A series of polls of LV’s conducted September 19-22 by SurveyUSA show:
Kerry ahead by 10% in Michigan and 5% Washington State
Bush ahead by: 1% Maine; 4% Iowa; 13% Tennessee and 1% Oregon.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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November 29: Biden, Trump and Young Voters
I decided to add my analytical two cents at New York to the political topic many Democrats are worried about right now: the direction of the youth vote.
Until recently, Democrats’ biggest concern about the 2024 youth vote was that millennial and Gen-Z voters were so disappointed with our octogenarian president that they might not turn out in great enough numbers to reelect Joe Biden. Young voters were, after all, the largest and most rapidly growing segment of the Democratic base in the last election. But now public-opinion surveys are beginning to unveil a far more terrifying possibility: Donald Trump could carry the youth vote next year. And even if that threat is exaggerated or reversible, it’s increasingly clear that “the kids” may be swing voters, not unenthusiastic Democratic base voters who can be frightened into turning out by the prospect of Trump’s return.
NBC News reports it’s a polling trend that cannot be ignored or dismissed:
“The latest national NBC News poll finds President Joe Biden trailing former President Donald Trump among young voters ages 18 to 34 — with Trump getting support from 46% of these young voters and Biden getting 42%. …
“CNN’s recent national poll had Trump ahead of Biden by 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.
“Quinnipiac University had Biden ahead by 9 points in that subgroup.
“The national Fox News poll had Biden up 7 points among that age group.
“And the recent New York Times/Siena College battleground state polling had Biden ahead by just 1 point among voters ages 18 to 34.”
According to Pew’s validated voters analysis (which is a lot more precise than exit polls), Biden won under-30 voters by a 59 percent to 35 percent margin in 2020. Biden actually won the next age cohort, voters 30 to 49 years old, by a 55 percent to 43 percent margin. In 2016, Pew reports, Hillary Clinton won under-30 voters by a 58 percent to 28 percent margin, and voters 30 to 44 by 51 percent to 40 percent.
So one baby-boomer Democrat and one silent-generation Democrat kicked Trump’s butt among younger voters, despite the fact that both of them had their butts kicked among younger primary voters by Bernie Sanders. It’s these sort of numbers that led to a lot of optimistic talk about younger-generation voters finally building the durable Democratic majority that had eluded the party for so many years.
What’s gone wrong?
For one thing, it’s important to note that yesterday’s younger voters aren’t today’s, as Nate Silver reminds us:
“Fully a third of voters in the age 18-29 bracket in the 2020 election (everyone aged 26 or older) will have aged out of it by 2024, as will two-thirds of the age 18-to-29 voters from the 2016 election and all of them from 2012. So if you’re inclined to think something like “gee, did all those young voters who backed the Obama-Biden ticket in 2012 really turn on Biden now?”, stop doing that. Those voters are now in the 30-to-41 age bracket instead.”
But even within relatively recent groups of young voters, there are plenty of micro- and macro-level explanations available for changing allegiances. Young voters share the national unhappiness with the performance of the economy; many are particularly afflicted by high basic-living costs and higher interest rates that make buying a home or even a car unusually difficult. Some of them are angry at Biden for his inability (mostly thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court) to cancel student-loan debts. And most notoriously, young voters are least likely to share Biden’s strong identification with Israel in its ongoing war with Hamas (a new NBC poll shows 70 percent of 18-to-34-year-old voters disapprove of Biden’s handling of the war).
More generally, intergenerational trust issues are inevitably reflected in perceptions of the president who is turning 81 this week, as youth-vote expert John Della Volpe recently explained:
“Today many young people see wars, problems and mistakes originating from the older generations in top positions of power and trickling down to harm those most vulnerable and least equipped to protect themselves. This is the fabric that connects so many young people today, regardless of ideology. This new generation of empowered voters is therefore asking across a host of issues: If not now, then when is the time for a new approach?”
All of these factors help explain why younger voters have soured on Uncle Joe and might be open to independent or minor-party candidates (e.g., Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Cornel West, Jill Stein, or a possible No Labels candidate). But they don’t cast as much light on why these same voters might ultimately cast a ballot for Donald Trump.
Trump is less than four years younger than Biden and is about as un-hip an oldster as one can imagine. He’s responsible for the destruction of federal abortion rights, a deeply unpopular development among youth voters (post-election surveys in 2022 showed abortion was the No. 1 issue among under-30 voters; 72 percent of them favored keeping abortion legal in all or most cases). His reputation for racism, sexism, and xenophobia ought to make him anathema to voters for whom the slogan “Make America Great Again” doesn’t have much personal resonance. And indeed, young voters have some serious issues with the 45th president, even beyond the subject of abortion. In the recent New York Times–Siena battleground state poll that showed Trump and Biden about even among under-30 voters, fully 64 percent of these same voters opposed “making it harder for migrants at the southern border to seek asylum in the United States,” a signature Trump position if ever there was one.
At the same time, under-30 voters in the Times-Siena survey said they trusted Trump more on the Israel-Hamas conflict than Biden by a robust 49 percent to 39 percent margin. The 45th president, needless to say, has never shown any sympathy for the Palestinian plight. And despite the ups and downs in his personal relationship to Bibi Netanyahu, he was as close an ally to Israel’s Likud Party as you could imagine (among other things, Trump reversed a long-standing U.S. position treating Israeli settlement activity in the West Bank as a violation of international law and also moved the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a gesture of great contempt toward Palestinian statehood). His major policy response to the present war has been to propose a revival of the Muslim travel ban the courts prevented him from implementing during his first term.
But perceptions often differ sharply from reality. Sixty-two percent of 18-to-29-year-old and 61 percent of 40-to-44-year-old voters said they trusted Trump more than Biden on the economy in the Times-Siena survey. It’s unclear whether these voters have the sort of hazy positive memories of the economy under Trump that older cohorts seem to be experiencing or if they instead simply find the status quo intolerable.
In any event, the estrangement of young voters provides the most urgent evidence of all that Team Biden and its party need to remind voters aggressively about Trump’s full-spectrum unfitness for another term in the White House. Aside from his deeply reactionary position on abortion and other cultural issues, and his savage attitude toward immigrants, Trump’s economic-policy history shows him prioritizing tax cuts for higher earners and exhibiting hostility to student-loan-debt relief (which he has called “very unfair to the millions and millions of people who paid their debt through hard work and diligence”). Smoking out the 45th president on what “Trumponomics” might mean for young and nonwhite Americans should become at least as central to the Biden reelection strategy as improving the reputation of “Bidenomics.” And without question, Democrats who may be divided on the Israel-Hamas war should stop fighting each other long enough to make it clear that Republicans (including Trump) would lead cheers for the permanent Israeli occupation of Gaza and the West Bank while agitating for war with Iran.
There’s no world in which Donald Trump should be the preferred presidential candidate of young voters. But it will require serious work by Team Biden not only to turn these voters against the embodiment of their worst nightmares but to get them involved in the effort to keep him away from power.
I understand that polling organizations cannot poll people who just use Cell Phones (young people that tend to vote towards Kerry). I have read that their are 40 Million people using just cell phones now. Is this correct?
Go Kerry!
Referees skew the outcome of games. Judges skew the outcome of trials. They don’t usually do it at the buzzer. No, they do it all along, especially early enough to beat down the side they want to lose, then let them come back up. It’s the way there are fixed outcomes in trials, in games, and in other places in life. I don’t approve of it, but it exists.
I believe what we are seeing is a concerted effort by some polls to impact the election with badly constructed polls which are designed to give Bush big leads. The data simply don’t support these polls as sound.
They are piling it on heavy now because the know at the end they will have to close the gap, just so they don’t look ridiculous. After all, no one can really prove they were wrong unless they badly miss the final number.
Look for the pro Bush polls to continue to show big Bush leads until the last week, then they will close it. But not until the day before election day, when they will still give Bush more points than he will have.
Some referees are dirty, some judges are dirty, and some pollsters are dirty. They’re names for hire.
Mike in Md — I agree that despite the discourses about cell phone use, I doubt it will have any decisive effect on the polling methodology on its own. I also think that the SUSA polls are not terribly bad news for Kerry. The election will not be held today and he is within striking distance in several states. Although I wish he were ahead in several states won by Gore, with the exception of Wisconsin, he is not terribly behind either.
As regards the state of Wisconsin, I really have trouble with a state that leans toward Bush because Kerry said Lambert Field instead of Lambeau. I certainly hope this is not the reason for the Bush lead! If the people of Wisconsin are willing to make voting choices on the basis of something so trite while Bush has so terribly mismanaged domestic and foreign affairs, then I think they deserve four more years of hell.
I’m skeptical of SUSA polls; as I have posted on here before, their result in my home state is totally out of line with anything else (including reality.) And the NJ result showing Kerry behing by 4 is also an outlier; that said, Kerry’s got some work to do there.
But the polling news cited before by Mr. Mankuch is not terrible for Kerry. Not great, but not terrible. Most of the polls cited are within the margins of error (in some cases one point) and I have not seen any other survey that shows Bush ahead in Oregon (most show Kerry ahead, but not by a whole lot.)
The Wisconsin one is most problematic from a Democratic perspective, though the one with Bush ahead by 14 points (the Badger poll) seems out of line; I noticed that Republicans had an 8-point margin among respondents, which seems unrepresentative. (Previous Badger Polls have constantly been more pro-Bush than others, as well.) But Kerry is probably still behind there, though maybe not by much. Again, he’s got to work harder there (and remember, it’s LamBEAU Field!) Democrats also should work hard at last-minute voter registration there; the state’s election-day registration may produce results that the polls don’t show. I’ve read that Minnesota’s registration is similar.
The increasing reliance on cell phones (especially by the young, one of Kerry’s best groups) may render the polls off by a point or two, but I doubt that that factor by itself explains Bush’s leads in several key states. Though several of them are extremely narrow, so anything could be blamed, including polling error.
I would just like to chime in that I feel in my bones that any poll that shows Bush winning Oregon is going to be proven wrong on Nov. 2. The intensity of the anti-Bush feeling in Portland and Eugene is absolutely unprecedented. You can go on a number of admittedly unscientific factors (anecdotal conversations, the Portland turnout for Kerry of 50,000 to 60,000 at the rally in August, a simply unbelievable amount of Kerry stickers and yard signs, the number of people I know who are actively involved in defeating Bush compared to 2000, Republicans I know who have switched to Kerry, etc.etc.). Portland and Eugene can and will outvote the Republican areas in the state. I don’t think it will even be close here.
“So how is any pollster supposed to correct for the skewing that happens due to these effects? I don’t think there is any acceptable methodology to do this now.”
I believe that on Election Night, when the electoral map begins to turn blue in state after state after state the pollsters were calling red, they will have to face up to this problem or they will lose all credibility.
One point about the cell phone issue: I completely agree that this invalidates a lot of polling, but I wonder if that is the case equally in every state. Not to sound like David Brooks, but I wonder if “Red America” has the same degree of the cell phone/no land line phenomenon? Where I live, in Seattle, it seems hardly anybody youngish has a landline, or if they do, they screen their calls. And they aren’t home much anyway. I imagine that in Alabama it might not be quite this way yet?
Yes DanF – I think the cell phone effect is going to prove to be a major thorn in the side of pollsters in this election and going forward. I think there has already been a plethora of evidence that the samples in most of these polls seem to be heavily skewed towards Republicans. Anyhow, I’ve heard the # of cell phones is something like 160 million – and I think we can all give annecdotal evidence that supports the notion that a huge proportion of young urban dwellers are heavily reliant on their cells. Also, the other day I posted my experience of Gallup Poll hanging up on me, and someone suggested that it was probably because their dialing progran detected my caller ID – I don’ t know if that is in fact the case, but likewise, I think caller ID elimination is a further skewing problem.
So how is any pollster supposed to correct for the skewing that happens due to these effects? I don’t think there is any acceptable methodology to do this now.
Don’t like these poll results much either, but hopefully they will change in our favor after the fine week Kerry’s had. Check out Ras – better news and perhaps more reflective of the change in Kerry’s campaigning style.
Ruy – thank you for the screening system!
What is WH?
Speaking of trends, Rasmussen’s tracking poll today shows Kerry just 0.9% behind Bush — quite an improvement from the 4-point spread of the last three days.
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Presidential_Tracking_Poll.htm
Some key battleground states with among the worst-maintained voter lists (lots of erroneously purged voters), according to a recent study by Scripps Howard News Service, are Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Missouri.
This from an eye-popping article in the current, October issue of The American Prospect, “2000, The Sequel”, by Joshua Kurlantzick, on how the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) passed in ’02 by Congress may have made things even worse.
http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleID=8544
A few other points may have particular pre-Election Day relevance:
*NY PIRG says it is illegal for local election boards to tell poll workers not to accept a student ID as proof of ID. U Wisc and Penn State Students for Kerry in particular, do you copy? A recent study in NY found that election officials in only 18 of 45 counties even understood voter-ID requirements.
*Some states simply do not count “provisional ballots” at all (which may be cast by individuals not permitted to vote by election officials on Election Day). HAVA established no national guidelines on when to count them. Which suggests just a few questions for state and local election officials and newspaper editorial boards.
*Representative Rush Holt (D-NJ) and others became so concerned about huge problems with the touchscreen machinery in many states that they drafted an amendment to HAVA that would require touchscreen machines to have a paper record. Bob Ney, Chair of the House Administration Committee, has not allowed Holt’s legislation, offered in May 2003, out of committee. House and Senate Republicans have introduced “smokescreen” versions of Holt’s bill that contain similar provisions for verifiable voting–by 2006.
*Major White House footdragging on setting up the Election Assistance Commission, created under HAVA to disburse money to states to upgrade voting systems, issue guidelines, and hold hearings to help make voting as fair as possible. Shockingly enough it is now too late for this Commission to do much of what it was supposed to do for this year’s election.
1) Love the new posting policy.
2) I have oodles of anecdotal evidence, but would like to know if there is a way to confirm the number of people in urban and rural areas who have abandoned their “land-lines” in favor of cell phones. Most of the people I know my age (39) or younger who live in metropolitian areas either completely rely on cell phones or will only answer their cell phones without first screening (caller ID/answer machine) as they know that the only people who can call them on their cell are people that they have given their number to.
This might account for the Republican skew in the polls. If you can’t reach the Deomcrats who live in the cities, you can’t poll them. My feeling, and anecdotal evidence, is that rural folks keep their land-line as phone coverage isn’t that great outside of the cities.
Is SurveyUSA a bunch of Republicans? as ElectoralVote.com points out, this Oregon result is a bizarre outlier.
It’s good to see focus on the state races, because they’re all that matters. Unfortunately for the challenger, this poll brings terrible news. He has to pick up states (as compared to 2000) to win, but instead, he’s losing six.
States and his deficit:
ME -1
IA -4
OR -1
NJ -4
WI -14, -10 in the two latest polls
MN -2, in the latest poll
Certainly there’s still time for change, but as of this snapshot it’s 331-207. Let’s say Senator Kerry picks up ME, MN, NJ, and OR, and it’s still 295 -243.
I wouldn’t pay much attention to SUSA polls. They always lean way Republican. I remember they did back in 2000.
Ruy,
Thanks for giving the lie to these lazy, superficial poll stories about usually non-existent “gaps”. We can call it Gapgate.
Also If you haven’t done so already check out “King of the Polls” on http://www.zogby.com
It ‘splains why he’s da best!
Keep up the good work.
VJ