A flood of new data on young voters has just come out and it shows their enthusiastic reaction to Vice President Kamala Harris taking over as the Democratic nominee for president. Beyond brat memes, coconut tree emojis, and nearly $2 million in sales for a camo hat to support the Harris-Walz campaign, polling insights prove that the online momentum is reflected by IRL voter sentiment. (The below surveys were conducted before Minnesota Governor Tim Walz joined the Harris campaign as her vice presidential nominee.)
Here’s what you need to know about how young people have shifted their thinking since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race.
Harris is making inroads with the young voters Biden struggled to please
Whether national polls of young registered voters or youth-focused polls in battleground states, all signs point to a spike in enthusiasm for Harris over Biden.
Fifty-six percent of 18 to 29-year-olds said they would vote for Harris if the election were held today, while 38% said they would vote for former President Donald Trump, according to a national New York Times-Siena College poll of registered voters, conducted from July 22-24. A month earlier, Trump was leading Biden with the under-30 cohort in the same survey — a huge shift from 2020, when Biden captured 61% of young voters.
Meanwhile, Harris’s favorability among young people jumped 16 points since July 3, according to an August 5 poll of registered voters under 30 in battleground states, conducted by youth pollster John Della Volpe’s Social Sphere. That same poll, first shared with Politico, found a 13-point boost in support for Harris since July in a two-way matchup with Trump.
In addition, a poll from the progressive advocacy organization and PAC NextGen America and Impact Research of likely voters ages 18 to 35 in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Virginia, conducted July 23-30, found that Harris leads Trump by 17 points in a multi-candidate matchup (that includes third-party candidates and undecided voters). In March, Biden had led by just 9 points in that same matchup.
“The level of support and how quickly this race has shifted with Harris as a candidate, honestly, surprised our entire team at the level that we saw,” NextGen America’s president Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez tells Teen Vogue.
The “double haters” are moving toward Harris
NextGen’s poll also found that “double haters,” the potential young voters who disliked both Biden and Trump, are coalescing around Harris. She’s now up among that group by 62 points, the poll found, at 68%, compared with Trump’s 6%. Comparatively, in March, Biden led this group by 20 points in the multi-vote matchup.
“We saw the double haters almost totally eroded,” Tzintzún Ramirez says of the July polling, adding that when it came to the newly eligible voters, her team had to “double-check” that the numbers were correct because the jump was “so huge” at a net 37 points for Harris.
While NextGen was gearing up for a “persuasion campaign” with Biden at the top of the ticket, Tzintzún Ramirez says, they’ve moved into a mobilization campaign. “To be quite honest, it felt like we were trying to push a boulder up a hill," she recalls. "And now, it’s going down [the] hill, and we’re just grabbing on to the momentum that’s there, and making sure there’s as many people climbing on as possible.”
Harris's campaign is reaching key constituencies of young people
Social Sphere’s polling found that Harris’s margin over Trump has increased most with the youngest voters (18 to 24), women, college students, and Black voters.
NextGen’s analysis of its recent survey emphasized Harris’s performance among young voters of color, in particular how she has “consolidat[ed]” Black voters who were undecided in March. Overall, the organization said, when it comes to young voters of color, 60% prefer Harris, while just 26% prefer Trump. Harris’s level of support from this cohort is 21-points higher than Biden’s was in the group’s March survey. When it comes to Black voters, Harris has a 53-point margin over Trump, which is 36-points higher than Biden’s was in March.
The poll shows Harris with a 17-point margin over Trump with Hispanic/Latino voters, which, NextGen said, marks “a double-digit increase over Biden’s margin” from March. Among that cohort, non-college educated Hispanic/Latino voters, a group that was previously shifting toward Trump, Tzintún Ramirez says, is moving back toward Harris. “For Arizona and Nevada, Latinos make up a really important portion of the electorate, and that was a big surprise shift for us…," she says, "the level of support she gained amongst young Latino voters as well, especially non-college educated voters.”
Young women lean toward Harris
NextGen’s polling shows that Harris attracts young women, in particular, outperforming Trump with a 36-point margin — twice Biden’s level of support with young women from the March survey.
There's a motivation bump across the board
Since Harris entered the race, the likelihood that young voters on both sides of the aisle will show up at the ballot box in November has increased, according to a Change Research poll of registered voters ages 18 to 30 in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The poll, commissioned by Democratic donor Reid Hoffman’s donor network Investing in US, was conducted from July 22-24. The poll found that 80% of registered Democrats and 82% of registered Republicans ages 18 to 30 “rate their motivation to vote as 8 out of 10 or higher.” Meanwhile, in June, just 64% of registered Democrats and 70% of registered Republicans said the same.
Along those lines, young people see room for consensus
In July, America In One Room, a deliberative, in-person polling experience, convened a survey of 430 first-time voters across the political spectrum, done in partnership with self-described “global problem-solving organization” Helena, Stanford’s Deliberative Democracy Lab, Close Up Foundation, the Generation Lab, and the University of Southern California’s Neely Center for Ethical Leadership and Decision Making in Washington, DC.
All of the deliberators were first-time voters. Topics discussed included the environment, economy, health care, and democracy. On the last day of the deliberation, Biden dropped out of the race and endorsed Harris, and Harris was substituted for Biden’s name in a matchup that included a third-party option. Of all participants, 53% said they preferred Harris, while 27% said they preferred Trump.
Overall, the groups said in a release, the deliberators “moved closer together” on issues of “climate change and energy independence, economic issues such as providing free college tuition for the poor or increasing the federal minimum wage, health care issues such as access to abortion and reproductive services, democracy issues such as voting rights and voting administration, including voting rights for convicted felons who have served their time.”
When asked what she learned from the experience, Ysabella Olsen, an 18-year-old from Parkville, Missouri, said the exercise encouraged her to keep an open mind. “America In One Room allowed me to hear from people who were able to expand my viewpoint on a certain issue, but also allow[ed] me to see if I had too stark of an opinion,” she explained. Reproductive rights are one of her top concerns, she said, and she plans to vote for the Harris-Walz ticket in November.
Rebekah Bushmire, also 18, from Peachtree City, Georgia, leans more conservatively, she said, adding that the community where she grew up is somewhat of “a bubble.” “It really opened my eyes to the different experiences of everyone in the country,” Bushmire explained, adding that throughout the deliberation, she warmed up to issues of climate change and environmentalism after hearing “firsthand accounts” from other first-time voters about how climate events have affected them. “That’s the only one where I was really like, ‘Oh, wow! This might be a bigger problem than I thought it was,’” she noted.
In recapping the experience, Olsen said she saw that her peers were engaged and excited to vote in November, especially after the Harris change-up: “To me, a big misconception with young voters is that they're not educated or that we don't care. But I think, really, the contrary is true, and we're ready and excited to participate.”
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