Just before Joe Biden dropped out of the Presidential race, polls showed a head-spinning turn in the youth electorate. Since the Obama years, voters under the age of thirty had been a solid, enthusiastic part of the Democratic coalition. But in early July, according to Pew Research, registered voters in that age group were identifying more with the G.O.P.—and by a double-digit margin. Though some commentators tried to brush it off—“Sample noise?” an analyst at ABC News wondered—it echoed other polls and piqued liberal fears that the youth had taken a hard, Trumpian turn.
In the past year, I’ve interviewed dozens of young voters across the country. I kept asking myself: Was Trump doing something right, or was Biden doing something very, very wrong? Three weeks into Kamala Harris’s campaign, we seem to have our answer. The news for the Democrats is full-blast, coconut-tree thrills. While Biden had idled behind Trump in surveys and vibes, Harris quickly caught up and even overtook the former President. Young people, including in battleground states, are now choosing Harris over Trump by as many as twenty-four points. Harris has inspired endless memes and TikTok tributes, and a flood of donations—three hundred and ten million dollars in July, and thirty-six million dollars within a day of the announcement that the Minnesota governor, Tim Walz, would be her running mate. A hundred and seventy thousand people signed up to volunteer for her campaign in her first week as the presumptive nominee. I was amazed by how quickly that iconic photo of Trump, pumping his fist in Butler, Pennsylvania, after the attempt on his life, faded from our screens.
Whatever forbearance young Democrats and anti-Trumpers had mustered when it came to Biden is now transforming into a mix of relief and genuine zeal. “Harris is able to connect with culture young people care about,” Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the president of NextGen, one of the largest youth-voting groups, told me. “She has a much more coherent message that goes straight to Trump. Biden’s message was more conflict-averse.” John Della Volpe, of Harvard’s Institute of Politics, which conducts an influential youth poll, told me that this moment feels similar to the founding of March for Our Lives, in 2018, after the high-school massacre in Parkland, Florida. “Overnight, there seems to be someone who’s listening,” he said. “It’s provided this unique combination of hopefulness I saw with younger people in 2007 and 2008 around Obama, with the urgency and fight that was so powerful post-Parkland.”
I called two progressive swing-state organizers, both in their twenties, to hear more about the Harris effect. Mary-Pat Hector, the head of Rise, in Atlanta, a national nonprofit that mobilizes young voters, was getting used to a new level of energy among her staff. “It was very difficult the past few months, prior to Biden’s announcement,” she said. “Our students were chasing down voters. Now voters are chasing organizers down, trying to get involved.” Rise’s political-action fund endorsed Harris immediately after she declared her intention to become the nominee. Hector, who is Black and went to a historically Black college, believes that Harris’s commitment to economic issues such as health-care access and student-debt forgiveness, combined with her identity as a Black and Asian woman, will continue to attract young voters—in Georgia, Wisconsin, Arizona, and other battleground states where Rise has a presence. “She represents the progress that is what this country stands for,” Hector told me. “She also represents the constituency itself—we are one of the most diverse generations.”
On the last day of July, just after Arizona’s primary election, I reached Leila Winbury, a recent graduate of Arizona State University and an organizer with two electoral nonprofits, Arizona Native Vote and Generation Vote. Winbury had cast her ballot in the Democratic primary, but was tracking the more consequential outcomes on the Republican side. (The results were leaning MAGA.) Though her views are more progressive than most mainstream Democrats’—especially on climate and Palestine—she was finding Harris a bit easier to support than Biden, as were the voters she was meeting. “Across the board, people are just happy Biden stepped down and that it’s not an old white man,” she told me. Reproductive rights were a top concern; she herself had been affected by crackdowns on abortion care in Arizona. “What I keep telling people is, we have to fight for what we have left, to make sure we’re not losing more,” she said.
Before Biden removed himself from the race, Harris was most visible as the Administration’s ambassador on reproductive health, “which was the top issue for youth in 2022 and remains a top-five issue,” Abby Kiesa, of CIRCLE, a center at Tufts University that studies youth politics, told me. But abortion is usually framed as an issue that only affects young women. What of young men? In two polls from earlier this year, young men preferred Trump to Biden by fourteen points, causing a panic among Democrats. “America’s new political war pits young men against young women,” a headline in the Wall Street Journal read. The Guardian asked, “Young men in the US used to lean left. Could they now hand Trump the presidency?” Much of the Biden-Harris agenda had promised to benefit young, working-age men—the jobs baked into the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, investments to prevent the opioid overdoses and suicides that have afflicted so many men without college degrees—but those achievements haven’t seemed to resonate.
There are some indications that Harris actually has more pull with young men than Biden did. One poll has her leading Trump by seventeen points among men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine who are registered to vote (though she, like Biden, trails Trump among all men that age). Perhaps the excitement (and financing) being generated by Coach Walz and White Dudes for Harris will draw young American men back to the Democrats—and prove that Trump, J. D. Vance, Hulk Hogan, and Kid Rock aren’t the only models of masculinity.
The Harris-Walz ticket has a tricky task ahead. They must maintain a buzzy, youthful image and embrace the appeal of certain kinds of identity politics without giving up on an older, Midwestern, class-based universalism that the Democratic Party once stood for, and which will be crucial for the campaign to win in states like Pennsylvania. Can a pro-labor, tax-the-rich, conservationist, health-and-education platform sway the young men in Trump’s orbit? “I do believe we can convince some men to come away from Trump,” Hector, the organizer in Atlanta, told me. “Young voters, especially young, male, Black voters, may not be on campuses or voter rolls or spoken to by campaigns or voter-engagement orgs. The only way they’ll have that conversation is if we go to them.” ♦
