Where do Trump’s gains come from?
Key takeaways:
Young and African-American voters are less likely to support Joe Biden than in 2020
There are multiple theories for why this is happening. Some point to the Democrats’ weaknesses, others to strengths of the Republican Part
Stack’s latest MRP predictions reveal that Donald Trump is on course to narrowly beat Joe Biden in the electoral college (despite Biden holding a lead in the popular vote) by 292 to 246. Why does Trump do better against Biden in a hypothetical match-up today than he did in 2020? In a recent Financial Times article, FT Chief Data Reporter John Burn-Murdoch dives into our data and identifies what we think is one of the key trends. Joe Biden is losing young and non-white voters, specifically African-American voters. While earlier election results showed shifts in voting behaviour in Hispanic communities, wavering support among younger and African-American voters are another headache for the Democrats as they gear up for 2024.
“A consistent finding is that the Democrats are going backwards — in some cases sharply — with young and non-white voters, the very “coalition of the ascendant” that propelled Barack Obama to power in 2008 and was seen as heralding sustained Democratic domination.”
Figure 1: Change in Biden share of major party vote from 2020 to our poll
What is going on? Our poll put two-way support for Biden among young voters (18-24) at 54%, down from 58% in 2020. Support among African-American voters is slipping too, from 85% in 2020 to 81% in our poll last week. As Figure 1 illustrates, swings towards Trump for these two groups are among the largest of all major demographic groups. There are many theories for why this is happening - not all of them equally conclusive. The two flanks of the Democratic Party have their own explanations. Moderates point to the left wing of the party and argue that the party has been captured by an overly progressive agenda that fails to appeal to the median voter. By contrast, progressives will argue that Biden has failed to deliver on the most popular progressive promises of his platform, causing disillusionment among younger voters in particular. Both theories are interesting, but the judge is still out. Good empirics on either side of this argument are hard to come by (and without them, we’d prefer not to get involved in partisan mudslinging).
Is Biden the problem? His age might be a particularly large obstacle for young voters, while inflation and a struggling economy may also disproportionately turn off younger and African-American voters who, on average, hold weaker economic positions than the average American. There’s some merit to this argument, and it’s one we’ll be keeping an eye on. However, Biden was old in 2020 too, and still managed to beat (an old) Trump. Moreover, our polling shows that younger alternative candidates Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom do not do any better than Biden. This explanation does not seem to be the whole story.
What about Trump? Some have argued that Trump’s unique brand of populist conservatism is more appealing to young and African-American voters than the generic Republican Party brand. Again, this is an interesting theory and could explain why Republicans do better when Trump is on the ballot. However, in our most recent poll, we do not find evidence to support this claim. In fact, we tested vote intention for hypothetical races with Trump and with DeSantis and found that DeSantis is practically level with Trump in terms of support from African-American voters. We do however find some evidence to support the claim that Trump’s brand compared to DeSantis’ is particularly strong among young voters.
A final theory that is less testable but equally interesting has to do with the formative experiences of these voter groups. Political science teaches us that voters’ political identities are shaped by the impact of experiences they have during their early years of “political consciousness”. For older African-American voters, the Democrat brand is therefore (more likely to be) tied to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. However, understandably, this link will be weaker in the experiences of young African-American voters growing up today. The effect of this could be that these voters simply do not have the same historical loyalty to the party.
Which theory best helps us understand the 2024 races? We’ve set out how our last wave of polling speaks to each of these, but at the moment it is still early days. Moving forward, we’ll keep using these theories as tools to help us get a better understanding of the race. We will keep you posted.