Democrats know the youth vote is critical to winning elections this cycle, and Kamala Harris’ campaign is seeing plenty of energy among younger voters.
The problem is, no one is quite sure how much of that enthusiasm will translate on Election Day.
Overall, young voter engagement has increased over the last decade, and young voters were a key factor in Joe Biden’s victory in 2020. (More than half of the people aged 18 to 29 voted in 2020, an 11% increase from 2016, according to data from Tufts University.)
But in 2022, an election where Republicans took back the House, only 36% of voters were under the age of 50. In 2018, an election where Democrats dominated, 40% of voters were under the age of 50, according to Pew Research Center.
“Decreased turnout among these more reliably Democratic voters contributed to the GOP’s better performance,” Pew concluded.
Young women, particularly, have become stalwarts of the Democratic Party. More than 40% of young women consider themselves liberal, which is 15 points higher than young men. But both young men and young women consider themselves liberal at high rates, even if that self-identification is translating less when it comes to men at the ballot box.
Clearly, there’s an opportunity for Democrats with young voters.
When Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, it sparked a new wave of enthusiasm among a number of groups, particularly the younger generation within those groups.
Young progressives who’d soured on Biden because of his response to the war in Gaza began warming up to Harris. Young Black men who felt Biden hadn’t done enough to improve the economy flocked to Zoom calls and raised millions for Harris’ campaign. Even Rep. Jim Clyburn, who was worried younger generations had succumbed to misinformation during Biden’s days, now preaches about how Democrats need to “harness this energy.”
Harris’ campaign, seeing an opportunity with younger voters, launched “Students for Harris-Walz” and “Creators for Kamala,” both unique national organizing programs intended to reach voters on high school and college campuses and on social media.
But the enthusiasm boost hasn’t been enough to give Harris a decisive edge over Donald Trump. Polls show she’s in a dead heat with the former president. And even though she’s doing markedly better than Biden was just a couple of months ago, surveys from NBC News and American University found her either doing about the same as Biden’s 2020 numbers with younger voters — or even doing worse.
Democratic operatives — in Harris’ campaign and at independent organizations working to elect Harris — had a number of theories to explain why Harris wasn’t exactly translating the new enthusiasm with younger voters into better polling numbers.
In their minds, the main culprit? Misinformation.
Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, told NOTUS that students she spoke with at a recent college voter activation event noted an uptick in anti-Harris memes on social media. She called the anti-Harris efforts on social media “sophisticated” and emphasized that there’s a direct tie between “negative information” and skepticism toward Harris.
“If you’re getting constantly negative information, and all of your information is coming from social media, or certainly designed, structured to make you question the person you might want to support,” she said. “You question whether or not you should participate.”
Antjuan Seawright, a consultant for the Democratic National Committee who’s been in regular communication with the Harris campaign, told NOTUS that younger voters can generally relate to Harris because of her personal attributes and her legislative record being “on the right side of history.” As he put it, Harris and younger voters share a “connective tissue.”
But, he said, the “misinformation targeted with precision at younger voters and vulnerable populations” has made it harder for Harris to earn their trust — particularly young Black men frustrated with the “pace of progress in America” who are now flocking to Trump.
“The pace has not been fast enough for a lot of African American men who feel like, since the beginning of time, we have been left out,” he said. “Look, as a 39-year-old Black man from rural South Carolina, I’m frustrated too. The way we cure the frustration above is by taking the voting pill, and we have to keep taking it every time there’s an election.”
The Harris campaign said it’s ramping up its outreach to young men online, on television and on the ground, particularly online on Twitch and TikTok. Twitch has a user base that skews male, and on TikTok, the campaign leverages viral trends to break through and reach men through ways that are “organic and relatable.”
“We know the best way to break through to undecided voters at this point in the cycle is an all the above strategy and one through leveraging voters’ own networks of friends and families,” a spokesperson for the campaign said in a statement. “So while Trump relies on a handful of podcast appearances to make his case for banning abortion nationally and kicking kids off their health insurance, Vice President Harris and her campaign will be everywhere, making her case for a future where young people don’t just get by, but get ahead.”
In other instances, operatives pointed to policy disagreements to explain why Harris isn’t excelling with younger voters.
Scott Holiday, political director at Detroit Action, told NOTUS that young voters in Michigan still distrust Harris because of her stance on the war in Gaza.
“We’re at college campuses across the state and high schools,” he said. “So we’re having conversations and framing the choice as the choice between what are your interests, looking at platforms and seeing whose platform, you know, more aligns with your interests.”
Quentin James, executive director at Collective PAC, said he was seeing the same in his work on the national level.
“We’ve heard a lot of issues from people around the challenge in Israel and Gaza and how the administration has responded to that,” he said. “Kamala Harris has been much more progressive on the issue than President Biden has, and that will also help with young people.”
Whether or not it will make a difference — or already is — remains to be seen. Many operatives said it was too early to make sweeping conclusions about Harris’ performance with younger voters, particularly because polls are rapidly changing with all the major news developments and because many voters are just starting to tune into the presidential race.
“People aren’t yet paying attention,” James of Collective PAC said. “A lot of young people aren’t really tuned in. But they will be over the next few weeks as early voting starts. It is just the nature of schools getting back into session.”
Others argued the comparisons between Harris and past Democratic candidates were unfair and somewhat inaccurate, given how little time Harris has had to build her campaign and how the consumption of information has changed recently.
“If we’re comparing to 2020, that in itself is such an anomaly of an election,” said Ashley Aylward, a research manager at HIT Strategies, which is an official pollster for the Harris campaign. “We were all at home during a pandemic, staring at our screens, looking for reasons to hope and not being able to avoid any sort of information and having ballots mailed directly to every individual.”
For Seawright, the comparisons are moot because Harris and Biden just aren’t the same.
“The fact of the matter is she and Joe Biden are two different candidates, two different people with two different backgrounds and experiences,” he said. “So the expectation is a lot different.”
“As a Black woman,” he said of Harris, “the journey is twice as hard for half as much.”
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Tinashe Chingarande is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.