When Donald J. Trump held a rally in Rome, Georgia, in March, the audience included a second-generation supporter named Luke Harris who was attending a rally for the first time.
“My parents always supported him, especially when he “That’s what happened when I was running against Hillary,” he recalls.
“I just grew up watching him, listening to him, watching him,” said Harris, now a 19-year-old student at Kennesaw State University. “I’ve kind of grown into it.”
Trump’s victory marked a deep break with normal American politics for supporters and detractors alike. Those who voted against him feared he would overturn the American presidency. The people who voted for him wanted him to be that way.
But for Trump’s youngest supporters, who are entering the presidential race for the first time this year, he represents something that older voters cannot imagine: the normal politics of their childhoods. is.
Charlie Meyer, a 17-year-old high school student who volunteered at a Trump rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last month, said he first became attracted to Trump when he was 13 years old while Trump was president. He said that was his opinion. , which resonated with himself as a Christian.
He has little memory of politics before Trump. “I was too young then,” he said.
While most polls show President Biden continuing to lead among 18- to 29-year-olds, several surveys in recent weeks have shown that Trump is gaining more ground among younger voters than he did at the same time in 2020. It has shown to be a much stronger performance than President Biden. He was running against Clinton at the same point in 2016.
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll last month found Trump and Biden tied among 18- to 29-year-olds. The latest Harvard Youth Poll, conducted in March by the Harvard Institute of Politics, shows Trump with an 8-point lead.
“He’s a long way from actually winning,” said John Della Volpe, a Harvard pollster who surveyed young voters for the Biden campaign in 2020. – Beat Trump as runner-up in the 29-year-old age group. 24 points. But “he’s done as well as any other Republican candidate at this stage of the election since 2012, and that makes sense.”
Della Volpe and other pollsters say these findings come with a number of caveats. Mr. Trump’s relatively good standing among young voters contradicts the broad liberal views on most issues that have supported Democratic candidates for decades.
In polls like the Harvard University poll, Biden is doing much better among registered voters and potential voters than in polls of all adults, and Biden is doing far better among registered voters and potential voters than in polls of all adults. It suggests that he is the weakest. Young people, who tend to lag behind in voting, appear not to be particularly involved in this year’s election, a contest between two familiar candidates in their 70s and 80s.
“Young voters are incredibly quick to show enthusiasm for candidates and elections,” said Daniel A. Cox, director of the Center for American Life Research at the American Enterprise Institute, adding that polls show young voters are less interested in the issue. He pointed out that it shows that the company has not paid the amount. “A lot of them just aren’t watching.”
Still, the Trump campaign sees opportunity in signs of demographic change. In recent years, there has been a noticeable disparity between men and women in youth politics, and the Republican Party has an advantage among young people. A Times-Siena poll conducted in February found that young voters were far more likely to say that Mr. Trump’s policies had helped them personally than Mr. Biden’s; were far more likely to say they had been personally hurt by the policy. President Trump’s policies (although in both cases, about half said there had been no significant change in either president’s policies one way or the other).
John Brabender, a media consultant for the Trump campaign who focuses on young voters, said the long period of the coronavirus pandemic has changed and defined the high school and college experience for many young voters this year. He pointed out the shadow. That dissatisfaction hurt Trump in 2020, Brabender argues, but is more likely to hurt Biden in 2024.
“Their life span is delayed compared to previous generations,” he says. “And they’re very unhappy with Biden about that.”
Biden successfully ran in 2020 by appealing to voters’ desire to return to the pre-Trump status quo, but in this election, the Biden campaign has focused attention on Trump’s departure from democratic norms as president. Ta. However, for voters who were in middle school when Trump was elected, these appeals may not carry much weight.
They have formed their opinions and identities within a political context in which he has always been present rather than cataclysmic.
“That was the world I came from,” said Makai Henry, 18, a student at Florida International University in Miami. “For better or worse, I think this is the era of Trump.”
For some first-time voters, this makes Mr. Trump feel more like an afterthought in their political development than a defining figure.
Alison Langston, 20, who became a supporter of Trump during his presidency, said the change was less about the former president and more about broader Republican values.
Langston, who was in middle school when Trump was elected, was living in Orlando, Florida, with her Republican parents and sister, who supported Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders in the Democratic presidential primary. She watched the presidential debates and said that although she was skeptical of both Clinton and Trump, “I thought I was more of a Democrat.”
However, in high school and college, she realized that she was on the right track. When her mother and her sister lost their jobs at the beginning of the pandemic, she had to support her family on part-time restaurant wages. She began questioning Democratic priorities such as student loan forgiveness, a proposal she now considers unreasonable given her other demands for federal spending.
“I agree with a lot of things that Democrats like, like free college,” she said. “But we understand that in a world like this, that is no longer possible.”
An unexpected miscarriage at the age of 19 led her to reconsider her views on abortion, and she now opposes abortion, with some exceptions.
She also rejected liberal views on transgender politics, despite being bisexual and supporting gay rights. “At the end of the day, there are only two genders for her,” she said. She plans to vote for Trump in her first presidential election this year.
“He’s following what this country was built on,” she said.
Mr. Henry followed the opposite trajectory. The son of Dominican immigrants, whose politics were center-left, he attended Barack Obama rallies with his mother from an early age, and his mother joined Clinton’s campaign in 2016 when he was in sixth grade. I also participated in the event.
When Trump was elected, she recalled, “I wasn’t a Trump supporter, but he was kind of interesting.”
In middle school and high school, he developed an interest in current events, watching daily YouTube videos from experts like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson, and organizations like Turning Point USA and Prager University. , I began to consider myself a conservative.
But he eventually expanded his media reach, and with that and the success of federal pandemic stimulus under both the Trump and Biden administrations, he became more skeptical of conservative claims about deficit spending and government programs. became.
Henry, who now considers himself an independent and is leaning toward voting for Biden in his first presidential election, believes Democrats’ warnings about the threat posed by another Trump presidency are overblown. .
“I feel like this is not necessarily a case of having to choose between two evils,” he said. “It’s between fair and ok. Trump is “meh.” ”
