(Supporters at a rally for former President Donald J. Trump on Wednesday in Freeland, Mich.Credit…Doug Mills/TNYT)
Politics Without Trump? His Youngest Fans Barely Remember It.
NYTS freak out!
May 4, 2024
Democrats call Donald J. Trump dangerous. Republicans see him as revolutionary. For young Trump voters, he is just normal.
When Donald J. Trump held a rally in Rome, Ga., in March, his audience included a second-generation supporter and first-time rallygoer named Luke Harris.
“My parents were always supporters of him — especially when he was going against Hillary,” recalled Mr. Harris, who was in sixth grade in Cartersville, Ga., when Mr. Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 to win the presidency.
Mr. Harris, now a 19-year-old student at Kennesaw State University, “just grew up looking at him, listening, watching him,” he said. “I kind of grew into it.”
Mr. Trump’s victory, to supporters and detractors alike, represented a profound break with politics as usual in the United States. People who voted against him feared he would turn the American presidency upside down. People who voted for him hoped he would.
But for the youngest Trump supporters participating in their first presidential election this year, Mr. Trump represents something that is all but impossible for older voters to imagine: the normal politics of their childhood.
Charlie Meyer, a 17-year-old high school student who volunteered at a Trump rally in Green Bay, Wis., last month, said he was first drawn to Mr. Trump at 13, during his presidency, because of his views on abortion, which resonated with his own as a Christian.
He has little memory of pre-Trump politics. “I was too young at the time,” he said.
Although President Biden continues to lead among 18- to 29-year-olds in most polls, several surveys in recent weeks show Mr. Trump performing much more strongly with young voters than he was at the same point in 2020, and more strongly than he was against Mrs. Clinton at the same point in 2016.
In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll, from last month, Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden were neck and neck among 18- to 29-year-olds. In the latest Harvard Youth Poll, conducted in March by the Harvard Institute of Politics, Mr. Trump trails by eight points.
“He’s not anywhere close to actually winning,” said John Della Volpe, the Harvard poll’s director, who polled young voters for the Biden campaign in 2020, when Mr. Biden ultimately beat Mr. Trump among 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points. But “he’s doing as well as any other Republican nominee at this stage of an election since 2012, and that’s meaningful.”
Mr. Della Volpe and other pollsters note that these findings come with a wealth of caveats. Mr. Trump’s relatively good standing with young voters is at odds with their broadly liberal views on most issues, which have led them to favor Democratic candidates for decades.
In polls like Harvard’s, Mr. Biden performs much more strongly among registered or likely voters than he does in polls of all adults, suggesting that he is weakest with those least interested in the race. Young people, who are often late in following elections, appear to be especially disengaged from this year’s race, a contest between two familiar candidates in their 70s and 80s.
“It’s incredibly early to be taking their temperature on the candidates and the election,” said Daniel A. Cox, the director of the American Enterprise Institute Survey Center on American Life, who noted that polls have shown young voters paying far less attention to this year’s election than they did in 2020. “A lot of them simply haven’t tuned in.”
Still, the Trump campaign sees opportunity in the signs of shifts in the demographic. A stark gender divide has emerged in young people’s politics in recent years, in which Republicans enjoy an advantage among young men. In a Times/Siena poll in February, young voters were far more likely to say they were personally helped by Mr. Trump’s policies than by Mr. Biden’s, and far more likely to say they were personally hurt by Mr. Biden’s than by Mr. Trump’s (though in both cases, about half said neither president’s policies had made much difference either way).
John Brabender, a media consultant to Mr. Trump’s campaign who focuses on young voters, pointed to the long shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, which transformed and defined high school and college experiences for many of this year’s young voters. That discontent hurt Mr. Trump in 2020, but Mr. Brabender argues it is more likely to hurt Mr. Biden in 2024.
“Their whole life has been delayed compared to previous generations,” he said. “And they’re extremely frustrated with Biden for that.”..
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