Trending
What's with young voters? It's a question prompted by two surprising and perhaps contradictory developments that are out of line with conventional wisdom and prevailing expectations among political observers.
One is the sharp difference in opinion between young voters and their elders on the Hamas atrocities against Israel. A post-Oct. 7 poll by Quinnipiac University showed respondents under 35 disapproving of Israel's response to Hamas' atrocities, 52% to 32%, while those over 35 approved by a wider margin.
Young voters' views are out of line with President Joe Biden's strong rhetorical support of Israel, which has been attacked by multiple young staffers, media personnel and activist leaders. There's evidence it is costing him young people's votes.
The other development is a shift, compared to 2020, away from Biden and toward former President Donald Trump among black and Hispanic people under the age of 45, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll focusing on six target states.
Analyst Nate Cohn points out that nonwhite respondents under 45 said they favored Biden over Trump, 68% to 29%, in 2020, but they now say they would favor him by 49% to 42%.
Among nonwhites over 45, support for Biden fell by a smaller amount, from 73%-26% to 63%-29%. Movement among white respondents was about the same among those under 45 and statistically insignificant among those above 45.
These two developments seem to be pointing in opposite directions, with young voters veering left on Israel/Hamas and right on Biden/Trump. My tentative explanation is that we're looking at different halves of the young age cohort, with the college-educated (or -indoctrinated) voter standing to the left of the larger electorate and noncollege young people (black, Hispanic and Asian as well as white) moving to the right.
The leftward lurch among college-indoctrinated young people is something I have picked up in city elections. Just as we've seen since the 1970s a graduate student proletariat dominant in university towns from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Berkeley, California, in the last decade, we've seen an emerging barista Left in large central cities.
The New York Times' superb interactive map shows the neighborhoods where such voters predominated in New York City's decisive June 2021 mayoral primary -- in lower-rent neighborhoods within commuting distance of Manhattan, such as Astoria, Queens, and Williamsburg and Bushwick, Brooklyn. These are the same places where white voters favored Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) over Hillary Clinton in the April 2016 Democratic presidential primary.
In 2021, these areas were the base for left-winger Maya Wiley, while more affluent whites in Manhattan favored the more centrist Kathryn Garcia. But both were narrowly edged by the black former police officer Eric Adams, who carried almost all black and Hispanic precincts.