What Do the Kids Want? Young Voters in the American Presidential Election

In a highly competitive 2024 presidential election, both candidates are engaged in an on-the-ground effort to turn out their voters in the greatest numbers. Given the importance of massive mobilization, American voters under the age of 30 have emerged as an electorate that is both potentially critical to victory and more complex than pundits had previously imagined.

Why is the youth vote so important?

Americans under 30 represent approximately 50 million people and 41 million eligible voters in 2024. Young America has been turning out in historically high numbers during the previous two election cycles (2022, 2020) - and overwhelmingly in support of Democrats - and political leaders unable to overlook their concerns or to underestimate their political weight. An historically high half of youth voters turned up at the polls in 2020, a jump from 39% just four years earlier.

The 2024 election will play out mainly in seven swing states. In those places, the stakes of winning young voters can mean the difference between victory and defeat. In Arizona for example, polling data shows the Democratic and Republican candidates in a virtual dead heat. In 2020, Joe Biden flipped the historically conservative state, winning by a razor thin margin of about 10,000 votes. More than 220.000 young people are currently enrolled at public Arizona universities alone, making them eligible in many cases to vote there. Given recent youth voting trends, high youth turnout this year could perhaps deliver the state to Kamala Harris.

Nearly all the way across the country, Michigan - another swing state - was won by Biden by less than 3% in 2020. Four years later, prospects are even more complicated for his successor who is facing significant discontent from many Arab Americans who reject the Biden administration’s policy toward Israel. Many of these discontented voters are under 30 years old and have declared themselves either willing to stay home or to vote for Donald Trump. Will their protest votes make the difference and allow the GOP to take that crucial swing state?

Neither presidential candidate can afford to overlook any part of the electorate in the 2024 election, and capturing the lasting loyalty of young voters is critical beginning now.

What Are Young Voter Intentions?

Overall, the Democratic party fares significantly better than Republicans among under-30 voters. About 65% of voters aged 18 to 29 associate themselves with the Democratic party, compared to around 33% for Republicans.Among young, registered voters or those who declare themselves likely to vote, Kamala Harris is polling firmly ahead of Donald Trump (52% for Harris vs. 29% for Trump among registered voters under 30; 61% Harris vs. 30% Trump among those likely to vote). Among registered young voters, 14% undecided compared with 6% of young people who are likely to vote. But when polls widen to include all young people between the ages of 18 and 29, support for Kamala Harris drops to 46%; whereas support for Donald Trump remains steady at 29%, and the undecided portion of the youth electorate increases to 20%.

The Emerging Gender Gap

Behind the overall trend for heavy support for Harris among young voters lies a widening gender gap in voter intentions. During spring 2024, when President Joe Biden was the Democratic candidate, the gender gap between the candidates was 17 points. In the period leading up to the election, it has widened to 30 points. What this gendered gap demonstrates is that while both young men and women largely prefer Kamala Harris, her candidacy garners much more enthusiasm from young women voters. Consequently, young women choose Kamala Harris 70% to 23%. Young men prefer Harris at a smaller margin of 53% to 36%.

The chasms dividing some youth in this election have been both a surprise and proof that young Americans are complex in their preferences and attitudes. The youth gender gap is evidence of this.

Fueled in large part by the shifting social, political, and cultural landscape of a post-MeToo society, the gender gap comes to embody different priorities and struggles among young women and men.

The societal reckoning around issues of gender equality, bodily autonomy, and sexual harassment and abuse created lasting repercussions for young women, who are also more likely than their male counterparts to say that much more work needs to be done in the United States to achieve gender equality. The realignments and political mobilization created by MeToo among young women was crystalized even further in 2022 with the Supreme Court decision to overturn 1973’s Roe vs. Wade (granting Constitutional protection of abortion, thus making it legal everywhere in the US). Allowing states to decide whether to uphold, to ban, or to severely restrict abortion rights served as a catalyzing force in American politics that Democrats made the centerpiece of their midterm election strategy. It paid. The anger of women - driven largely by young women voters - helped to fuel the Democrats’ strong performance nationally and significantly limit Republican gains in what was supposed to be a Red wave election.

Democrats have maintained sharp focus on abortion as an election issue, drawing a contrast between the Republican party’s support of restrictions and the possibility of a federal ban under a Republican president. Capitalizing also on Donald Trump’s rocky history with women, Kamala Harris affirms her intention to sign a federal law reinstating abortion access nationally. Harris and the Democrats have leaned heavily into cultivating the energy and anger of women across generations, framing the election as a choice linked directly to American values of freedom, individual choice, and modernity. Indeed, to most women, especially young women, the Republican party and its candidate are disqualified on the issue. As such they seem very motivated to use their votes to show it.

There is a feeling among many of these men that they are excluded by society - by the economy, by the changing social norms, by the political process.

They may not be uncomfortable with more progressive social issues such as gay marriage or equal pay. However, they worry about their ability to fulfill a traditional role of manhood - finding a secure job that they enjoy, one that allows them to purchase a home and start a family - because of social and economic factors that limit them. Many of these young men are looking for a sense of what it means to be a man in America today. They are more likely to see Democrats as having a punitive and shameful view of masculinity as toxic, whereas they see Donald Trump - for all his bombast and excess - as embodying and defending a vision of strong manhood. They may not necessarily agree with all his ideas, but he offers them a clear and unapologetic path to follow.

On the other hand, Democrats are active in trying to cultivate the support of young men with less than a college education. Tim Walz proposes a nonpunitive, alternative image of a strong man, able to embrace changing mores while also fulfilling the role of a traditional man in American society. He is a husband and father, a veteran from the Midwest, that worked in a traditionally female field (teaching) while also coaching his high school’s football team. Tim Walz rose the political ranks and is now working tirelessly in full support of a powerful woman. Tim Walz has spent time speaking directly to these young men, to embody the model of a man embracing new gender dynamics while also having succeeded in achieving the markers of traditional American masculinity.

As these young men are mostly disengaged from politics, they are not among the most likely voters in the 2024 presidential election. Will Trump be able to capture their allegiance enough to turn them into voters this week? Will the alternative vision of masculinity offered by Tim Walz resonate with them instead?

Copyright image : Terence Rushin / GETTY IMAGES NORTH AMERICA / Getty Images via AFP