of the electorate. In the latest Times/Siena poll, Mr. Biden leads by 15 points among young voters who turned out in the midterm elections, while trailing by three points among young voters who did not turn out. If these irregular, disaffected voters simply choose not to vote, Mr. Biden will most likely have a healthy lead among young voters.

There are countless other reasons why today’s polls may not ultimately reflect the final result. First, Mr. Trump could be convicted of federal crimes within six months. But just because the polls aren’t necessarily “predictive” of the eventual outcome doesn’t mean they’re wrong. It also doesn’t mean they aren’t worth taking seriously. For the campaigns, taking today’s numbers seriously could ultimately be exactly what changes the numbers tomorrow.