Donald Trump is coming for the bro vote
A new poll shows Trump making strides among young men of color
Good morning! It’s Tuesday, October 15, 2024. Election Day is 21 days away — exactly three weeks to go.
Let’s kick off this morning with some new poll numbers about the 2024 youth vote, which WUTP is getting our hands on first…
Polls of young voters have been all over the place this election cycle, showing everything from a slight Trump advantage to a commanding Harris lead.
To add to the confusion, few surveys exist that specifically poll young Americans, which means that most of the available data comes from exceptionally small sample sizes drawn from larger polls. The Harvard Youth Poll, conducted since 2000, has long been one exception; now, a group of students from Harvard’s historic rival is trying their hand at quantifying Gen Z politics.
“I felt that a lot of times these arguments about what young people prioritize, about what we want or what we care about, are based on stereotype or based on anecdotes or conjectures, and not really grounded in data,” Yale junior Milan Singh, director of the Yale Youth Poll, told me in an interview. “And I thought that there was room for some more data.”
The poll, funded by Yale’s Institution for Social and Policy Studies, has now completed its first survey; the results were shared exclusively with Wake Up To Politics and are being reported here ahead of their release this morning.
Here’s the topline result, since I know that’s what you all care most about: Kamala Harris is winning among 18-to-29-year-olds, 56% to 35%. (The poll sampled 5,500 registered voters, with an oversample of 2,750 voters under 30.) After months of Democratic worries about the demographic, that means Harris is running only slightly behind Joe Biden in 2020, who won 60% of the age group to Donald Trump’s 36%, according to CNN exit polls.
But, underneath that seeming stability, shifts are occurring among America’s youngest voters.
Notably, like other polls, the Yale survey found the youth gender gap edging slightly larger, from nine percentage points in 2020 (as calculated by the difference between Trump’s support among male and female male voters) to 13 percentage points today. (That change may not seem like much — but remember that the 2024 election is poised to be decided by a vanishingly small margin. Even the slightest shifts could make a difference.) Trump’s deficit among young men has been halved since 2020, from 11 points in that year’s exit poll to 5.5 points in the new Yale survey.
Most of Trump’s gains appear to be fueled by young men of color; in fact, if the Yale poll is correct, a major Gen Z racial realignment seems to be underway. Trump’s largest strides are being made with young Latino voters, among whom he trailed by 41 percentage points in 2020 and by just 10 points in the Yale survey. Among young Black voters, Biden’s 69-point lead in 2020 has turned into a significantly smaller 50-point Harris advantage.
Why, then, hasn’t Harris slipped more considerably among the generation as a whole? Because those changes are (nearly) canceled out by Harris’ steady advantage among young women — and her dramatic jump among young white voters, a group Biden lost by nine points in 2020 and that the Yale poll shows her winning by 12 points this cycle.
Singh, who has also done work for the left-leaning Blueprint polling firm, is careful with his language; at one point in our conversation, he apologized for describing the Supreme Court in a way that would cause “law professors to get mad at me.” Still, he acknowledged that the poll’s gender split jumped out to him.
“I’ve noticed it,” Singh said, with the din of the Yale dining hall audible behind him. “There are friends of mine who are going to vote for Trump. I wouldn’t use the language that James Carville uses” — the famed strategist has said that “preachy females” are dominating the party — “but I think he’s right that the Democratic Party has a problem of being perceived as not friendly towards male interests or male personality types.”
“I think, oftentimes, there is this not-inaccurate perception that the party frowns upon ‘bro’ culture, or what I would call, like, mainstream American male personality types, right? And I think that’s a problem for the party.”
Singh had previously argued that young voters are more like older voters (read: less liberal) than many progressive activists think — a belief he says was challenged by the poll results, which found that a majority of 18-to-29-year-olds (52%) identify as “somewhat” or “very” liberal.
But, in truth, the Yale poll doesn’t fully contradict his prior argument; it just complicates it. In the survey, many more young women identify as liberal than do women as a whole (60% vs. 41%), but young men are about as liberal as men of other ages (42% vs. 37%).
Issue by issue, the same gap can be detected. The poll found young women to be 10 percentage points more likely than woman of all ages to support abortion rights and 18 percentage points more likely to back transgender rights. Young men, meanwhile, were only two percentage points more likely to support abortion rights and seven percentage points more likely to support trans rights than the broader male population.
In the final weeks of what’s been called the “boys vs. girls election,” both sides are tending to their sides of the gender equation. Trump has appeared on podcasts hosted by Theo Von, Logan Paul, Adin Ross, and the Nelk boys (all shows with large audiences among young men), while Harris recently paid a visit to “Call Her Daddy” (the most popular podcast for young women).
Trump’s reliance on young men, however, could prove to be a risky gamble: young men are historically less likely to turn out to vote than young women. Indeed, in a recent Pew survey, 50% of Harris supporters ages 18-29 said they felt “extremely motivated” to vote in November; only 34% of their Trump-supporting peers said the same.
Harris has also made some recent media appearances in attempt to chip into Trump’s gains with men of color — including an appearance on the “All the Smoke” podcast, hosted by a pair of former NBA players, and a forthcoming town hall with Charlamagne tha God, whose show commands a large Black male audience. She also unveiled a new policy platform for Black men on Monday, and according to Reuters, is even considering an interview with the country’s most popular podcaster, Joe Rogan, whose audience is largely made up of young men (including a large swath of Hispanics, the group that she is most struggling with).
This flurry of competing podcast appearances is a reflection of the fact that about half of 18-to-29-year-olds listen to podcasts at least a few times a week, making them a key part of the Gen Z media diet, along with apps like TikTok.
Those news consumption habit do not appear to be serving young voters particularly well, at least according to the Yale poll.
The survey asked a slew of questions about civic knowledge, finding that just 40% of voters under 30 were able to correctly answer that Republicans controls the House, while only 48% knew that Democrats run the Senate. (55% and 63% of all voters were able to correctly answer those questions, respectively.)
Generational gaps also emerged when voters were asked about threats to democracy: all voters were nine percentage points more likely than young voters, for example, to name attempts to overturn elections as a major threat. Young voters were seven points more likely to be worried about election fraud.
Singh said those trends serve as a reminder that, for many young voters, a Trump-tinged political atmosphere is the only one they’ve ever known. “[Older] people ask me, like, ‘How can young people be voting for Trump?’” Singh said. “And I say, ‘Trump is unusual to you because you’ve seen Republicans before him, and you know he’s an aberration.’ But to someone who turned 18 in 2020, this is the only Republican Party they’ve ever known.”
More news to know
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WaPo: Netanyahu tells U.S. that Israel will strike Iranian military, not nuclear or oil, targets, officials say … AP: UN Security Council voices ‘strong concern’ for UN peacekeepers after Israeli attacks
Politico: Two presidential candidates agree on something: the source of the housing crisis
The day ahead
Democrats: Vice President Kamala Harris will participate in a live iHeartRadio interview with Charlamagne tha God in Detroit, Michigan.
Gov. Tim Walz will campaign in Pittsburgh and Volant, Pennsylvania
President Joe Biden will travel to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to headline a fundraiser for the city’s Democratic Party.
Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff will headline a pair of campaign fundraisers in New York City.
First Lady Jill Biden will stump for Kamala Harris in Chester and Montgomery Counties, Pennsylvania.
Republicans: Former President Donald Trump will participate in an interview with Bloomberg editor-in-chief John Micklethwait at the Economic Club of Chicago and hold a campaign event in Atlanta, Georgia.
Sen. JD Vance will participate in a town hall event in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania.
RNC Co-Chair Lara Trump will volunteer at a local food bank helping with hurricane relief efforts in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Congress: The House and Senate are on recess.
Supreme Court: The justices will hear oral arguments in Medical Marijuana, Inc. v. Horn and Bouarfa v. Mayorkas.
When discussing age/generational poll results, especially when comparing polls 4 years apart, it's always good to remember that the cohorts are different. The 18-year-olds of this year were 14 four years ago. And the 30-year-olds from four years ago are now 34.
Your last quote touches on that. We're not really talking about the same people or the same age groups.
Kudos for getting first dibs on Yale poll.