when donald trump He held a rally in Rome, Georgia in March, and his audience included supporters of King II, attending a rally for the first time. luke harris.
“My parents always supported him, especially when he was against it.” Hilary” recalled Harris, who was in sixth grade in Cartersville, Georgia, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to win the presidency in 2016.
Harris, now a 19-year-old student at Kennesaw State University, “just grew up watching and hearing and watching him,” he said. “I’ve kind of grown into it.”
Sign up for The Morning newsletter from The New York Times
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 almost impossible for older voters to imagine: the normal politics of their childhoods. There 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 this was because his way of thinking resonated with him. As a Christian himself.
He has little memory of politics before Trump. “I was too young then,” he said.
Even though I’m the president joe biden He continues to lead among 18- to 29-year-olds in most polls, and several polls in recent weeks have shown that Trump has performed much stronger with younger voters than he did during the same period in 2020. and is showing to be even stronger than he was against Clinton in the last election. Same point in 2016.
The latest New York Times/Siena College poll shows Trump and Biden tied among 18- to 29-year-olds starting last month. 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. – Outperformed Trump by 24 points among 29-year-olds. 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 is at odds with the broad liberal views on most issues that have supported Democratic candidates for decades.
In polls like the one from Harvard University, Mr. Biden performs much better among registered voters and potential voters than in polls of adults as a whole, and among those least interested in the race. This suggests that Biden is the weakest in this demographic. 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 far more interested in this year’s elections,” said Daniel Cox, director of the Center for American Life Research at the American Enterprise Institute. 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 February Times-Siena poll found that young voters were far more likely to say they were personally helped by President Trump’s policies than Biden’s, and far more likely to say they were personally hurt by Biden’s policies than Trump’s. (However, 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 Trump campaign media consultant focused on young voters, points to the long shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, which has upended and defined the high school and college experience for many young voters this year. did. That dissatisfaction hurt President Trump in 2020, Brabender argues, and will likely hurt Biden in 2024.
“Their life span is delayed compared to previous generations,” he says. “And they’re very unhappy with Biden about that.”
Mr. Biden successfully ran in 2020 by appealing to voters’ desire to return to the pre-Trump status quo, and in this election his campaign has focused attention on Mr. Trump’s departure from democratic norms as president. . 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, Trump has become more of 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 was in middle school when Trump was elected and was living in Orlando, Fla., with her Republican parents and sister, who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders (R-Vt.) in the Democratic presidential primary. . She watched the presidential debates, and although she was skeptical of Clinton and Trump, “I thought they were more Democratic,” she said.
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. He plans to vote for Trump in his first presidential election this year.
“He’s following what this country was built on,” she said.
Henry followed the opposite trajectory. The son of Dominican immigrants who practiced center-left politics, he attended Barack Obama rallies with his mother from an early age, and in 2016, when he was in the sixth grade, his mother joined Clinton. Participated in the election campaign in support of Mr.
When Trump was elected, she recalled, “I wasn’t a Trump supporter, but he was kind of funny.”
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 that, along with the success of the federal pandemic stimulus package under the Trump and Biden administrations, made him skeptical of conservative claims about deficit spending and government programs.
Mr. Henry, who now considers himself an independent and is leaning toward voting for Mr. Biden in his first presidential election, believes Democrats’ warnings about the threat posed by Mr. Trump becoming president again are overblown. thinking.
“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.” ”
Around 2024 New York Times Company
