Poll: Young Voters Favor Biden by Wide Margin
Posted: Thu Jun 25, 2020 12:26 pm
In this June 17, 2020, photo, Democratic presidential candidate, former Vice President Joe Biden speaks in Darby, Pa.
Young American voters appear to favor presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden over President Donald Trump, according to newly released national polling data.
The survey released Wednesday by the New York Times and Siena College shows Biden leading Trump among registered voters aged 18-34 by 34 percentage points.
By comparison, in 2016, Hillary Clinton on election day won 55% of the vote among young voters to Trump's 37%—a lead of 18 points.
In total, the poll shows Biden ahead of Trump by 14 points, with particularly strong leads among Black and Hispanic voters. Trump leads Biden by 19 points among White people without college degrees.
Since the 2018 midterm elections, trends have shown both an uptick in youth voter participation and their tendency to vote for Democrats.
Millennial voting nearly doubled between 2014 and 2018—from 22% to 42%—according to demographer Richard Fry at the Pew Research Center in Washington. Thirty percent of Gen Zers eligible to vote turned out in the first midterm elections of their lives. And for the first time in a midterm election, more than half of Gen Xers reported they had voted, Pew reported.
In the 2018 midterm elections, two-thirds of all young voters aged 18-29 supported the Democratic candidate for Congress—the widest party gap in the past 25 years, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement based at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
Kathleen Struck contributed to this report.