Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during a conversation at the White House Asian American and Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Forum at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., on May 3, 2023. | Source: MANDEL NGAN / Getty
In what could have broad implications for the 2024 election, a new poll found that the nation’s youngest voters overwhelmingly support Vice President Kamala Harris.
The Economist/YouGov.com poll was conducted between April 29 and May 2 and surveyed 1,500 adults.
Among them were voters aged 18-29 years old — also known as Generation Z — who expressed their approval of Harris in no uncertain terms and had extreme faith in her ability to be president.
When it comes to approving of Harris’ job performance, 60% of the Gen Z voters polled indicated they either somewhat approve or strongly approve of her as vice president. Aside from Black voters as a whole, those were by far the strongest approval numbers for Harris of any demographic surveyed.
When asked whether Harris qualified to be president, 52% of the Gen Z voters responded in the affirmative. That’s second only to Black voters’ 58%.
When it came to the topic of whether Gen Z voters think Harris is honest and trustworthy, 52% of the young respondents said yes. That’s in comparison to 61% of Black voters responding the same way.
Finally, on likeability, 51% of the Gen Z voters surveyed responded in the affirmative regardless of whether they are with her politics. Sixty percent of Black voters responded similarly.
Harris’ approval matters because Republicans have been suggesting the morbid idea that President Joe Biden’s age (he’s 80 years old) increases the chances of him not being able to fully serve another term should he be reelected. Those politics of fear have been employed by conservatives like Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley in an effort to scare people at the prospects of Harris, 58, becoming president, an ascension that would make her the first woman and Black woman commander-in-chief.
“If you vote for Joe Biden, you really are counting on a President Harris,” Haley told Fox News during an interview last week. “Because the idea that he would make it until 86 years old” — the age Biden would be at the end of a second term — “is not something that I think is likely.”
Beneath the surface, the polling numbers among young voters, in particular, could bode well for Biden’s reelection campaign, which he and Harris just announced last week.
It’s already a foregone conclusion that the vast majority of Black voters will cast ballots for Democrats, but the Gen Z voters’ electoral presence next year is expected to be pivotal and could prove to make all the difference come Election Day.
Not to mention, Gen Zers’ disdain for Republicans is well documented.
“Republicans don’t have a messaging problem with younger voters, they have a values problem with younger voters,” John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics, told the Hill last month. “The problem is their values and vision are misaligned and the messengers are not trustworthy currently.”
A Brooking Institution report from earlier this year similarly found that young voters are poised to have a major impact in the 2024 election.
“Younger Americans are tilting the electoral playing field strongly towards the Democrats and making it very likely that the ‘over/under’ line in American politics will be 45, if not 50, for at least the rest of this decade,” the research group wrote.
One of the primary reasons why data shows Gen Zers are voting more for Democrats is because they support issues championed by liberals, such as gun control, abortion rights, climate change and LGBTQ issues, topics in which Republicans appear to be on the wrong side of history.
This is America.
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