POLITICO (“The polls are suggesting a huge shift in the electorate. Are they right?“):
Something weird is happening beneath the overall stability of the early 2024 polling — and it’s either a sign of a massive electoral realignment, or that the polls are wrong again.
Polls show former President Donald Trump is ascendant with the youngest bloc of the electorate, even leading President Joe Biden in some surveys, as less-engaged young voters spurn Biden. Meanwhile, Biden is stronger with seniors than he was four years ago, even as his personal image is significantly diminished since he was elected last time.
That would be a generational shift: For decades, Democratic presidential candidates have overwhelmingly won young voters, and Republicans have done the same with the other end of the electorate. Poll after poll is showing that’s flipped this year.
If these changes are real, it would have profound effects on the coalitions both campaigns are building for November. No Republican has won young voters since George H.W. Bush’s landslide victory in 1988, and no Democrat has carried the senior vote since Al Gore hammered Bush’s son, George W. Bush, on Social Security in 2000.
Or something’s wrong in the polls — and the mirage of an “age inversion” is really a warning sign of a structural problem in the 2024 election polling.
That would be a signal that the polls are once again struggling to measure the presidential race accurately after underestimating Trump in the previous two presidential elections. Maybe the young-voter numbers are wrong, and the polls are understating Biden; or maybe the older-voter numbers are wrong, and Trump is even stronger than he appears; or both.
“Seems like we know how to poll white, middle-aged people really well,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling for the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics and an expert on polling young voters. “But if they’re younger, older, Black, Hispanic — there seems to be no consensus about what’s the best practice these days.”
There’s a longstanding concern that, as most of us move away from landline phones to being cellular-only, polling will become less accurate. I, for one, have my phone set to automatically reject callers who aren’t in my phone’s contact list.
The thing is, despite a spate of columns arguing otherwise, polls have continued to be pretty damn accurate at predicting the outcomes of American elections. Thus, I’m inclined to believe that the “inversion” being shown in the polls is real and part of the larger sorting going on in our politics.
Just last week, a new NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist College national poll showed Trump 2 points ahead of Biden among Millennial and Gen-Z voters, while Biden led overall among voters 45 years and older, including those in the Silent and Greatest generations.
That’s a weird framing. Silents (the generation Biden himself is in) were born between 1928 and 1945 and thus between 79 and 96 years old! The “Greatest” Generation were born between 1901 and 1927, and are thus between 97 and 123; there aren’t all that many of them left.
A Fox News poll last month showed Trump leading Biden among voters under 30 by a whopping 18 points in a head-to-head matchup — and by 21 points with independent and third-party candidates included.
I tend to dismiss Fox’s polls. And both of the cited surveys are of registered voters, thus without a likely voter filter. Still, to the extent others are showing the same thing, I’m inclined to think it’s a real phenomenon. Alas . . .
Not every poll shows a perfect age inversion.
Biden is at just 50 percent among voters under 30 in the Wall Street Journal’s national and swing-state polling. While that’s still about 10 points ahead of Trump, it’s a significant decline compared to the 2020 election — and roughly equal to his vote share among seniors, 48 percent.
A Quinnipiac University poll released last week had Biden 20 points ahead of Trump among voters under age 35, close to the president’s margin in 2020 according to exit polls and other estimates of voting subgroups. But that survey also had Biden ahead by 8 points among voters 65 and older, which would be a significant reversal from recent elections, when Republicans won older voters.
So, the polls are not particularly consistent on this. That may simply be a function of their using different age cohorts. Or the fact that the margin of error is very much higher for subsamples than for the whole polling sample.
On paper, it might seem like a good trade-off for Biden: Young people turn out to vote at significantly lower rates than seniors. According to census data, 48 percent of voters under age 25 participated in the 2020 election, compared to 73 percent of those between the ages of 65 and 74, and 70 percent of those 75 and older.
But winning over older voters doesn’t appear to be boosting Biden in the polls, which show him essentially neck-and-neck with Trump, with the Republican narrowly ahead in most swing states.
That’s just a non-sequitur. Expressing a preference and taking action are two different things. If the gains among old voters are roughly the same as the losses among the young, the way to bet is that this is a net gain in turnout.
Regardless, Nate Cohn is running with the inversion theme and has a cute explanation for it (“How ‘All in the Family’ Explains Biden’s Strength Among Seniors“):
Mr. Biden’s strength among seniors might be surprising, but the likeliest explanation is deceptively simple: At every stage earlier in their lives, many of today’s seniors voted Democratic. They just got older.
To understand why, consider Archie Bunker, the working-class “lovable bigot” from the 1970s hit sitcom “All in the Family,” and his TV family.
[…]
It’s not unreasonable if Archie is your image of an older voter. As recently as 15 years ago, every single voter over age 65 was born before the end of World War II and came of age before the cultural revolution of the 1960s that shaped the views of many baby boomers voters for a lifetime.
Archie’s generation was the only one that reacted to the 2008 nomination of Barack Obama by shifting right: A higher share of them voted for John McCain in 2008 than for George W. Bush in 2004.
But in 2024, Archie shouldn’t be your image of a senior. Archie would be 100 years old today; his generation, called the Greatest Generation, has almost entirely died. The generation that came after Archie’s — the conservative Silent Generation, who grew up during the popular Eisenhower presidency in the “Leave It to Beaver” 1950s — has mostly died, too. Just 20 percent of the Silent Generation is alive today.
Instead, you may be better off thinking of Michael and Gloria. They are boomers, and they would be in their 70s today.
As a result, today’s seniors bear little resemblance to those from 10 or 15 years ago. Today, Madonna is a senior. So are Ellen DeGeneres and Katie Couric. By Election Day, Magic Johnson will be 65. Even though they may not feel like older voters to you, these boomers are the new seniors.
All together, boomers will make up more than 70 percent of seniors in 2024, up from zero percent when Mr. Obama — himself a baby boomer — won the presidency in 2008.
It’s an obvious point but one that analysis often misses: age, income, and other categories aren’t static. The Silents and Greatest are quickly dying off and being replaced by Boomers and Xers in the older ranks. It’s natural that they’re going to have different ideological views than their parents and grandparents.
Likewise, while it’s hard for me to understand why Trump would be appealing to someone under 35, that young cohort has endured wave after wave of systemic shock, from the Great Recession to COVID. While Biden is trying to help with various policy proposals (like student loan forgiveness), he represents The Establishment in a way that Trump simply doesn’t.
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: James Joyner
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, https://www.outsidethebeltway.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.