What's Up With The Kids These Days?
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I would say I have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump. I think that we need younger people in office that represent more of either Gen X or millennials or even the oldest of Gen Z. I just think that with the silent generation and then the baby boomers, like they're even though their politics and their opinions are important, they don't reflect the progression and they don't reflect the future of young Americans.

Hello and welcome to the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Druke.

What is up with the kids these days? If you yourself have been asking that most enduring and amorphous of questions, listener, you have come to the right place, at least as far as electoral politics is concerned. In the 2020 election, voters aged 18 to 29 voted for Biden by somewhere between a 23 and 29 point margin, depending on the data set that you're looking at.

Nearly half of all eligible young voters turned out, the highest rate in decades. Claims that one group or another will decide an election are all too easy to come by. But according to FiveThirtyEight's Swing-O-Matic, if young voters shifted by just five points towards Trump this fall and everything else remained the same, Trump would win.

And current polling shows that such a shift could be underway. According to an average of polls over the past month and a half, Biden's lead over Trump has dropped to 14 points amongst young voters. And when RFK Jr. is an option, it drops to just six points. Some high-quality polls have even shown Trump winning young voters, which has prompted a number of observers to argue that the polls are all simply wrong.

So today we're going to talk about young voters. And I'll just say at the top, this is my first presidential election where I no longer fit into that category. So thankfully, here with us today is Lakshya Jain to pick up the mantle. Lakshya is a partner and modeler at SplitTicket.org. And in his free time, he's also a machine learning engineer. Welcome back to the podcast, Lakshya. Hey, thanks for having me, Galen.

Split Ticket is in the process of rolling out its own very interesting polling on young voters in particular. So we're going to dig into it and we're even going to have a sneak peek of some polling that has not been released yet. So get excited.

Also with us today is John De La Volpe. He is the director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, where he's been leading the Harvard Youth Poll since 2000. He was also a pollster for the Biden campaign in 2020. Welcome, John. Great to be with you. Thanks for having me, Galen. I'll also say here that later on in the episode, we send our intern Jayla Everett out onto the Spelman College campus, where she is a senior, to talk to some young voters about how they're thinking about

the 2024 election. So we're going to dive into the polling, and then we are going to hear from some young voters themselves. But first, I want to gauge where the two of you stand on this debate over how accurately current polling is reflecting the preferences of young Americans. Lakshya, let's start with you. One of the things that really popped out to me is

is that in a lot of crosstabs, we actually see young voters seem to like Donald Trump. The Fox poll that came out, Fox is a high quality pollster by the way, and that poll had Trump's favorability among 18 to 29 voters.

at like minus two. So basically break even. And when I look at that, the first thing that I think of is, okay, that is an extraordinary claim. And extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. But it's not just them, right? Like the New York Times and Sienna showed Donald Trump winning young voters in November.

November, December. I mean, it was just a massive, massive, massive shift from 2020 where Biden won these voters by like 23 points. And so when we did our own polling, what we actually did was we first tried to answer the question of do these people actually like Donald Trump? Like, are they Trump curious? And then after that, how are they thinking of voting? And in both cases, I find that, you know,

I'm very skeptical of polls that say Donald Trump is winning the hearts of young voters and becoming more favorable with them.

It's not replicated in anything I see, and it's almost always because of artifacts derived from waiting. Basically, the polls reach young Republicans a little bit better, or when you're trying to wait the poll to be a little bit more representative of the electorate overall, and you're trying to take some non-white voters or something, or some hard-reach demographics, well, young voters don't have a great response rate. So they get up-waited, and you get a couple of weird Trump voters

for example, that may not be representative, but now their impact is magnified by like four or five times in a poll. And so you'll get things like, oh, Donald Trump is popular with young voters all of a sudden. And that's almost entirely because of unrepresentative crosstabs that were analyzed using something they're not designed to do. And John can talk much more about that. Well, hold on, hold on, hold on. Before we throw to John, I got to say, Lakshya,

We're doing a little bit of crosstab diving here, which is understandable given that we're talking about a subgroup. But I'm not necessarily asking if Donald Trump is popular with young voters or even if he's winning young voters, according to the polls, because, of course, this is 538. We love an average. And if you average the polls,

The gap looks something more like a 14 point lead for Biden over Trump or even smaller if you consider RFK Jr. So that I think would be a little more believable and actually is even backed up by some of the polling that you conducted. Right.

Yeah, I think that is more fair to say. I think that Biden has definitely lost some ground with these voters. Don't get me wrong. I cannot sit here and tell you that young voters today would back Biden by the same amount that they did in 2020. Like, I'm not seeing enough evidence to say that. I would say you're right on that. I just don't think the slippage is as big as some people have postulated. But the election isn't held today.

The election is held in several months. Of course. Right. So your argument is that the poll is a snapshot in time and you expect things to change over the next seven months. I think a lot of people probably would agree with that. But there is a camp of people who are saying, no, the polling right now itself is wrong and not even representative of this moment. John, do you fall into that category?

I think it depends upon what poll we're talking about, doesn't it? I can virtually guarantee you that Donald Trump is not winning younger people,

period on a national basis, and specifically by double digits, as some what I have always considered to be high-quality polls show. So I think that when you average it, Galen, it's like you said, Biden plus 14. The last Harvard Youth Poll, when we released it back

in December, it was conducted end of October through November, I believe. When I look at registered voters and that probability-based sample, I think it was plus 14 or plus 15 or so, right? There you go. So that double-digit average aligns with the last probability poll that we released a handful of months ago. It sounds like we can agree here that there's been erosion amongst young voters. Why?

I think a couple of things. One is context. If you pull the lens back a little bit, a Democrat a year out being in the mid-50s, Republican somewhere in the mid-30s is a relatively normal preference rating for 18 to 29-year-olds over the most of the last couple of decades. So I think overall, it looks relatively normal.

As you said earlier, the reason that Biden won, one of the most significant reasons, was turning out younger people and averaging about 60% across the five battleground states that flip from red to blue, right? So he is not at that level at this point. But as you said, as someone who polled for him last cycle, I took a leave from Harvard to do so. I don't plan on doing that this year. There is certainly some erosion. I think there's a couple of...

hypotheses that I have for that in no particular order, but one of which is I've done a few dozen focus groups the last couple of months on this topic broadly of younger people. And I find it very challenging to pull a group of younger people together who could talk to me in generalities or even specifics around

some of the accomplishments from the Biden administration. So I think there's a significant knowledge gap between what he promised and what's been delivered and how that has filtered through young people. Younger people in 2020 voted for

for Biden for three big reasons, right? For progress on climate, on gun violence, and on student debt relief for those three reasons. And that's been a challenge, one. The other thing, which is what I really want to dig into in the next couple of polls I'm going to release, is the youngest of the young cohort.

this 18 to 21, 18 to 22-year-old first-time voter who was essentially in middle school when Donald Trump was elected. And I think all of us need to do some more data gathering with that group to see where they are relative to the older members of that youth cohort.

That part is so interesting for me because I'm aware of a lot of survey research also from people who specialize in surveying, you know, college students and people under 30. And there is a very big gap between an attitude gap between people who

who were basically like in, like you said, like in middle school when Trump was elected, people who were in high school when COVID happened, people who were still in college when COVID happened. Those types of voters are very, very different from the 28, 29 year olds right now.

I get that 18 to 29 year olds is a pretty convenient bucket for people to use. But in terms of attitude, not talking about partisanship, but those voters have a very different outlook on things from everything that I have seen. And it's really interesting to look at the differences. They're a lot angrier.

Well, I think we should talk about partisanship, actually, because so, for example, the circle poll at Tufts, which specifically focuses on youth, breaks folks down into age categories of 18 to 24 and 25 to 34. And you see a significant difference in terms of partisanship. The youngest of this cohort are more likely to vote Republican than the older cohort.

So for 25 to 34, 40% say they would vote for a Democratic candidate versus 24% for a Republican candidate. When you look at the 18 to 24-year-olds, it's 34% for a Democratic candidate versus 28% for a Republican candidate. And I think this is actually pretty easily explainable, which is that these are people who are more coming of age during the presidency of an unpopular Democrat. And we see that, you know, throughout history, we're

who is in the White House and whether or not that person is popular when you age into voting or become politically aware is very important, even for long-term voting patterns. And we're most certainly at this point, when we're talking about the youngest voters today, have aged well out of the group of people who may have

a sort of positive hangover from Obama and the vibe surrounding 2008 and sort of the millennial generation aging into voting. I should say we even have data that suggests that across Gen Z, Gen Zers are less liberal than millennials. Millennials are actually the most liberal of the groups in the electorate when looking by age, and Gen Z are slightly less liberal.

Do you guys think that it's like the sort of unpopular president thing that explains this? Is there other stuff in play? I think a couple of things on that. I would challenge the definition of liberal, right? They are perhaps a few points less likely to self-identify as liberal, a few points more less likely to self-identify as Democrats. But on

A battery of typology questions I've been asking for over 20 years now. Every year, younger people, specifically Gen Zers, are choosing more liberal, more progressive positions on every single part of the survey. On climate, on the role of government to reduce poverty, on same-sex marriages, all the way

up and down the line. I've seen that significant trend for over a decade. However, that same trend doesn't necessarily translate to partisanship, right? Whereas there's a decrease of people identifying as Democrats, but there is an increase of people identifying with a progressive liberal agenda often espoused by Democrats. I have a question here. Because

Oftentimes, I feel like the youngest generation gets caricatured as, you know, oh, they're so liberal. And I mean, it wasn't me so long ago. So I remember everyone was like, oh, this generation is different. They're so liberal. I mean, when you look at the issue polling for young people today, the sort of 18 to 29 year olds, the number one most important issue for people is the cost of living and inflation. This is, again, according to the circle poll. Number two, jobs that pay a living wage.

Then you get a significant drop off before you start seeing things like gun violence prevention, addressing climate change, expanding access to abortion, fighting racism, things like that.

And so I wonder, you know, I think it's important to keep in mind all of this, that young voters are also just people who exist in society as well and aren't sort of alien from the rest of the population and have a lot of concerns that are similar to the rest of Americans. And in fact, I know you'll probably take issue with this poll a little bit, but across the

gender, race and age, important piece here, age, Americans say that Donald Trump's policies helped them more personally than Joe Biden's. And when you look at 18 to 29 year olds specifically, 28 percent of that age cohort say Trump's policies helped them personally. Only 10 percent say that Biden's policies helped them personally. So I think even when you dig into some of the issues, there's weakness for Democrats and Biden.

I don't take issue with that. I hear that every time I conduct a focus group. What I take issue of generally is the fact that 18 to 24-year-olds are more conservative. I think this 18 to 24-year-old, it's two issues, right? One is they don't see Donald Trump as toxic as older people in this cohort.

When you're 18 to 22, that means by definition you were fifth, sixth, seventh grade. In 2015, 16, 17, when Trump was campaigning and was elected, that had a different effect on a generation who was 10, 11, 12 years old, thinking about the president for the first time as a TV star, social media star, very charismatic, as compared to this older group who saw him in a very different way. So there's just like less toxicity there, one. And the other part is,

I feel pretty strongly that there is a lack of recognition for what the administration delivered. And the reason that is so important is from the very first survey we did before 9-11, when it was mostly Gen Xers, it was some millennials, is I realized that people vote when they see a tangible difference that politics can make.

And what this generation hasn't seen is the tangible difference that Biden has made in their lives. And what I believe is, I believe those values are more aligned with Biden than with Trump. And once that is communicated, if it is communicated, I think we'll see kind of this shift back to closer to what we saw in 2020. Right. Okay. So the argument there is that the campaign can shift things. I have thoughts on that, but Laksha, let's get you in here first.

I agree with John broadly. I also think that something here that we're just not properly accounting for is that

You know, people talk about Dobbs v. Jackson as upending the electoral landscape. And honestly, that's going to be true among young voters, too, is my bet. Maybe it's early, but we actually did a poll on a lot of this stuff. We did two polls, right? So the first one was just probability-based sampling, live texting for contacting young voters, different methodologies that we'll get into. But in the longer survey we did, we actually tested young voter attitudes using an oversample.

on who they think would be better on specific issues. And we actually tried to do something where we would weight the sample to be representative. So this isn't like the typical crosstab diving you see, right? Like we actually weighted the sample to be representative of 18 to 29-year-olds. Now,

Trump actually won the young voters in our poll, in the second poll, which I'll get into in a second. But what's crazy about that is if you look at the abortion question and which candidate does a better job in abortion, Biden is at 42 in that among voters 18 to 29, and Trump is at 21.

So there's a two to one advantage for Joe Biden in terms of, you know, young voters think he's going to be much better on abortion policy than Donald Trump is. But when you go to the economy, and this is what I find fascinating, when you go to the economy, that split is basically reversed. It's 48 percent for Trump versus 25 percent for Biden. And that just builds on, you know, a lot of the points touched on here, which is that if you think that these

Social issues are going to take more salience. You know, if you think climate change, abortion rights are going to gain in salience as the election nears, you would expect that a lot of these young voters who look very Trump curious in polls, and I have skepticism that a lot of that is real, but if that movement is real, you would also expect that as campaigns pick up, as voters get more engaged, that they would start to drift back towards the camp that shares their social alignment.

Well, why would you expect that the campaigns would be able to effectively make climate change and abortion more salient, but not effective at making something like the economy more salient? Because I'll also say that there's a big change in what the electorate looks like between a midterm and a general election. And we expect that in a midterm, the kinds of voters who turn out

are more likely to have a four-year college degree, are more engaged in politics and the kinds of partisan issues like climate change or even abortion that are going to get primetime coverage on MSNBC or Fox or what have you. But when the electorate broadens and you get closer to 50% of young people turning out, it's going to be a lot of people for whom those might not be as salient as the economy.

But Galen, didn't we learn anything from the midterm elections where it was overly simplified that economy was going to be the driving vote? I don't think women's reproductive rights was like the number one issue in many polls. I believe we spend too much time focused on whatever that first volunteered issue is rather than a kind of a series of issues.

I think the signal to younger people who turned out, again, it's a different lecture in the midterm, was that they were mature enough to appreciate the fact that economic cycles ebb and flow. But when someone's rights are taken away, it takes a lifetime to win them back.

I mean, I think that is the case that the Biden campaign is hoping for and wants to create that dynamic. I don't think there's any guarantee there. I will agree with you that abortion is an issue that's far more differentiated between the two parties than the economy. So...

somebody doesn't feel like they're going to the polls and when they cast a vote for president, that if one person wins, they'll have a job. And if the other person wins, they won't have a job. It's not that black and white, whereas they may feel that black and white on the issue of abortion. We will have to see whether or not it is the case as we get nearer to election day.

But I think we should also consider that there are reasons that young people may continue to not align with Democrats. I think they are various, but...

One is you mentioned this group of voters that sees Trump as less toxic. That's also a group of voters that was limited severely in terms of sort of congregating during the pandemic that may have actually not felt all that afraid of the pandemic. These were people who were prevented even from congregating outdoors on college campuses, prevented from doing all kinds of things that young people want to do in the early stages of life. And the Democratic Party was extremely differentiated on that.

to the point where basically voters could look at Trump and Biden and say one person wants the economy open and one person wants the economy closed. And I think we saw that that contributed significantly to certain swings within the electorate that benefited Trump. I think we can also look at the candidates on offer and see that the youngest voters are the most likely to say that Biden is too old to be president. These are also people who have never had the sort of inspiring candidate experience

that they chose in a primary be the actual nominee. As I said, the hangover from Obama is well past. They supported Bernie Sanders in 2016 and 2012. They weren't voting in 2016 in 2020 and he didn't win. And these voters are being repeatedly asked to sort of like hold their nose and vote for the person who they're not very excited by. But because if you don't vote this way, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of young voters look at that dynamic and say, I'm not interested. And we're about to get into RFK Jr. in a minute. But I'm curious, John, if you disagree. No, I largely agree with that analysis, right? I largely agree. Let's see where the campaign, as the campaign develops, right? Because I still see, I see like in Florida, for example, just where I've done some recent work, right? A

real break, the biggest break between younger people and the Democratic Party is on COVID, right? So I completely hear what you're saying on that. There are

several subgroups within the youth cohort, what I would consider to be soft, right? They're just not like the white working class, perhaps non-college or community college young people, right, who are more aligned perhaps with Trump on the economy than with Biden. But you also have, you know, a lot of residents of college campuses who are also soft on

on Biden right now who are showing some interest in RFK and others, where again, I think that as campaign develops, that could change. Today's podcast is brought to you by GiveWell. You're a details person. You want to understand how things really work. So when you're giving to charity, you should look at GiveWell, an independent resource for rigorous, transparent research about great giving opportunities whose website will leave even the most detail-oriented reader stunned.

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Because businesses that grow, grow with Shopify. Start your success story today. Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com slash 538. That's the numbers, not the letters. Shopify.com slash 538. I erred in not mentioning in the list of reasons that young people might not vote for a Democrat this fall is the war in Gaza.

And, you know, we see in a lot of this polling that shows Trump and Biden closer on young voters or even Trump leading with young voters that.

Young voters are overwhelmingly more sympathetic towards Palestinians compared with other generations. Galen, can I actually drop something here that you might find interesting? Yeah, absolutely. Go for it. We tested that. We tested that actually in our poll. We actually asked young voters. This is something interesting. I'm not sure how real it is and whether it has to do with the mode of contact among voters. I would bet that this is a large part of it. But

But we actually asked, who do you think would do better in handling the war between Israel and Hamas?

Among young voters, remember this is a sample that's waited to be represented at the – Donald Trump led that group, 37 to 22. So 37 percent of young voters in this panel said we think Donald Trump will be better at handling the Israel-Hamas conflict than Joe Biden, where 22 percent of them said it. Now, I don't know if that's real or not. But if you assume that the poll universe is correct, that is a big reason why.

Well, we should say here that the most recent Harvard Youth Poll also showed Trump leading on the issue of the Israel-Hamas war amongst young voters. There were a lot of people who said neither. In fact, the plurality said neither, 44 percent. But then 29 percent said Donald Trump and 25 percent said Joe Biden. And I would be curious if you added RFK Jr. into that mix, the breakdown. But, John, what's your takeaway from that?

My takeaway is a couple of things. One is I think, well, the poll that you cited, again, was conducted within like a month after October 7th. And I think that the important thing is the plurality who didn't know. Right. And I'm not sure the degree to which that plurality has changed. Right. There's a large cohort of younger people who don't feel comfortable enough with

to voice their opinion on this issue. Obviously, all the polling shows that there is more sympathy for Palestinians among younger people than older Americans, but roughly equal sympathy for Palestinian and Israeli people, which is...

unique to Gen Z and younger voters. And listen, at the end of the day, I think that younger people want to protect the vulnerable and they want to see a leader that is always striving for peace. And the extent to which we don't have a permanent ceasefire, that is going to be a drag on Joe Biden without question.

I have a question here that maybe challenges the usefulness of some of this polling, which is it seems like Joe Biden is now in a situation where he's trying to win young voters over on specific policy issues. So pivoting to some degree on the war in Gaza.

On Monday, he announced another attempt to forgive student loan debt in Madison, Wisconsin, obviously a large college town in a swing state. So it's clear that he thinks he maybe has a problem with the youth vote and is trying to enact policies that might appeal to them. Can I pause you for one second on that, Galen? You absolutely may. Because on the student loan debt forgiveness...

That was a promise he made in 2020, that he was going to work to relieve debt. And he's been working at that.

And, you know, obviously the Supreme Court made their decision and he has worked since that. So I don't think this is a gimmick. This is a, this is to me, it's very important that like we build confidence in the system. Young people show up when they can see that our elected officials respect them by enacting things. And I think this is what's about. It's not about a ploy or a giveaway.

In fact, most Americans, 70% of Americans in a poll I released last week, support government intervention to deal with student debt relief.

Right. I mean, this is something he talked about in 2020. And I should even say from a data perspective, this does the most to help borrowers between the age of 35 and 49 who hold the most student debt on average. But more to the point, I think the idea is that these kinds of policy positions could help him with younger voters. And I wonder if in some ways that's a little misguided.

So when I think about Barack Obama, who holds the high watermark for youth support, I'm

amongst all Democrats. He got 66% of the youth vote in 2008. There was a 34-point margin. The best that Republicans ever did was a 20-point margin with Ronald Reagan in 1984. But I think back on that, and Barack Obama wasn't saying, OK, young people, this is what I'm going to do for you. I'm going to enact this policy, that policy, and the other policy.

Barack Obama's appeal was in some ways his sort of happy warrior. We're not a country of divisions. He became a celebrity in his own right. He signified generational change, racial change, things that were not policy specific and not

I wonder how much, because you've already mentioned that things like the American Rescue Plan or the Inflation Reduction Act or the bipartisan infrastructure bill, huge expenditures that will help specifically on things that young people care about when you look at the polls, but aren't shifting the actual dial in terms of support. And it's hard to sort of change people's perceptions by being like, OK, he did A, B, C and D. You just don't know it.

There's an important point here that young voters are typically not really aware of what goes on in government.

And, you know, if you ask them who the Speaker of the House is, only like I think under a quarter would be able to tell you. If you asked all young adults who the Speaker of the House is, even if you asked all young registered voters who the Speaker of the House is, under a quarter would be able to tell you who that is. This is a very politically disengaged group. John's right. A lot of them just don't know about the Biden administration policies. But it's also true that outside of big seismic structural issues,

changes or, you know, something that really dominates the airwaves on a day-to-day basis and breaks through into the salience of, I hate to use this phrase, but like kitchen table issues, something that everyone hears about, young voters are probably not going to hear it. And so I do agree that that thing of like, you know, trying to reach young voters with specific types of policies is probably not, the micro approach is probably not the way to go if you want to recapture them.

If young voters treat the election as a referendum on Biden, he's going to experience lots of slippage. Whereas if they treat it as a choice between the two candidates...

It becomes a much more complicated question, and I think it becomes a lot better for Biden in that regard because the question of salience comes up, right? When the campaign kicks up, who do these people see? They see Donald Trump. They're not inclined to like him. The probability poll that we did suggested, you know, like 68% of them had negative views of Donald Trump, and they're strongly disapproved. 60% of them strongly disapproved of Trump. 60%. And so—

At this point, when the overarching issues come into play, you don't start looking at, well, Biden did this line item thing for student debt relief, or Biden had this specific plan for a ceasefire in Gaza, or Biden did this specific thing to combat climate change. Maybe if you're an activist or stuff, but if you're really a normal young voter who doesn't really pay that much attention to news, probably couldn't tell you who the Senate majority leader or the Speaker of the House is, they're going to look at the big picture overall. And I think

you see the campaign message shifting a little bit, not just in terms of policies, but in terms of rhetoric. It's about pitting the two candidates against each other and creating a contrast that breaks into basically everyone's homes and everyone's TV sets and gets them thinking about broadly who aligns with me better. Because you and John both, I think, make some very good points that I completely agree with. If

If you're trying to talk about the specific policies of this administration, no young voter is going to be able to tell you them. And that's just that's the thing that we always see. That was true under Obama. It's true. It was true under Bush. It's true under Biden as well. It's they look at the big, big, big things like Dobbs, for example. Big change. Inflation Reduction Act. Not so much. I think people appreciate the fact that there are significant differences between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.

And I believe that unlike any time in our lifetimes, they're going to have two presidents, former and current, running for office, both with records. And I think most are younger people. A lot of them are soft on Biden. A lot of them are parking their vote right now, independent candidacies, which is the biggest threat, in my opinion, to Biden. But as things get closer,

based upon everything I've been feeling and hearing and seeing in my research the last couple of months, they're going to choose the candidate whose values more align with those. Not perfectly. There could be disagreements on COVID, okay? But on the big issues in

In terms of where we need to make progress, that's where I think people are. What's interesting, though, is that there's been a lot of conversation about Biden doing better among seniors. Is it directly related to prescription drug care, et cetera? A lot of that work is quite tangible and quite transactional.

Whereas the work that younger people are asking for and that vision is difficult to measure on a day-to-day basis in terms of the progress we're making towards climate, the largest investment ever, the first bipartisan gun violence prevention. And sadly, it's hard to measure that on a day-to-day basis. So those things are difficult to measure. What is not difficult to measure is when you can relieve someone's student debt.

That is life-changing, and I think that will continue to roll out, and I think that helps across a variety of different places. But again, I think younger people are going to take this vote much more seriously than we might think. All right, so let's talk about the elephant in the room, and it's probably a dereliction of duty that I haven't gotten to this earlier, and that is RFK Jr. So, Lakshya, you conducted two different polls at SplitTicket.org, one that was just young voters and the

That was a probability-based sample that reached out to people using text messaging. In that poll, Biden receives 35% of the vote, Trump receives 25%, and RFK Jr. receives 23% of the vote, while 13% say they are undecided.

Now, you did another poll that was online opt-in. We have done podcast episodes about the perils of online opt-in polling. We won't get into that now. But in any case, it was online opt-in, and it was a broad national poll of all age ranges, but with an oversample of young voters. And what you found there was that

True to some of the polls that we've seen, amongst young voters, Trump leads Biden by two points, 34% to 32%. RFK Jr. gets 18% of the vote. Don't know is 13% and wouldn't vote is 4%.

And let me just compare that to all ages so you can see the difference in RFK Jr. support. When you consider all ages, 11% say they'll vote for RFK Jr., so an increase of 7 percentage points amongst the youngest voters.

And this is also backed up by the polling averages that I mentioned at the beginning where Biden's lead over Trump drops from 14 points to just six points amongst young voters. So, Lakshya, what did you find in your polling about why young voters are drawn to RFK Jr.?

So I think the main thing is that the voters who are drawn to RFK Jr., broadly speaking, they are among the most disengaged in the electorate. They're the most likely to have unfavorable opinions of Trump and Biden. And they're also just the most likely to not really see a difference between the two parties as much or identify as –

independent of those two parties. When you boil it down to partisan allegiances, the Democrats largely stick with the Democrats. The Republicans generally stick with the Republicans. RFK Jr. wins the independents.

And that's because I think a lot of these young voters who are really disillusioned, like I said, some of the lowest rates of engagement with news or voting in the entire country among any demographic. These guys look at the news and they, you know, whatever they do see, they don't like what's going on. And they kind of think like, well, not a big fan of Biden. He's an old guy and I don't really know what he's done for me. And then there's Donald Trump, who I have very little affinity for.

And then who cares? There's this third guy, you know, might as well go for him. How much worse can he be than the others? And if I sound blasé and nonchalant about describing their support for RFK Jr., it's because it is usually not very strongly conditioned. The RFK Jr. voters are not usually the ones that are the most committed to their vote. They say, I don't know if I'm likely to vote or not. I'm probably not certain to vote. Yeah, I could change my mind. And

And stuff like that. The RFK junior voters, by and large, in every poll, not just ours, almost every poll, they're the ones that are the most, not just disengaged, but also the most unsure about what it is. They're just kind of looking for an avenue to express their protest. And if you think about how third parties do in most elections, they usually peek around like –

May or June or something, and then they start crashing as the election nears. You saw that with Ross Perot in 92 and 96, but really 96. You saw that with Gary Johnson in 2016. And my guess is you're going to see that with R.K. Jr. here. What you measure now does not reflect the reality in November. Right. Although, open question how much it will—I think we all expect it to crash by some degree—

How much is an open question just because of how famous he is and also how much money he has, which differentiates him, of course, from somebody like Gary Johnson in 2016 who didn't have near universal name recognition and millions of dollars to spend. I think it really is a question of how much it crashes. I don't know about the universal name recognition part because they do know the name, but

But it's a question of, okay, there's name recognition as in I recognize the name. It's a Kennedy. I learned about that guy in my history class versus –

Who is this guy? Have I heard him speak? Am I actually familiar with his policies? That number is very, very low among young voters. And they may recognize the Kennedy name, but they don't really know anything about his proposed policies or his stances. So I don't know that I would say that RFK Jr.'s share may be more robust than most candidates because, again, it's all a question of how much airtime does he receive. The more airtime he receives, actually, the worse I expect him to do.

It seems to me that his entire campaign is, if you don't see a difference between the two parties, right, declare your independence and vote for me, right? And that, to me, gets back to the essence of how I think about this, and that he's correct. But I think campaigns matter, and I think there will be differences between the parties, and I think that's where his vote softens. I think it's a convenient place. But again, whether it's

25%, 15% or 5%, it could be extremely decisive. One of the things that I'm seeing, guys, in a lot of our polling is that in 2020, when I look at the exit polls, except for Georgia, those other four states that flipped, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona, those four states...

Biden received about 60% in each of those states, 60, 61, 63%. Young people, as we said earlier, were going through the same thing in terms of the pandemic, right? They were responding in large part to what they had seen in the last four years with Trump. This is different. And I think state by state by state, we're going to see much more variance in the polling

than we did last cycle. That's what I'm kind of prepared for. That's what I'm seeing. Perhaps that will kind of solidify, you know, as a campaign moves on. But this is just another reason I'm quite circumspect to lots of the state-by-state polling that we're seeing that's less high quality than some of the national polls.

Yeah, I think all of this suggests a lot of volatility. There's a lot of people who don't know, particularly amongst young voters, but this extends to other parts of the electorate as well. There's a lot of people who don't know. There's a lot of people who dislike both candidates and say they might be voting independent. How much that crashes, again, will in many ways determine the election. Also, it seems like there's a lot of volatility in what turnout could actually look like. In your most recent poll, John, you found that

18 to 29 year olds who definitely plan on voting for president decreased from 57% at sort of this point in the 2020 cycle to 49%

this time around in your most recent poll. And so it seems like a lot of people might also just look at the dynamic and say, no, thank you. And there's wide, wide differences. So stay tuned. You know, April 18th, we're going to update those numbers to give you some sense of like who's motivated to vote. But there is also wide variance between young adults, young registered voters and likely voters. The more narrow the electorate, the far better that Biden does. The far better that Biden does.

That's a trend we've definitely seen, John. I agree with that. If you're looking for bright spots for Biden, look at what the youth margins look like if not that many young people vote. They're much better for Biden if we don't have massive youth turnout, which is probably counterintuitive to how most people think about elections and especially the youth vote.

Galen, John, you're both right there. The people who are the least likely to vote are also the ones whose votes are most up for grabs right now from what we see. But the funny thing here is that

Both sides are kind of right, actually, because the general person will look at it and conclude that low youth turnout is bad for Biden. Someone more focused on the margins will say, well, his margin goes up among the young voters that don't – if you limit it to young voters who are certain to vote or the likeliest young voters. The thing is that Biden may be only winning the unlikelier young voters by two or three in reality, but he's still winning them. It's still a net gain for him. Yeah.

This thing of like you need to balance your – you need to obviously like get your margins as high as possible, but you can't do that at the cost of turning out a vote because elections aren't won with just the margins on the sheet. They're actually won by the number of voters that come out to vote. So that's the other challenge that comes in here.

That's a very important point, Lakshya. I'm glad you brought that up. Okay, final question here, which is something that I don't necessarily love doing, which is why I saved it to last. Do you think there is something that differentiates Gen Z politically from the generations that came before? Because I think the stereotype is somewhat nihilistic. That TikTok humor where it's like, LOL, nothing matters kind of mentality.

And I'm curious if that aligns with how we'll let we'll let the Gen Zer go first, if that aligns with how you perceive your generation.

I think there is a difference between Gen Z and the previous generations. I don't know that it's as big as the difference between millennials and Gen X was. And I'll say that here for this reason. Up until 2004, really, young voters are pretty evenly split between both parties. I mean, you know, it's not like Al Gore won them by a blowout margin or something. Only by two points. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.

young voters were actually up for grabs from either party. In fact, in 2000, you know, you guys may remember better than I do. Hey, you get to call me young. I get to call you old. Oh, wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. Wow. I was a young in 2000. I was a young boy. Judd Axler was a young voter. Right. So we have all three generations reflected, I think, on this pod. Axe Millennial Z. There we go.

So, you know, in 2000, the joke was that like Al Gore was more of the old guy's candidate. 2004 comes around, the millennials polarized around the Iraq war. That's when this big shift to the left began. John Kerry won them by double digits. And then Obama came around, they sprinted to the left. And that generation is still probably the most liberal generation in America, the biggest source of, you know, the Democratic Party.

Now, young Gen Z voters are continuing that thing of being significantly more socially liberal than the generations that came before them, like Gen X, boomers, etc. But the gap between Gen Z and millennials is not as big politically as the gap between millennials and Gen X was. And I think that's pretty important because

If that issue doesn't rebalance itself for the Republican Party in terms of – and I'm not making any projections like demographics is destiny or whatever, but there is a simple math issue here at Play for Republicans. Unless you start making sizable gains with a group of very, very socially liberal voters –

The problem you run into is that no one lives forever. And Gen Z is not any more conservative than millennials really were. Sure, they're more, they can be more disaffected. You can say that. You could say that they're a little bit more likely to prioritize economic issues maybe than social issues. You can go ahead and say that. But right now,

That generation still is backing Democrats in the average of polls, too, by more than, you know, actually by more than John Kerry won young voters by against George Bush. So, yes, Gen Z is different in a way that every generation is different. What's more interesting here for me is that.

They're as close to a continuation of millennials politically as you can get from another new generation in ways that did not exist previously. That's my take. Lakshya, that was brilliant. And I echo much of what you said in the frame that I put on this as a couple of points.

I do think there are no two generations whose values are more aligned than millennials and Gen Z. Together, this could represent close to 40% of the electorate. You look at 2018, 2020, 2022, those generations. We think about this country being divided. Of course it is. But I think it's more accurately depicted to think about this generation as divided based upon over and under 45 years of age.

Last three cycles, Republicans win voters over the age of 45 in those battleground states and nationally, and Democrats win voters under 45, Millennials and Gen Z. The biggest difference I see between Gen Z and Millennials

is that I think, as you said, there's a shared set of values. I feel a more urgency around Gen Z. And I think that helps explain, you know, so many young people got engaged in politics after the combination of Las Vegas

and Parkland shootings and that surge where they essentially got double youth turnout in 2018 relative to the last 40 years. We saw record-breaking numbers in 2022, a lot of young people running for office. So I see a shared set of values between these two generations. But this generation actually doing something that Galen, millennials didn't do and Gen Xers didn't do. We didn't vote as much. We just didn't.

Thank you so much, Lakshya and John, for joining me today. Thank you. As I mentioned at the top, our intern, Jayla Everett, went out on campus to talk to young voters themselves. And Jayla is a senior at Spelman College in Atlanta, which is a historically Black women's college. And she talked to several folks, and they brought up a lot of the themes that we talked about from the polling today so far. So let's give them a listen.

Hi, my name is Olivia McDowell. I plan on voting for Biden. It's just like it reminds me of the previous election that we had where it's like you're voting for the lesser of two evils. And so I kind of like I have no other choice than to vote for Biden. Do you would you say you have an unfavorable view or do you have a favorable view of Biden? And then the same question for Trump as well. I would say I have an unfavorable view of both Biden and Trump. I

I think that we need younger people in office that represent more of either Gen X or millennials or even the oldest of Gen Z. I just think that with the silent generation and then the baby boomers, like they're, even though their politics and their opinions are important, they don't reflect the progression and they don't reflect the future of young Americans. I think

that Biden, I feel like he uses, not tactics, but just different topics that are kind of like buzz topics. So like obviously like abortion or like obviously like now he's declaring that he, a ceasefire, but it's like time and time and time again for many months, the younger generations, honestly, many Americans, but the younger generations especially have been very, very, very anti-war. I just think there's too many things that are going on on American soil that need focus. And

But at the same time, I don't think that Trump would do right by the American people either, given how he handled COVID, given how he handled the stimulus checks and honestly, everything since then. So, yeah. You talked about Biden. Do you think that his focus on those things and also he just announced his new student loan debt forgiveness plan, do you think that that helps?

helps improve your opinion of him? Or to you, does it feel like it's forced and he's just trying to get young people's votes? It doesn't feel genuine. It feels forced. I feel as though Biden, he's literally a career politician. Like, he has spent his entire adult life in politics, right? And high up in politics, meaning that he's been able to make changes. But he's

And now it's still able to be used as, like I said, like a buzz topic to very heavily sway people. And so I don't think that is genuine, no. What party do you identify with?

I was raised Democrat, right? But as I'm getting older and as I'm looking more into politics, I honestly feel like I don't align with... I feel like I'm independent. But the thing is, you know, independent parties or independent nominees, they typically don't go as far in the two-party system. And I've seen many things of a lot of people, honestly, on both sides kind of feeling like they're like now in the middle or just kind of like...

I guess, in the water, like, because there's just, neither side has a strong enough pull to convince anyone really, not anyone, but a lot of people that I've seen.

for their vote or to feel as though they're truly fully represented. Like, I literally feel like I'm voting just so things don't start to go back even further to like when my grandmother was a kid. Like, I feel as though or I heard somewhere actually that as we're like our generation, Gen Z, at some point, we have less freedoms than our parents did.

When it comes to reproductive health and when it comes to just different things of that nature and anything that I can do to prevent the further of the rolling back of legislation, of laws, all those different things, I feel as though I need to do just as an ode to my ancestors who literally died for a right to vote. So that's why I just feel like I have to go with Biden. But truly, I feel like I'm independent or in the middle. Hi, my name is Shia Hood. I do intend on voting.

And who do you intend on voting for? Cornel West. Why? He's an independent party. So are you an independent, would you say? Yeah. Okay. And also what he's done for the Black community, I feel like it aligns with what he's proposing in his campaign. Why Cornel West and not RFK Jr.? Okay. RFK Jr., I know he's like in...

like environmental science, like he's like a philanthropist within that region. Um,

I feel as though I probably need to be a little bit more familiar with him. You know, I feel as though, like, Cornel West, that was, like, a household name in, like, my life. So, like, I'm kind of familiar with what he's done. So, yeah. With Biden, I do believe that his proposals are promising. But I feel as though with, you know, they just aren't necessarily falling through, you know? And what, which policies would you say? Um...

I'm trying to think, what has a policy proposed recently? I'm trying to think. I can't think. My name is Kelsey Henderson. I currently plan on voting for Joe Biden. I align more with Joe Biden's politics. I personally don't believe that Trump served a good presidency. I don't think that I think the only thing that he really pushed was open misogyny, open racism and just made

America a bit uncomfortable and it was just evident in everything that happened while he was running and in office. And so I think in moving forward with Joe Biden, I think that would just be the best option in my head on top of the fact that, you know, he's done a lot while everyone doesn't necessarily agree and they had expectations of it just being

I guess a bigger impact of the situation is coming out of the COVID pandemic and the Trump presidency. Like, I think he's done the best he could with crappy circumstances, honestly. Would you say that you identify as a Republican, Democrat or an independent? I identify as a Democrat, I guess. I think I identify with it as a Democrat, but I currently believe like the party system has just been very interesting in

who it's promoting in recent years, it just seems like the focus is less on the greater good of people and more about like money and this idea of

who has more power and less of how can we make America a better country. Would you say that you have an unfavorable view of Biden or a favorable view of Biden? I wouldn't say that I have a favorable view of Biden. Like, I think if you pay attention to like media and how he's been portrayed in media as a president, like, I don't think it's possible for many people to have a favorable view of him because outside of even the like slander that's been created by the Republican Party or by like

Trumpies. I think at this point, so many people want a better president and we want better politics. And whoever is in that position is really just on the other side of a crap storm, for lack of a better word. So I don't think I have a favorable view of him. However...

I don't think I have an unfavorable one either. Like, I don't think he's the worst president ever. Like, you know, as far as Trump, I do have an unfavorable view of him. But I think that's just evident in his actions and his constant allegations and his constant trials and or all the other things.

My name is Galen Druk. Our producers are Shane McKeon and Cameron Chertavian, and our intern is Jayla Everett. Jesse DiMartino is on video editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at podcasts at 538.com. You can also, of course, tweet us with any questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple Podcast Store or tell someone about us. Thanks for listening, and we will see you soon.