What young voters see in Kamala Harris

Among the signs that the 2024 presidential contest is reverting to a more “normal” election is a big shift from the country’s youngest voters. After abandoning President Joe Biden in favor of third-party candidates, former President Donald Trump, or simply not voting, they have rallied to support Vice President Kamala Harris since her entrance to the race this summer.

That’s true across much of the electorate, though to differing degrees. After all, Harris took over from a candidate in political free fall. But young voters have responded with particular enthusiasm: They organized Zoom calls for her nascent campaign. Their activist groups rushed to endorse the VP. They signed up to volunteer for her campaign and registered to vote for the first time. “A breath of fresh air” was the phrase of the day, and some Gen Z activists wondered if this was what it felt like to be young during Barack Obama’s first presidential run in 2008. And, of course, you can’t forget the memes.

The conventional wisdom from pundits and pollsters was that, like any honeymoon, the good vibes could be temporary. It seemed only natural that as young voters who didn’t really know Harris learned more about her, some share of them would be turned off by elements of her political track record or personal history. And surely the usual fusillade of Trump attacks would sour some part of the electorate, including young voters, against her.

And yet, about two months later, Harris has managed to sustain that youth enthusiasm and recover much of the support Biden received in 2020. Part of that success, polls suggest, is because her campaign is tackling some deep-seated frustrations young voters have had with American politics in the Trump era: a disconnected feeling, an absence of representation, and a sense that they just aren’t being heard by the political establishment.

That appeal may be key to what’s going on with Harris and young voters. While she’s made gains with a number of groups since entering the race — independents, suburban voters, even white non-college-educated voters, to name a few — only Black voters have swung as hard in her favor as young voters have. An analysis of crosstab data from polls conducted before Biden’s dropout and after Harris’s debate performance by the former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson found a Harris gain of nearly 12 points with voters 18–29, compared to a shift of 4.2 points for the electorate at large.

“Young voters desire to be seen and heard, particularly in this presidential race that just felt really disconnected from them,” Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, cofounder of Way to Win, a political strategy group that focuses on mobilizing minority voters, told me. “The opportunity now is to present this campaign as a response to young voters’ desire for younger candidates at the top of the ticket, affirming their collective power and their ability to affect change.”

That ability may rest in part on turnout; while millennial and Gen Z voters combined are on track to make up a larger chunk of the electorate this year than they ever have, they regularly participate at lower levels than older generations. Even in 2020, a year of record young voter turnout, only about half of those younger demographic cohorts voted. And yet, turning out and winning less reliable young voters by large margins is a necessary part of any Democratic presidential victory, even if it’s not enough to swing the whole race.

Young voter enthusiasm has shot up — and stayed there

Most polls since the Democratic National Convention in August and the first Harris-Trump presidential debate last month present similar accounts of the “youth vote”: After nearly a year of bad polling for Biden, Harris has managed to open and hold a margin of support nearly equal to what Biden got four years ago.

In 2020, for context, Biden won voters under the age of 30 by about 24 points, according to post-election surveys. That result itself was a decline from the support Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama received in past cycles, but Biden had long had trouble energizing young people. Harris now has an average polling lead of about 22 points with young voters when you look at aggregated crosstab results from polls in September.

Even a return to the 2020 status quo, though, represents a dramatic shift. Before dropping out, Biden was routinely just barely leading Trump with young voters, if not falling slightly behind. Pundits and the public were regularly asking if the polls were just broken or if Biden could really be that unpopular with young people. Harris’s candidacy may have provided an answer: By late July, mere days into her campaign, she had begun to restore the Democratic edge. She was leading Trump by about 20 points in some of the same polls that had spelled doom for Biden.

Polling isn’t the only sign of this sudden reversal. Voter registration rates for young people provide another data point. According to tracking from the Democratic strategist Tom Bonier, rates of new registration for the young, particularly young Black and Hispanic women, have surged both in the immediate aftermath of Biden’s dropout and Harris’s ascension, and in the six weeks since. These statistics mirror what independent voter registration trackers, like Vote.org, say.

Polls gauging the enthusiasm of young voters and their interest in the presidential election have also shifted in the last few months. The Harvard Youth Poll, one of the best surveys of young voters out there, found significant movement in young Democrats’ enthusiasm for the election from March to September 2024. In the spring, similar shares of young Democrats (66 percent) and young Republicans (64 percent) told pollsters that they would “definitely” vote in the November election. Last month, young Democrats were much more likely to say they will vote: 74 percent compared to just 60 percent of young Republicans.

The Harvard pollsters argue that much of this boost is due specifically to Harris. Back in March, just 44 percent of self-identified Biden voters in the Harvard poll said they were enthusiastic about supporting him. In September, 81 percent of Harris voters said so. And views of Harris specifically have gotten much more positive: Her overall favorability ratings have risen since the spring, and she also holds an advantage over Trump in the kinds of personal attributes they ascribe to her and in who they trust more on most policies.

The University of Chicago Institute of Politics Youth Poll found similar shifts from its May 2024 survey to its most recent poll from late July and August, which was taken shortly after Biden exited the race. Both young Republicans and young Democrats are now paying more attention to election news, but the share of young Democrats who say they will “definitely” vote this year has risen, while the share of Republicans has stayed flat.

Taken together, these surveys and statistics suggest not only that the rush of early youth enthusiasm for Harris is sticking but that there are clear opportunities for Harris’s campaign to continue to increase these margins of support.

Harris is a symbol for some of the longer-term, deeper changes young voters want from politics

Harris’s apparent success with young voters wasn’t a given, but reckoning with just how rotten the vibes had gotten for young voters while Biden was the nominee is key to understanding how it came about. That context also explains why so many young people are projecting a new kind of hope onto Harris — and what she can still come to represent in the little over a month left of the campaign.

In addition to national-level polling, researchers and strategists are using focus groups and surveys to zoom in on young voter sentiments and better understand the “why” and “how” of their evolving support for the Democratic ticket. Fernandez Ancona’s Way to Win, for example, identified and surveyed a group of battleground state young voters to examine how young people were feeling about the country, the electoral process, and the candidates before them.

The survey was conducted this summer before Biden dropped out of the race. “One of the challenges that we saw early on with Biden’s candidacy,” Fernandez Ancona said, “was [that young people] felt like Biden had abandoned them. They felt like Biden couldn’t fight for them because … he was too old and he could no longer understand them or feel empathy for them. So that disconnect was a huge problem.”

The results were grim for Democrats and confirmed what other qualitative research of young voters has found: that young people feel like the American dream is a “fading mirage” that is increasingly “out of reach.” They were still hopeful, dreaming about what could be, but felt especially left out of political discussions, uninspired by Biden or Trump, and pressured by the cost of living, debt, and threats to abortion rights.

“I am struggling in every aspect when it comes to the cost of living, the cost of food, everything is barely making it so that I can [stay] just above water … (barely making it),” one 28-year-old Biden-supporting female participant told the researchers. Pluralities of respondents felt the same way. And more than half of them said 2024 was trending in a worse direction than any of the past few years.

“You’d see over and over again, just how young people do feel powerless and out of control, regarding their finances, their own ability to provide themselves, health care, and just the state of the world. That is something that [persists] and is still a thing we have speak to,” Fernandez Ancona said.

The results offered a clear picture of what Democrats needed to change if they wanted to win in November: Replace Biden, promote younger leadership, and offer a clearer, more positive, and more forward-looking platform that moved beyond Biden or Trump.

That’s just what has happened in the following months. “What we see in the data is that Harris is almost kind of the ideal candidate for them, because [she presents] the three things that [young people] said they wanted most: authenticity, actionable policies, and a change from the status quo,” Fernandez Ancona said. “Harris becomes that avatar for everything you are asking for. So she can possibly help solidify them as a voting block by speaking to their agency in [pushing for this change].”

Aside from representing the kind of shock to the political system that many young people were hoping for, Harris is also benefitting from a high level of trust from young people, both on the issues they said matter most and on being the “change” candidate. The University of Chicago poll, for example, found that while young people continue to disapprove of Biden, they don’t necessarily apply that same disapproval to Harris.

What all these surveys and studies also confirmed was the way these narratives of trust, change, and hope were boosted by viral memes and social media engagement. It was through social media, and TikTok in particular, that many young voters were reintroduced to Harris as a candidate and prompted to tune back into election news and look into her policies.

Still, these analyses also point to a central vulnerability for Harris, one that existed even before the summer shakeup. Young voters, and voters writ large, are still concerned about affordability and their economic prospects, and that’s the big issue holding back stronger support from young men, and young men of color, in particular. It’s the biggest issue where Trump continues to hold an advantage over Harris in the Harvard Youth Poll, it’s the most important issue in the University of Chicago poll, and it’s the major sticking point for undecided and marginal young voters in the focus groups that Harvard’s John Della Volpe, the director the youth poll, has been running. 

It also swamps the share of young voters who are concerned about the other big vulnerability Biden faced — his handling of the war in Gaza. Anywhere from 1 to 4 percent of respondents in either poll prioritized the Gaza war, though 11 percent of respondents in the UChicago poll said they were Harris voters who felt less likely to support her because of the administration’s handling of the war.

Harris, scholars and researchers say, should focus on her economic vision as young voters continue to prioritize issues and “change” in their vote choice.

“Having an economic plan and a real plan for the future — yes, she talks about the opportunity economy that she envisions, but really spelling out for people how that’s going to work and play out, and how she may get that through Congress, is going to be critical, especially for that kind of cohort, these different demographic splits of Gen Z,” Alisha Hines, the director of research at the UCLA Center for Scholars and Storytellers, told me.

Harris and her team may be getting the message. She rolled out an extensive economic policy vision in late September, followed in quick succession by a major speech and an interview with MSNBC to flesh out her plans — all of which mark a new phase of her campaign, drilling down on the policy specifics she has slowly rolled out since becoming the nominee. Polling and surveys tell us that young people want more of that. Harris has about a month left to do it.