Young voters turned out in record numbers in Arizona in 2020. Trump is making inroads with them now.
10/22/2024 06:00 PM EDT
PHOENIX — Young people may be in their voting era. But many don’t plan to cast their ballots for Kamala Harris — and Democrats in Arizona are warning it could hobble her here.
Youth voters turned out in record numbers in Arizona in 2020, helping to flip the state blue for Joe Biden. But four years later, some Democratic strategists fear the inroads Donald Trump has made over the last four years with younger voters — particularly with young men and young Latinos — is eating away at one of the party’s core, but most fickle, constituencies.
And while Harris faces similar challenges with youth voters nationally, including in Michigan, nowhere are they more clear than in the West, where young Latinos alone make up more than 40 percent of all newly eligible voters.
Even some young voters who say they will vote for Democrats in other races here are not supporting Harris, recent polling suggests. In the most recent New York Times/Siena College poll, Trump leads Harris by 5 points in Arizona, even as Democratic Senate candidate Ruben Gallego leads GOP Senate hopeful Kari Lake by 7 points. The gap with youth voters in Arizona is even more stark: Harris leads Trump 53-44 among 18 to 29 year olds, while Gallego leads Lake 58-28.
Jacob Marson, executive director of the youth-focused organization Keep Arizona Blue, said his group has talked to “tons” of young people who are engaged on the issues but disillusioned with the process.
“They’ve been disenfranchised with the political system. They’re not into candidates,” Marson said. “They’ve been told things, and they don’t see a difference in their lives.”
According to exit polls, no Democratic presidential candidate in modern history has won with less than 60 percent of the youth vote, a threshold Biden met in 2020. Challenges surveying younger voters, including capturing a representative sample of them, make it hard to know exactly where Harris is at. But polls suggest that Harris is flirting with, but perhaps not quite meeting, that threshold.
While the Harvard Youth Poll shows Harris leading Trump 64 percent to 32 percent among likely voters under 30, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS last month found Harris with a much smaller 12-point lead with likely voters under the age of 35. (Those numbers are much more comfortable than the ones Democrats saw under Biden, who was at one point running essentially neck-and-neck with Trump for the youth vote.)
“She’s knocking on that door,” said John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics who has long studied youth voters and runs the Harvard Youth Poll. “I think she’s comfortably in the mid-50s.” (Volpe also runs a research firm that has conducted polls for a PAC supporting Harris.)
The Harris campaign still believes there’s time to woo younger voters, including young men and younger Latinos. On Tuesday, the campaign highlighted economic policies it said would help Latino men, and Harris, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff are all participating in Hispanic media interviews this week, building on their “Hombres con Harris” effort, which kicked off in Arizona.
“These undecided voters are just tuning in now to the election and are getable in this last stretch when the election is finally real to them,” campaign spokesperson Kevin Munoz said.
But the mid-50s may not be enough for Harris in a close race. And even if she can increase her numbers, she’ll still have to turn those voters — and get them to vote not just for other Democrats on the ticket, but for her. In 2020, more Arizonans cast ballots for Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly than for Biden, and some Democrats fear the same thing could happen this time around with Gallego and Harris.
Progressive organizations that focus on youth voters say that one of Harris’
biggest challenges is persuading younger people the Biden-Harris administration has done good things for them — and what, specifically, she will do as president. It’s harder, they say, for her to demonstrate the impact of more nebulous and longer-term work on issues like climate change and gun control than it is, for instance, for her to show how the administration delivered for seniors by capping the price of insulin at $35 under Medicare.
“The question becomes, ‘What are Kamala and Democrats doing? Because we haven’t really seen a shift.’ And so the conversations at the door often are a little bit longer because there’s a lot more voter education that has to happen,” said Alejandra Gomez, executive director of the progressive group Living United for Change in Arizona. “And then because of the dysfunction and polarization, there’s also just a lot more, in Spanish it’s like, resignación — resignation. We’re resigned, like, well this is what it is, so we have to really walk people back from that.”
Some young people, frustrated with the political process, are sitting out the election altogether. Others, who have spent all of their adult lives under Biden’s administration and an economic crunch they blame him for, are casting ballots for Trump, who last took office at a time many of them were in elementary school.
“I don’t know if I would say [Trump] was my first choice, but I also don’t think that Kamala is very good. Just some of the things that she says, they make me so anxious,” said Shay Gardner, a 19-year-old Arizona State University student, on a recent Tuesday morning in downtown Phoenix. “There are things Trump says that make me anxious, too. Ultimately, it’s just trying to decide, who do I think will do the least damage over the next four years — and then hopefully things might get better.”
The Harris campaign has taken a three-pronged approach to reaching youth voters: on college campuses, online and elsewhere in the community, including concerts, music festivals, sporting events and bars. This fall, it launched a back-to-school push on 150 college campuses in battleground states, including targeted digital and on-campus ads, campaign events on campus and a doubling of youth organizing staff.
And, aware of the low levels of trust for traditional media, including among youth voters, the campaign has leaned on influencers — including those whose audiences skew male, like the Track Star show and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker — and meme accounts to get its message out through social media, like Instagram, TikTok and Twitch. It has also placed digital ads on sites geared toward male audiences, like the video game websites IGN and Fandom; fantasy sports, sports betting, and sports news sites like DraftKings and Yahoo Sports; as well as on more than 100 mobile video games. In Arizona, the campaign has been reaching out specifically to younger Latino voters at local restaurants, barber shops and lowrider events.
“I’m in a car club, and the conversations we have even within our car clubs, it gets very interesting — and we’re starting to see more and more of them flip and lean towards Harris,” said Arizona state Rep. Cesar Aguilar, a Democrat and the youngest legislator in the state. “They’re finally having those difficult conversations that need to be had.”
Trump and his allies, meanwhile, have invested tens of millions of dollars into reaching out to young people, including through the so-called Send the Vote initiative. And the youth-focused organization Turning Point Action has been a key force in mobilizing politically motivated youth on the right, in the last month holding large-scale voter registration drives and passing out MAGA hats at Arizona State University, the University of Arizona and Grand Canyon University.
“We have never seen youth enthusiasm anywhere near this for the Republican candidate,” said Andrew Kolvet, a Turning Point Action spokesperson. “It’s cool to be conservative if you’re young. Like, if you love America, and you’re proud to be American, and you want to be proud to be an American, it’s cool. It’s cool now.”
“We still might not have the majority [of the youth vote]. But our job is to lose by less, it’s to close the margin there, so that there’s less ground to make up with the other demos,” Kolvet added.
Halee Dobbins, Trump’s Arizona spokesperson, said that the campaign has been “on the ground engaging with young voters directly, including Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, among others, making presence in college campuses, fairs, festivals, marketplaces, and more.”
There are signs in Arizona that it might be working for Trump. Even though experts warn that Trump’s plans could worsen inflation, the former president is promising a kind of economic change young voters are eager to see. Young men, in particular, have been increasingly drawn both to Trump’s persona and his economic message. While Harris still leads young men by 17 points, that’s a much narrower margin than the overwhelming 47-point margin she has with young women, according to the latest Harvard Youth Poll. And she may still have work to do with those young voters, too.
“I don’t like Trump as a person. I don’t think he’s a great person. And I think he needs to get Twitter taken away from him — please — because he has some really loud opinions that aren’t the best. But as a whole, his policies are much more aligned with my beliefs,” said Madelyn Dwyer, 20, who is also voting for Trump. “Our economy right now is in the gutter. I’m 20 — so I’m going into adulthood — and I want to be able to buy a house. I bought my first car and it was so much money. And I don’t want to be in crazy debt.”
Read Full Article: https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/22/harris-lags-young-voters-arizona-00184952
Comments