Donald Trump and Ben Carson are running neck and neck in winning support from primary voters ages 18-29, according to polling released Thursday by Harvard’s Institute of Politics.
Trump gets 22 percent support and Carson gets 20 percent in the survey of 472 under-30 GOP primary voters. The poll was conducted in the wake of the third Republican debate, Oct. 30 through Nov. 9.
{mosads}Carson, a former neurosurgeon, had been rising in the GOP field around that time, and briefly overtook the billionaire businessman in the RealClearPolitics index of national polls in early November before tumbling in the past few weeks.
The poll of young adults found Sens. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and Ted Cruz (Texas) at 7 percent each, with Sen. Rand Paul (Ky.) and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 6 percent each.
Businesswoman Carly Fiorina, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and former Sen. Rick Santorum (Pa.) take 3 percent apiece. Seventeen percent of those surveyed remain undecided.
Overall, the poll found that a majority of young voters, 56 percent, prefer that a Democrat win the White House in 2016, up 5 points from a spring survey, while 36 percent prefer a Republican.
Young adults on both sides of the aisle prefer anti-establishment figures, with Trump and Carson leading on the GOP side and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) leading Hillary Clinton on the Democratic side.
The polling found that young adults overall are split on whether the “American Dream is alive or dead,” with 49 percent saying “alive” and 48 percent “dead.”
A solid majority of young adults, 60 percent, surveyed after the Paris attacks Nov. 13 also said they supported sending U.S. ground troops to combat the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria.
View the full polling results here.