OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
President Joe Biden and his Democrats are lurching so far to the left that one of the party’s primary voting blocs is bailing on them at an increasingly rapid pace, which likely will impact future elections beginning next year.
According to a new analysis by researchers at Harvard University, the 18-29-year-old demographic, or Generation Z, is trending less liberal and more toward conservatism, which is horrible news for Biden and his party.
John Della Volpe, the polling director at the Harvard Kennedy Institute of Politics, found in his study that younger Americans are shifting further away from the Democratic Party, while a separate study found that high school senior boys are also 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, almost 39 percent of the participants in the Harvard Youth Poll said that they identified as Democrats. But, by the following spring, the 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 in 2023. And, the analysis found the percentage of youth voters who identified as Republicans rose slightly from 23 percent to 24 percent, according to The Hill.
Also, Della Volpe discovered that the percentage of respondents who said they would 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.”
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.
As for Biden, Democratic voters are becoming increasingly disenfranchised with him.
A survey from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs found that Americans were more likely to say that Biden’s age would be a concern than former President Trump, who is only a few years younger than the president.
The poll found that less than one-third — 32 percent — of respondents believe that Biden is mentally fit to serve as President, while 68 percent expressed doubts about his mental acuity.
