In 2020, Joe Biden won voters under the age of 30 by 24 points, according to Pew Research Center’s comparison of polls to voter records. In the latest Times-Siena poll, though, voters under 30 prefer Biden by only 1 point. That the race is close is a function of older voters — those 65 and up — backing Biden by 9 points, despite preferring Trump by 4 points four years ago.
So what gives? Has there been a huge shift over the past four years? Is this a function of a very weird, repeat election?
Maybe and maybe. But part of it probably comes down to who Siena’s pollsters think are likely to vote.
Let’s first point out that this is one poll. Different polls conducted recently — including ones from YouGov (conducted for The Economist) and Ipsos (conducted for Reuters) — offer different assessments of these same groups. YouGov’s poll, for example, also shows Trump with a 1-point lead, but gives Biden a wide advantage among younger voters and Trump a big advantage among older ones.
The results from the Ipsos poll, meanwhile, shows little variation. A slight Biden lead among registered voters at the younger end of the spectrum; a slight Biden lead at the older one.
Ipsos was generous to provide a number of different divisions of their results by age, one of which was particularly noteworthy. If we divvy up their respondent pool into three groups — under 35, 35 to 54 and 55 and up — we find that the Biden-Trump margin between the two is essentially equal. But the levels of support for each candidate increase as the age of the respondent pool increases. Among those under 35, Trump and Biden each get about 30 percent. For those 55 and up, they each get about 40 percent.
The difference comes in the percentage of each group that says they would vote for a different candidate or, more often, wouldn’t vote at all. Within the youngest group, a fifth say they wouldn’t vote for Biden or Trump. Within the oldest group, only 7 percent do.
Writing for 538 last week, University of Pennsylvania political scientist Dan Hopkins pointed to research included in a recent Associated Press poll conducted by NORC. That poll found that support for Trump and Biden varied widely depending on how often respondents voted in recent elections. Among those who didn’t vote in any of the last three federal elections — 2018, 2020 and 2022 — Trump led by 18 points. Among those voted in all three, Biden led by 11 points.
That pattern held among Black and White respondents, too, with only the most frequent Hispanic voters diverging in favor of Biden.
This is a good point at which to note that several of these characteristics overlap. Younger Americans are more likely to be Asian, Black or Hispanic than are older Americans. Young people are also more likely to be political independents, a group that generally votes less often and follows political news less closely.
The divide between politically active and non-politically active young people is, for example, probably one reason why recent Pew Research Center data looking at voter registration continues to show a broad Democratic advantage among young people while Gallup, looking at self-reported identity, sees a shrinking one. Which group better represents the November electorate?
The Times-Siena results include both overall results and results among voters more likely to cast a vote. They didn’t find much difference between the two groups by age; the margins among likely voters only shifted by a point or two. But it also depends on how the pollster identifies who’s likely to vote. The importance of how pollsters look at the electorate was made obvious in a useful 2016 experiment — by the Times — where different pollsters offered different estimates of the presidential vote using the same pool of responses.
It’s early. It’s a weird election. There’s a lot of hostility to Biden on the left, particularly among those only loosely tied to the Democratic Party. This probably makes it unusually hard to know which of those younger not-likely-to-vote voters actually won’t and which might grudgingly (or even eventually excitedly) commit to one candidate or the other. Different pollsters will come to different conclusions about who might vote, and the results within age groups will differ accordingly. In each of the polls presented in this article, it’s worth noting, the Biden-Trump contest is within the margin of error.
Best to close with a reminder: The polls will remain close until Election Day, and small fluctuations probably tell us less than we might think. Big fluctuations, meanwhile, will probably prove to be smaller than anticipated.
The Times-Siena poll also triggered some discussion about generational divides in support for Trump and Biden. From the data shared by Ipsos, we offer this graph as a point of discussion and debate — and offer no further thoughts beyond those above.