Is Harris winning back Gaza-supporting younger voters?
New polling shines a light on the voter group that Biden lost and who pundits expected to dominate the DNC
All eyes are on the DNC in Chicago - inside the hall and out. There has been talk for months about the risk of pro-Palestinian protests causing disruption and even potentially up-ending the DNC as anti-war activists did in the same city in 1968.
But the disturbances so far look smaller than anyone anticipated. Expected numbers today were as much as 40,000, but attendance so far looks closer to 3,000.
It’s a harder ask to get university students to Chicago than it is to set up on their local campus. And in today’s era of short attention spans, the issue of Gaza may have lost its social justice allure as it reaches its ninth month.
But something else is going on: Kamala Harris’ ascendancy to the Democratic ticket appears to have won back some of those younger, traditionally Democrat voters.
Take a look at these figures, hot off the press from the J.L. Partners / Daily Mail poll.
Last summer, Biden had a 12-point lead over Trump with 18-29 year olds, winning 51% of their support. But after October 7th, he never exceeded 50%, and came as close to being just 2 points ahead of Trump in December. Immediately after Hamas’ attacks on Israel and the Biden administration’s response, the proportion of 18-29 year olds saying they didn’t know how they would vote jumped to 13% as Biden’s support fell.
I spoke to students at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania earlier in the year. The verdict on Biden - and what students saw as his complicity in genocide - was damning. Many said they would vote third party or not vote at all. That had a serious risk of damaging Biden come November when every vote counts.
But with Harris in the race, support for the Democratic candidate amongst 18-29 year olds has jumped to its highest in a year. She is pulling in 55% of younger voters, higher than anything Biden managed in the last twelve months. That is an 18-point lead over Donald Trump.
Things get more interesting when we split the results by gender. Some caution is needed here: sample sizes are small and can produce outlier results (the dip in the below chart in Trump’s support to 15% in one month is a good example of one of those).
But the trend overall in instructive. Amongst 18-29 year old women (who tend to be more liberal than their male counterparts), we see the story of the last year. After October 7th, Biden’s support fell from 59% to just 42% amongst female Zoomers. It never went above 50%. Now Harris has completely recovered Biden’s losses with younger women, shoring up the Democrat position to 60%.
Can this last? Trump is doing Harris favors with this group by calling her anti-Israel. Harris does seem to take a genuinely different approach than Biden: she had a backstage conversation with a pro-Palestinian activist last week, and had a similarly sympathetic conversation with a student in 2021 long before the issue reached fever pitch.
But the issue is still one fraught with danger for her. She will be hoping she can talk about it publicly as little as possible. If she has to take a firm position - and everything about America’s global role points to that having to be on the side of Israel - then the image these pro-Palestinian voters have of her may crumble.
For now, though, the Harris camp will be very happy with diminished crowds at the Chicago protests. And they will be even happier looking at their own polling, knowing that they are clawing back support amongst a crucial group of voters.