President Joe Biden has a serious age problem, and it’s not that he’s 80: It’s his dreadful standing with youth voters. If he loses reelection next November—even at this early stage, there are many indications that this is a real possibility—it’s likely that his remarkably low marks from voters under 40 will be seen as a major culprit.
A recent Quinnipiac poll underscores Biden’s disastrous standing with the youth vote. The president’s favorability rating has cratered out at an almost-unbelievable 25 percent among registered voters under 35 years old. A few weeks prior, a Washington Post–ABC poll had Trump winning voters under 35 by 20 points. (The Post’s story notes that the poll differs from others taken recently, and that it may be an outlier. It’s not the only recent presidential poll that’s made publishers raise an eyebrow.)
Liberal commentators have been quick to dismiss these data points, even as they continue to pile up. It’s wise not to overreact to individual polls, especially more than a year from Election Day.
And yet, something is clearly awry between Biden and the kids, who are, arguably, the most critical demographic constituency for Democrats. In 2020, 60 percent of 18-to-29-year-old voters, by far the most Democratic-voting group by age, threw in for Joe Biden. It’s likely there are many explanations for the slide since then: Biden, hesitant to even grant interviews to the Sunday shows, has done basically zero communications outreach to any outlets or platforms that millennials and zoomers actually consume. Turning student loan payments back on before actually implementing the promised loan debt cancellation—which never would have happened without an archconservative Supreme Court’s dubious intervention against his initial proposal, of course—probably didn’t help.
Now Biden’s Israel policy threatens to deepen that divide even further. Again: It’s wise not to overreact to polls, but the data is not terribly ambiguous on this. On this issue, young voters are far from the president, who publicly remains hawkish and unstinting in a way that has not kept pace with their political attitudes (or even those, to a lesser degree, of the Democratic Party). Biden has continued to pledge unquestioning and total support for Israel, even as human rights groups sound the alarm about the threat of the Israeli military committing ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, humanitarian groups’ inability to deliver anything resembling sufficient aid to Gaza, and comments from Israeli military leaders that indicate a willingness to target civilians. Biden’s Thursday night public address on the matter, which broadcast right around the same time that Israel was bombing one of the world’s oldest churches, killing 16 people, was cheered by Fox News—which is not, incidentally, a youth outlet.
But none of the ways that Biden has responded to the conflict have been received favorably by young Americans. That same Quinnipiac poll found that 51 percent of voters under 35 say they disapprove of the United States’ sending weapons and military support to Israel—a much higher figure than the 28 percent of Americans who oppose such a policy. Only 21 percent of voters under 35 say they approve of Biden’s Israel policy; 42 percent of voters across all age brackets approve.
A CBS News poll conducted last week came to an even starker conclusion. When asked if the U.S. should send weapons and supplies to Israel, 59 percent of respondents under 30 said it should not. An even more resounding 64 percent of those between age 30 and 44—a bracket more likely to vote that carries the whole millennial generation and part of Gen X—said the U.S. should not.
Hamas’ attacks on Israeli civilians and taking of more than 200 hostages were terrible acts of terror that justifiably horrified much of the world; the president received plaudits for his forceful moral condemnation of those acts. But since then, the death toll in Gaza has continued to climb through an indiscriminate bombing campaign, while Israel prepares its ground invasion. According to the Gaza Health Ministry, more than 5,000 Palestinians, roughly 2,000 of whom are children, have already been killed. That total includes medical workers, over a dozen journalists, and 29 United Nations employees. Forty-two percent of all housing units have been destroyed in Gaza, while Israel also escalates its attacks elsewhere. According to the New York Times, “more Palestinians have been killed in the Israeli-occupied West Bank in the past few weeks than in any similar period in at least the past 15 years.” What is currently happening in Israel and Gaza is, obviously, a humanitarian crisis more than it is one of American political brinkmanship and electioneering.
But that doesn’t mean it’s not affecting American politics. Some of the trends regarding Biden’s response, though most explicit among the youth vote, are reflected elsewhere in the American electorate. Earlier this year, Gallup polling found that among Democrats, net sympathy for Palestinians outweighs net sympathy for Israelis, a change that has occurred during Biden’s time in office. The aforementioned CBS News poll shows that a slim majority of both Democrats and independents feel that the U.S. should not send weapons and supplies to Israel. Data for Progress found that 80 percent of Democrats currently believe that the “US should call for a ceasefire and a de-escalation of violence in Gaza.” To put things charitably, the president has been slow to adapt.
Although the data seems overwhelming on this point, the anecdotal evidence in Washington appears to mirror it. An open letter, signed by 411 congressional staffers, took the rare move of calling publicly for a cease-fire. Meanwhile, HuffPost has reported that the State Department is in turmoil over Biden’s unequivocal support for Israel. “There’s basically a mutiny brewing within State at all levels,” one department official told the outlet.
Anyone who’s spent time in Washington will tell you it’s a young person’s town, and that’s relevant here as well. From my conversations with Hill sources about that letter, I can affirm that those 400-odd staffers are overwhelmingly not senior-level or senior age. They’re young people expressing a widespread conviction of their generation.
Look, too, at the slowly growing list of representatives sponsoring the House’s cease-fire resolution. They’re not all young, but the list includes the House’s most prominent left-wing millennial in Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the chamber’s only Gen Z member, Maxwell Frost.
If Biden hopes to win reelection, he desperately needs to run up the score with the youth vote as he did in 2020; we can comfortably say, even 13 months from Election Day, that there are only narrow, unlikely paths back to the White House for any Democrat without that.
But he’s running out of opportunities to reverse the trend. There almost certainly will be no more significant legislation between now and Nov. 5, 2024; Congress will remain divided between a Democratic Senate and Republican House, and there is still no House speaker in sight. For now, in a rare moment of crisis, in his rare spate of public appearances, Biden is alienating young voters even further, in a manner out of step with both Democratic and independent voters.
It’s possible—appears likely, even—that Biden’s policy comes from a place of personal conviction as much as domestic political expediency. Meanwhile, joining the congressional calls for cease-fire is hardly a safe bet. Certainly, significant percentages of the electorate would welcome that, but the same polling indicates that nontrivial percentages would also be enraged. It’s a divisive issue, and domestically, there’s no “safe” option for a U.S. president.
Still, if Biden does lose in 2024, and young people don’t turn out, many Democrats will be quick to blame the listless youth for not taking seriously the stakes of the election. But that critique would also be directly applicable to Biden, who, staring down a close and critical reelection campaign that could decide the fate of American democracy, seems content to endanger votes that he needs in pursuit of an unpopular policy.
Update, Oct. 24, 2023: This article has been updated to clarify the source of the death toll numbers in Gaza at the time of publication.
