“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.”
So wrote Steve Shepherd in Politico. He went on to cite polls conducted by NPR (yes that NPR), Fox News and the Wall Street Journal showing that younger voters, especially younger male voters of all ethnicities, flocking to Donald Trump, while older voters are breaking slightly for Joe Biden.
Because Biden cleaned Trump’s clock among younger voters in 2020, this would represent a huge change and a big advantage for the former President.
Last week, I was on Hamilton College’s campus and I interacted with two classrooms of students, had dinner with them and then did a mini-debate with a Democratic strategist. Hamilton College is a liberal place, probably far more liberal than Alexander Hamilton envisioned it back when the school was named after him, but even in this hotbed of progressive thought, I found more than a few pockets of conservative support. And while the most vocal conservatives were men, I found some women nodding their heads in agreement with my sound reasoning and ample charm.
My son is going to turn 18 this week, and among his friends (many of whom follow me on Twitter and hopefully subscribe to The Feehery Theory), I sense a more conservative sensibility. They love their country music, they like traditional gender roles and they have little interest in supporting somebody like Joe Biden.
On the other side of the coin, I get the sense among older voters that there is more support for Joe Biden than I would generally assume. Old people like his professed political centrism, they get upset by Donald Trump’s bombastic pronouncements and they forgive him his more senior moments.
Old people also liked how Biden handled Covid. They generally think the vaccines saved their lives (which is mostly complete nonsense). They were fine with the school lockdowns, because those germ-generating small children didn’t spread their Covid germs community wide. They were fine with the vaccine mandates because they believed (wrongly) that the vaccine would end the pandemic. They were fine with the mask mandates, because once again, they wrongly believed that the masks would save them from Covid.
Of course, for young people, the story of Covid was far different. The vaccines hit young men the hardest with myocarditis . The school lockdowns were a complete disaster for children, from a learning perspective and from a socialization perspective. They were forced to wear masks unnecessarily in schools for long stretches of time, which caused headaches and limited oxygen to the brain. All of these mandates and lockdowns were put in place for a disease that for the vast majority of young people was hardly more than a bad case of the sniffles.
While Donald Trump started the lockdown madness, it was Joe Biden who made it stick and kept at it far longer than was necessary.
I talked to my mother yesterday and she confirmed to me what the polls are showing. Old people liked how Biden handled Covid, mostly because the old people who are still alive like the fact that they survived the biggest fraud perpetrated on our citizens in our nation’s history.
Of course, there are other reasons that young people like Trump while old people seem to like Biden. Young people can’t afford the Biden economy. They can’t afford to buy a home. They can barely afford to buy groceries. Inflation hurts young people the hardest because they can’t save enough to get on with their lives. They can’t afford to get married. Hell, they can barely afford to go on dates. For this, younger people (and most other Americans) blame Joe Biden.
Old people like Biden because he promises not to touch their Social Security. And the higher interest rates that have come during the Biden Presidency may not be good for young home buyers, but are very good for older Americans who put their savings in interest-bearing bank accounts. And when inflation goes up, so does the size of the Social Security checks.
Now Biden doesn’t have a complete lock on the older set, while Trump’s popularity ratings among younger voters isn’t set in stone either. Inflation does hurt older voters. And Biden’s embrace of exotic gender roles and the trans movement is baffling to many senior citizens.
By the same token, Biden knows he is weak with younger voters, which is why he is so aggressively trying to buy them off with his unconstitutional student loan forgiveness scheme.
It is no surprise to me that younger voters are turning away from Joe Biden. He has not been a good President. Will this help Trump win the election? Maybe, but he can’t lose the senior citizen vote, because old people vote more consistently while young voters don’t.