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“You know, all this stuff about Brat Summer and all that jazz. So I want to take a look at Trump versus Democratic margin. Just remind folks where we were at the end of the 2020 campaign. Joe Biden won voters under the age of 35 by 21 points,” Enten said. “What do we see with Kamala Harris? Well, she’s still ahead, but the margin here is significantly less than what we saw with Joe Biden back in 2020. She’s up by just nine points. You may make the argument that was better than Biden was doing before he got out, but compared to that Democratic baseline, where Democrats have historically in presidential elections, at least this century, been carrying that young vote by 20 or more percentage points, she is way down from that. ”
“So if this is unique support among young voters, I would like to know what non-unique support is. Is it even worse than this? She was doing slightly better. Maybe Biden was up by like six on average or five. This is maybe slightly better, but this is not game-changing stuff, Mr. Berman,” Enten noted.
Enten also explained that Kamala Harris doesn’t seem to energize or inspire the young voter to actually vote.
“But let’s also talk about motivation, right? Because it’s not just who you would support, it’s whether or not you’d come out to the polls,” Enten said. “And this I think is rather interesting. Do Democrats say they’re more motivated to turn out after Biden left the race? Well, we do see a significant portion of Democrats who say yes, 39%. The thing I was interested in: Was it disproportionately younger voters who said that they were more likely to turn out or more motivated to turn out? And what we see here is it’s 42%. Not a big difference between 42 and 39%. So this idea, again, that the vice president has unique potential to dig in and get young voters to turn out, John, it’s just not there in the numbers despite all the internet memes that are going around.”
Enten also noted a recent trend of young voters identifying more and more as Republicans.
“So when we say that Harris is doing worse than Biden, it’s not that she’s uniquely bad. It’s rather she’s fighting uphill,” he said. “She’s trying to fight against a wave that is going against the Democrats among young voters. And Harris may be unique in some ways, maybe she does slightly better than the generic Democrat, but not all that much.”
