One of the recurring patterns in polling of Joe Biden’s approval ratings from his initial collapse in August 2021 through his nadir in July 2022 was his ghastly numbers among the youngest voters — usually a reliable Democratic redoubt, if one prone to low voter turnout. Biden is still polling poorly, but his approval rating in the RealClearPolitics average is merely an ugly -10 (43.3 approval, 53.5 disapproval), down from the catastrophic -20 highs of midsummer. In the interim, his administration has directed nearly all of its political energy away from the sorts of issues that concern middle-aged family heads and senior citizens (such as inflation and crime) and towards the things that excite left-leaning young people (such as student-loan debt, abortion, and climate change). Has anything come of this?
I looked at the seven polls in the current RCP average that have public age crosstabs. That’s not an apples-to-apples comparison, for a couple of reasons: These are polls of varying size; they range from all-adults polls to likely-voter polls; and, worst of all for these purposes, they group the youngest voters in brackets of varying size. Still, let’s see how Biden is doing with young voters compared with voters as a whole in these polls, which happen to be a sample of the more favorable polls for Biden:
Across these seven nationwide polls, Biden is at -9.6 with all voters, but -3 with voters in the youngest age brackets, which range from 18 to 29 year olds, to 18 to 44 year olds. Oddly, he’s doing best with young voters in the Fox News poll, which breaks at age 45, and worst in the New York Times/Siena poll, which isolates voters under 30. In two polls, the Federalist/Susquehanna poll and the Insider Advantage poll, he’s in worse shape with younger voters than the electorate as a whole. Taken together, this is a somewhat more normal age distribution for a Democrat, but still not terribly encouraging if you are staking your bets on young voters to bail Biden out. It’s not the Obama army of energized young people — and remember, even that army didn’t show up in 2010 or 2014.