Harris opens up 31-point lead over Trump in Harvard youth poll
Vice President Harris has almost double the support of former President Trump among likely voters under 30 polled in the Harvard Institute of Politics youth survey. The poll also found a widening gap in voter enthusiasm between Harris and Trump voters, with a 15-point lead for Harris voters.
“In just a few weeks, Vice President Harris has drummed up a wave of enthusiasm among young voters,” Anil Cacodcar, chair of the Harvard Public Opinion Project, told The Hill. “Harris is enjoying a perfect storm of personal appeal, policy support, and positive reach on social media.”
In the poll taken Sept. 4-18, close to 3 in 4 Democrats under age 30 polled said they planned on voting, compared to only 3 in 5 younger Republicans.
During the spring edition of this poll, there was only a 2-point difference between Democrats and Republicans.
During the spring poll, three-quarters of Trump voters said they enthusiastically backed their candidate, while less than half of Biden voters said the same. More than 4 in 5 Harris voters say they enthusiastically support her. Trump’s number stays largely unchanged.
Harris has dedicated considerable campaign resources to reaching younger voters, including a commitment to visit 150 college campuses. Her staff has also created numerous memes and video edits on X, Instagram and TikTok to boost youth engagement.
This was a marked shift from Biden, whose campaign provided little excitement to many younger voters, especially amid the Israeli onslaught in Gaza in response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack. The spring version of the Harvard poll found that less than 1 in 5 young voters approved of Biden’s response to the conflict.
The September survey also shows a widening gender gap. There was a 17-point gap between male and female support for Biden in the spring. For Harris, there is more than a 30-point gender gap, even though both men and women have moved toward Harris.
More than half of the men polled plan to support Harris, while 7 in 10 women supported Harris. More than 1 in 3 men plan to back Trump, while close to 1 in 5 women will back Trump.
Analyzing the results by race, Harris has seen a 30-point bump in support among Black voters compared to Biden’s support in the spring survey, and she has regained the lead among White voters. During the spring survey, white voters broke for Trump by 2 points. Now, Harris is up 15 points.
“This poll reveals a significant shift in the overall vibe and preferences of young Americans as the campaign heads into the final stretch,” John Della Volpe, Harvard Institute of Politics polling director, wrote to The Hill. “Vice President Harris has strengthened the Democratic position among young voters, leading Trump on key issues and personal qualities. Gen Z and young millennials’ heightened enthusiasm signals a potentially decisive role for the youth vote in 2024.”
Harris has also significantly improved her approval ratings among young voters, from less than one in three approving the job she’s done in the spring to close to half of the polled voters having a favorable opinion of her job performance during the September poll.
Other polls have also seen an uptick in Harris’s popularity and job approval. A recent NBC poll found a 16-point jump in favorability for Harris, the largest increase for a politician in an NBC News survey since former President George W. Bush’s favorability in the wake of 9/11.
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The Harvard poll also found that more than half of those surveyed had encountered memes, or joke posts, about either candidate in the last month, with more than double those encountering the memes saying they had a net positive effect on their impression of Harris.
Close to double the number of people who changed their view of Trump after seeing memes related to him said they had a more negative impression of him.
The September Harvard youth poll surveyed 2,002 adults under 30 and has a margin of error of 2.65 percentage points.
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