A voting bloc that was vital to President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory is sending him and his Democratic Party a message they won’t want to hear.
According to a new analysis from Harvard University, the 18-29-year-old demographic is trending less liberal and more towards conservatism, which is horrible news for the current occupant of the White House.
John Della Volpe, the polling director at the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics, found in his study that younger Americans are trending away from the Democratic Party, while a separate study found that high school senior boys are becoming more conservative.
“Nearly every sign that made me confident in historic levels of youth participation in 2018, 2020, and 2022 — is now flashing red,” Della Volpe wrote in his analysis of 2024, according to The Hill. He added: “The ground is more fertile for voting when youth believe voting makes a tangible difference.”
In 2019, nearly 39 percent of the participants in the Harvard Youth Poll stated that they identified as Democrats. However, in the following spring, this number decreased to 35 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of young voters who identified as independents or “unaffiliated with a major party” rose from 36 percent in 2019 to 40 percent this year. Also, the percentage of youth voters who identified as Republicans rose slightly from 23 percent to 24 percent, The Hill noted.
Also, he found that the percentage of respondents who said they will definitely vote in next year’s election fell from 55 percent at this point in the 2020 cycle to 51 percent now.
Volpe wrote “daylight’s burning” for the Democrats, who need young voters “to win today and maintain and grow an electoral edge in the years ahead.”
The Hill added:
Signs that younger voters are skeptical of the party establishment have been cropping up for years.
An overall rise in Americans identifying as independent has been noted since 2009, according to Gallup polling. The uptick has been attributed largely to Generation X and millennials holding onto independent identification as they age, whereas greater shares of previous generations tended to attach themselves to a party as they age.
Younger Americans boosted Biden to victory in 2020, with 61 percent of voters under age 30 supporting him, according to AP VoteCast. But it’s not clear by how much the voting bloc will turn out for Democrats this election cycle.
Meanwhile, as Fox News reported, high school senior boys are becoming more conservative while girls are becoming more liberal, according to a University of Michigan study.
Twelfth-grade boys exhibit a nearly twofold preference for identifying as conservative compared to liberal, and this gap has been progressively widening in recent years. Conversely, girls in the same grade identify themselves as liberal at a rate of approximately 30%, which marks a significant increase from the levels observed in 2015, the study found.
Psychotherapist Thomas Kersting shared his thoughts about the study’s findings last week during a “Fox & Friends” segment.
“12th-grade boys are kind of seeing through this. We’re creating this idea that if you’re a male, there’s something wrong with that and that you’re bad,” Kersting said.
“Then you have politicians out there saying, like, the number one problem in America is White men and things of that nature. So I think young, 12th-grade boys are kind of seeing through this,” he added.
The current figures are a shift from previous years when young men and women graduating high school leaned left in similar percentages.
“Everything is about advancing women and minorities and so forth,” Kersting said, suggesting that could be behind what is driving more young men to become conservative.
“I see this a lot at my private practice. A lot of young guys are falling behind. They feel like they can’t advance. So there’s nothing really there to help advance them because the idea is that men have always dominated, which is partially true,” he said.
“And we want women and everybody to advance, but we can’t do it at the expense of another group,” he added.
This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
