When Donald Trump held a rally in Rome, Georgia in March, his audience included a second-generation supporter and a first-time rallygoer named Luke Harris.
“My parents were always supportive of him, especially when he was against it Hillary” recalls Harris, who was in sixth grade in Cartersville, Georgia, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton to become president in 2016.
Harris, now a 19-year-old student at Kennesaw State University, “grew up watching him, listening to him,” he said. “I’ve grown into it a bit.”
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Trump’s victory meant, for both supporters and opponents, a profound break with politics as usual in the United States. People who voted against him feared he would upend the American presidency. People who voted for him hoped he would do that.
But for the youngest Trump supporters running in their first presidential elections this year, Trump represents something that is nearly impossible for older voters to imagine: the normal politics of their childhood.
Charlie Meyer, a 17-year-old high school student who volunteered at a Trump rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last month, said he was first drawn to Trump during his presidency at age 13 because of his views on abortion, which resonated. with his as a Christian.
He has little memory of pre-Trump politics. “I was too young then,” he said.
Although chairman Joe Biden continues to lead among 18 to 29 year olds in most polls, several surveys in recent weeks show Trump performing much stronger among young voters than at the same time in 2020, and stronger than he was against Clinton in the same point in 2016.
In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll last month, Trump and Biden were neck and neck among 18- to 29-year-olds. In the latest Harvard Youth Poll, conducted in March by the Harvard Institute of Politics, Trump trailed by eight points.
“He’s nowhere near actually winning,” said John Della Volpe, director of the Harvard poll, who surveyed young voters for the Biden campaign in 2020, when Biden was beating Trump among 18- to 29-year-olds ultimately defeated by 24 points. But “he’s doing as well as any Republican candidate at this stage of the election since 2012, and that’s meaningful.”
Della Volpe and other pollsters note that these findings come with a host of caveats. Trump’s relatively good reputation among young voters is at odds with their largely liberal views on most issues, which have led them to favor Democratic candidates for decades.
In polls like Harvard’s, Biden is performing much stronger among registered or likely voters than in polls of all adults, suggesting he is weakest among those least interested in the race. Young people in particular, who are often late to the elections, do not seem to feel involved in this year’s race, a battle between two well-known candidates in their seventies and eighties.
“It’s incredibly early to be scrutinizing the candidates and the election,” said Daniel Cox, director of the American Enterprise Institute Survey Center on American Life, who noted that polls show young voters are paying far less attention to the election from this year. than in 2020. “Many of them simply haven’t tuned in.”
Still, the Trump campaign sees opportunities in the signs of shifts in demographics. A large gender gap has emerged in youth politics in recent years, with Republicans enjoying an advantage among young men. A Times/Siena poll in February found that young voters were far more likely to say they were personally helped by Trump’s policies than by Biden’s, and far more likely to say they were personally hurt by Biden’s than by Biden’s of Trump (although in both cases about half said neither president’s policies had made much difference either way).
John Brabender, a media consultant for Trump’s campaign who is targeting young voters, pointed to the long shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, which has transformed and defined the high school and college experiences for many of this year’s young voters. That dissatisfaction hurt Trump in 2020, but Brabender argues it is more likely to hurt Biden in 2024.
“Their entire lives have slowed down compared to previous generations,” he said. “And that’s why they’re extremely frustrated with Biden.”
Biden was successful in 2020 by appealing to voters’ desire to return to the pre-Trump status quo. In this election, his campaign has drawn attention to Trump’s breaks with democratic norms as president. But those appeals may carry less weight among voters who were in high school at the time of Trump’s election.
They have formed their opinions and identities in a political landscape in which he is a constant and not a disaster.
“That was the world I grew up in,” said Makai Henry, 18, a student at Florida International University in Miami. “For better or worse, I think this is the Trump era.”
For some new voters, this has made Trump an afterthought in the evolution of their politics rather than a defining figure.
Allyson Langston, 20, became a supporter of Trump during his presidency, but she described the shift more generally about Republican values than about the former president.
Langston was a high school student when Trump was elected and lived in Orlando, Florida, at the time, with Republican parents and a sister who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., during the Democratic presidential primaries. Watching the presidential debates, she was skeptical of Clinton and Trump, but “I thought I was more Democratic,” she said.
But in high school and college, she noticed she was heading in the right direction. When her mother and sister lost their jobs during the early days of the pandemic, she had to help support the family with her part-time salary at a restaurant. She began questioning Democratic priorities such as student loan forgiveness, which she now sees as an unreasonable proposal in light of other federal spending demands.
“I agree with a lot of things that Democrats like, like free college and things like that,” she said. “But I understand that in a world like this, that is simply no longer possible.”
An unexpected miscarriage at age 19 led her to reconsider her views on abortion, which she now opposes, with few exceptions.
And although she is bisexual and supports gay rights, she rejected liberal views on transgender politics. “At the end of the day, there are only two genders,” she said. In her first presidential election this year, she plans to vote for Trump.
“He follows what this country was built on,” she said.
Henry followed the opposite trajectory. The son of immigrants from Dominica whose politics were center-left, he attended Barack Obama’s rallies with his mother as a young child and tagged along as a sixth-grader when she ran for Clinton in 2016.
When Trump was elected, he recalled, “I wasn’t pro-Trump, but he was pretty funny.”
In high school he developed an interest in current affairs and, informed by a steady diet of YouTube videos from experts like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and organizations like Turning Point USA and Prager University, considered himself a conservative.
But he eventually broadened his media diet, and that, and the success of the federal government’s pandemic stimulus efforts under Trump and Biden, made him skeptical of conservative claims about budget deficits and government programs.
Henry now considers himself an independent and is leaning toward voting for Biden in his first presidential election, though he believes Democratic alarms about the threat posed by another Trump presidency have been exaggerated.
“I feel like this isn’t necessarily a choice between two evils,” he said. “It’s between a moderately good and a moderate ‘meh.’ Trump is the ‘meh.’”
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