by Frank Holmes, reporter
Democrats nationwide are sweating bullets, as a series of new polls show a major Democratic voting bloc turning its back on Joe Biden…and his party.
Months of polling shows that Biden, the oldest president in U.S. history has made a huge slip among young voters.
An Axios-Generation Lab survey of voters under 35 found Biden holds a four-point lead over President Trump, 52 percent to 48 percent.
That sounds like good news… but it isn’t.
That same news agency, Axios, pointed to a Pew Research Center poll which found that Millennials and Gen Z supported Biden by more than 20 percentage points in 2020.
The two candidates sit on a knife’s edge, with different polls showing one candidate or another leading among young voters by a small margin.
Last November, an NBC News poll found Trump beating Biden among young people by four points. In a December New York Times poll, Trump led Biden by six points.
But remember, not all young voters are created equal. Democrats in 2024 could try to pad their popular vote margin by driving up turnout in blue states—as Hillary Clinton did in her losing efforts in 2016. But, as the former first lady found out, the way to get to the White House goes through states she skipped, like Michigan and Wisconsin.
That’s even worse news for Joe Biden.
A new poll shows Donald Trump leads Joe Biden among voters under 35 in swing states.
The reason obvious: Bidenflation.
Young voters are twice as likely as other, older voters to say the terrible economy is forcing them to vote against giving Biden—or whoever’s running his administration—another term in the Oval Office.
“They’re weighed down by student debt. They’re shut out of the housing market. They’re hit by higher costs of living. And they want President Joe Biden to listen,” reports Bloomberg News—a news agency run by 2020 Democratic presidential hopeful Michael Bloomberg.
It’s nice to run up the tally and say you have an “electoral mandate,” but it’s more important to court voters who can decide the margin between victory and defeat…and Joe Biden is putting them off.
“I voted for Biden, but he hasn’t really done much of anything, and I feel like things have gotten worse,” said Alitzel Olvera, a 23-year-old college student in Georgia, whose parents are non-citizens from Mexico.
She no longer identifies as a Democrat. This November, she plans to stay home or vote for independent candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
“I think Biden does have an enormous problem with young people because they’re living the economic realities of his policies,” former Arkansas governor and two-time Republican presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee told Newsmax on Wednesday morning.
“You’d have to be a masochist to want this again,” said Huckabee.
Even Teen Vogue, which has transformed from writing style and pop culture stories to posting glowing profiles of avowed Communists, complained, “Biden’s State of the Union Didn’t Address the Concerns of Young Voters.” (The outlet complained that Biden hadn’t gone far enough to the Left, but it still highlights dissatisfaction.)
Democratic strategists are sounding the alarm. James Carville, who led Bill Clinton’s team to two unlikely victories, called the Biden campaign’s low support among reliably left-wing voters “horrifying.”
“It’s horrifying—our numbers among younger voters, particularly younger blacks, younger Latinos…younger people of color, particularly males,” rambled the Ragin’ Cajun on “Carville’s Classroom.”
“We’re not shedding them,” Carville corrected. “They’re leaving in droves.”
Carville thinks the ongoing war between Israel and Hamas hits “deep” among younger voters, “and I think it’s a lot deeper than just progressive advocates or young people or college campuses,” said Carville two months ago. “I hope the president can get some kind of ceasefire and take this off the front burner because, frankly, its damage politically is pretty substantial.”
Carville, whose job is to think about every scenario in politics, said he couldn’t wrap his mind around the impact of an ongoing Middle Eastern war come this summer. “If we get to Chicago at the convention and this thing is still going on,” said Carville, “I don’t want to think about what‘s going to happen there.”
But it’s not clear that the issue would sway much: Pollsters last December tried plying voters with push-poll “information” bragging about Biden’s position on Gaza, abortion, and “Trump’s norm-violating behavior”…and it hardly moved the needle.
“Taken together, these results show little movement among young Democrats,” the pollster found.
One thing might: The new Axios poll also “found 4 percent of young voters would consider changing their vote if Swift endorsed Biden or Trump,” according to The Hill.
Will America go from Swift Boats to Swifties in 20 years?
Looking at these results, Democrats might want to listen to the advice of 21-year-old college student Essence Spence of Georgia, who suggested: “Biden? Maybe he should take a step down, relax, and go on vacation.”
Take off the next four years.
Frank Holmes is a veteran journalist and an outspoken conservative that talks about the news that was in his weekly article, “On The Holmes Front.”