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U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris poses for a picture with Jordynn Dudley, soccer player at Florida State University, Lynda Tealer, senior vice president of championships at NCAA, and members of the women and men's National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Champion teams, in Kamala's first public appearance since President Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 race, on the South Lawn of the White House, Washington, U.S., July 22, 2024.
Bloc by Bloc: How the youth and senior votes will influence the US election
This GZERO 2024 election series looks at America’s changing voting patterns, bloc by bloc.
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“Holy shit. Biden’s out,” I heard an older man in front of me at the airport say on Sunday, July 21. At JFK’s Terminal 4 – where people don’t even stop to tie their shoes – Joe Biden’s announcement of his withdrawal from the presidential race stopped travelers in their tracks.
In the week since, Biden’s move seems to have breathed new life into the campaign, with Democrats raising over $200 million in campaign donations in just a few days. Vice President Kamala Harris quickly won endorsements from the party’s senior leaders to become the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Election of the ages
Age dominated the conversation around this campaign from the beginning. Although Biden’s decades-younger replacement – Harris is just 59 – quells concerns that Dems and Republicans had about his ability to serve another four years, age remains a key factor in this year’s election. The success of both candidates, after all, depends on their ability to woo both the youth and the senior vote, which both appear to be in play as they mull decades-long political party preferences.
When Biden was running, election polls had turned conventional wisdom on its head about these voting blocs: Some showed young voters, who have long tended to align with the left, leaning Republican, and seniors, who have long favored Republican candidates, tilting Democratic. But reactions to Harris’s entrance suggest a return to more traditional trends, with her recovering lost ground among young voters but struggling to hold onto Biden’s lead with older voters.
Winning over youths
This year, there are 52.6 million eligible youth voters (aged 18-29), with particularly sizable presences in key swing states like Michigan and Minnesota, where youth voter turnout rates are the highest in the country. And while it’s hard to generalize, polls show the top issues for youth voters are the economy, immigration, abortion, and foreign policy.
“Kamala is brat.” In under a week, Harris’s youth campaign drummed up more support from young voters than Biden’s ever did – transforming Biden’s eight-point deficit into an 18-point lead for Harris among young voters.
Harris’s stances on two important youth issues are clear: She strongly advocates for abortion rights and is perceived as more critical than Biden of US involvement in Gaza. Both are expected to work to her advantage.
Her team has also been leaning heavily into the memes and buzz surrounding her on social media, making inroads with young voters. She has gained endorsements from youth voting groups like Voters for Tomorrow and Dream for America, as well as Gen-Z popstar Charli XCX, who tweeted “Kamala is brat” — a reference to her viral new album and a nod of approval to the new candidate.
But Eurasia Group Managing Director Jon Lieber questions the longevity of Harris’s momentum, citing her weak performance as both vice president and as a presidential candidate in 2020. “Is this election going to be about Harris, the person, versus Donald Trump, who Americans know and either love or hate very well?” he asks. “Or is it going to be about Kamala Harris, the meme, running against Donald Trump?”
While abortion, climate change, and foreign policy tend to dominate the conversation surrounding the youth vote, their importance is often overstated among this constituency. For voters of all ages, the most important issue is the economy. Inflation and the cost of living will impact the youth vote, and Harris’s association with the Biden administration’s struggles to keep both down may hurt her.
“Trump just does better on the top issues in this campaign, which are inflation, the economy, and immigration,” notes Lieber. Meanwhile, Harris as vice president, he says, was “kind of been relegated to a D-list of policy issues.”
Trump’s youth campaign, meanwhile, has centered largely on economic matters. He has focused on youth-oriented platforms and influencers, such as appearing on a podcast with Gen Z influencer Logan Paul, or launching a successful TikTok account that now has 7.5 million followers.
His team is also leveraging the power of youth organizations like Turning Point Action to energize young conservatives. Trump’s policy messaging to youth voters hasn’t been clear, but when he has targeted younger audiences, he has either spoken about the economy or bashed Biden – a strategy that’s now half-moot.
Turnout and third-party candidates
Youth voters are notorious for not showing up on Election Day. Historically, that has tended to hurt Democrats. For more than 10 election cycles, the youth turnout rate has been at least 10 points below the national average, but the 2020 election saw a record-high youth turnout of 51%.
Following Harris’s entrance to the race, 72% of people under age 30 report being very likely or certain to vote, up from 64% before Biden dropped out – a trend that the Generation Lab’s Cyrus Beschloss says could help Harris win an “Obama level” youth vote.
Third-party candidate RFK Jr., meanwhile, is polling overall at just 6% and stands no chance of winning the presidency, but he could play a spoiler. Some 8% of younger voters say they would pick him if the vote were held today. By pulling even a small percentage of the youth vote away from Trump or Harris, RFK Jr. could have a decisive impact.
Winning over seniors
The last election saw over 55 million citizens over age 65 cast their vote, making up over 30% of the electorate. Seniors are an outsized constituency in retirement-friendly, warm-weather, low-tax swing states like Arizona, Nevada, and Florida. Ninety-five percent of voters aged 65 and over say they are very likely, if not certain, to cast ballots in November.
The key senior issuesare the economy, immigration, and democracy. But “the economy” means something different to grandparents than to their grandkids, says Clayton Allen, a US politics expert at Eurasia Group. While younger voters worry about economic opportunity, older voters are asking, “Am I going to have the support I need to continue to live my life? Are you going to cut Medicare or Social Security?”
Biden ran a very smart senior campaign that allowed him to turn the silver vote blue for the first time in 20 years. Biden and Kamala had been meeting seniors on the pickleball court and at bingo game nights as a part of his “Seniors for Biden-Harris” initiative, which has helped them touch base on issues like lowering prescription drug costs, protecting Social Security and Medicare, and capping insulin prices.
But Harris, who seemed poised to inherit Biden’s lead among seniors, is now polling two points behind Trump with this demographic, 49% to 47%. If she can’t keep the margin close in November, Harris could be in trouble.
The reason for seniors’ return to the Republican Party isn’t clear yet, and polling will take a week or two longer to start returning more reliable information. NYTimes/Siena’s latest survey shows a majority of older voters believing Trump would make a stronger leader than Harris, 61% to 46%.
Still, AARP notes that Social Security is a key issue for 80% of senior voters. Currently, this seems to benefit Harris as she has worked as a co-sponsor of the Social Security Expansion Act and received the endorsement of the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare – a group that also endorsed Biden. But in this election, it has become a battleground issue. “Social Security is really an up-for-grabs issue [as] Democrats only have a three-point advantage… so the parties are basically tied,” Jeff Liszt, partner at Impact Research, explains.
So far, this election season has seen 34 criminal convictions, a failed assassination attempt, and the presumptive Democratic nominee dropping less than a month before the Democratic National Committee. And there are still three months to go. We’ll be watching to see whether Harris can keep up her momentum with young voters and woo back some of the senior votes she’ll need or whether Trump manages to rewrite his playbook to take on Harris and win back some of the youth vote he’ll need to prevail.
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Two students occupying Hamilton Hall on Columbia's Campus
With summer looming, where will student protesters turn next?
What are those demands? The movement aims to isolate and put pressure on Israel to stop its bombing campaign in Gaza by forcing universities to divest from companies with ties to the Jewish state or that profit from the war. While protests on US campuses are being driven by the war in Gaza, their impact is transcending the conflict. Some of the demonstrations have featured antisemitic and intimidating chants and posters, while politicians on both sides of the aisle have made visits to college campuses to either support or condemn them.
Schools are striving to restore order before commencement season to avoid becoming the next University of Southern California, which canceled its main graduation ceremony after arresting more than 90 students last week.
But protesters aren’t concerned about graduation ceremonies. At Columbia, a new chant, “no commencement until divestment,” can be heard from the occupied building. Ali, a senior at The New School who was involved in the takeover of Parsons and requested anonymity, laughed when I asked if he was worried about missing graduation. “We are all pushing as hard as we can to get divestment before the end of school. That’s the priority,” he said.
He was optimistic they would succeed, at least on his campus. But the overarching goal of getting the largest university endowments to divest from Israel is certainly not going to happen before students go home for summer.
So what comes next?
Hamilton Hall, the building Columbia protesters occupied last night, was also taken over in the spring of 1968 during the Vietnam War. Demonstrators back then went home for the summer, only to resurface in the thousands at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and, long story short: Things got ugly. The gathering erupted into violence, leading to the activation of the National Guard and the arrest of hundreds of protesters.
This August, the DNC is also in Chicago, so could history repeat itself? When I asked students whether the movement would shift from university endowments to political events, the question took them off-guard.
“People aren’t really talking about what this is going to look like during the 2024 election," said Ali. “But what I do know is that people in this movement aren’t committed to voting for a certain party.” His statement echoed the disillusionment with political parties that I have heard again and again from student protesters.
“I don’t know how Joe Biden doesn’t realize he’s lost us,” said Julia Ye, a senior at NYU.
Cornel West and Jill Stein, two left-leaning third-party candidates, have both visited the Columbia University encampment in hopes of picking up the liberal youth vote. But it remains to be seen whether students will vote for either of them, especially if doing so makes it more likely that Donald Trump wins.
What’s clear is that students are confident the movement isn’t going on vacation. “Right now, all our focus is on university divestment,” said Ye, “but this energy isn’t going anywhere. It will just take a different shape over the summer.”
Students reported that throughout this year of university protests, they have seen their activist networks strengthen and expand, especially between schools. They have coordinated sending excess food donations between encampments in New York City, live-streamed the programming from different encampments across the country on their own, and been catalyzed by each other’s encounters with law enforcement.
“It was cool to see us moving in sync with the Columbia protests yesterday, even if it wasn’t officially organized,” said Gabriella, another senior at The New School who requested anonymity. “We are all watching each other on social media. We all want the same things. This movement is exploding, whether one person is calling for it to or not.”
President Joe Biden speaks as he announces a new plan for federal student loan relief during a visit to Madison Area Technical College Truax Campus, in Madison, Wisconsin, on April 8, 2024.
The battle for Gen Z
With President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau facing upcoming elections, the battle is on to capture young voters. Biden will face former President Donald Trump next November, and the next Canadian election is due by the fall of 2025, but both contests are already underway. Younger folks in both countries are turning increasingly sour on the status quo as they face affordability challenges and feel left behind.
Trudeau has expressly said his government was focusing on Gen Z and millennials, “restoring fairness for them.” And on Tuesday, his government unveiled its “Gen Z budget,” going all in on measures for parents with younger children (new cash for childcare and a school food program), students (interest-free student loans), and housing policy aimed at opening space in the market for younger buyers who’ve been shut out in recent years (with a first-time buyer, 30-year mortgage amortization period and tax breaks for home purchases).
In the US, young voters are focused on affordability, abortion rights, the environment, and student debt, and Democrats will need those folks to turn out on Election Day if they hope to retain the White House and make gains in Congress. Those 43 and under are frustrated with the housing market. Democrats are working to get on abortion rights on the ballot in key states, and the Biden administration is touting the impact of its Inflation Reduction Act on the environment. The president also hopes efforts to eliminate student debt will help alleviate some cost-of-living concerns for young voters.
But Biden is also facing a backlash from Gen Z voters over Gaza and US funding for Israel. The president had hoped tougher talk on Israel would boost his reelection bid, but that’s been complicated by Iran’s attack – although the administration has told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that it won’t support reprisals against Iran.
Both Biden and Trudeau need younger voters to turn out to vote for them. In 2016, Biden dominated the Millennial and Gen Z vote by about 20 points over Trump. And while Canada’s Liberals managed a minority government in 2021 with a youth vote that was likely a near-split with the Conservatives, younger voters played a crucial role in Trudeau’s 2015 majority government victory.
This means the coming months will see increasing efforts focused on wooing younger generations.
Supporters of Greek opposition leader of Syriza party attend a pre-election speech in Athens
Greece’s “lost generation” election
This Sunday, Greeks head to the polls for the country’s most tightly contested election in recent memory.
PM Kyriakos Mitsotakis’ center-right New Democracy Party leads the polls right now and hopes that falling inflation, rising tourism revenues, and strong economic growth will help them stay in charge.
But the hard left-wingers of Syriza, who lost power in the 2019 election, are close behind. They’ve pledged to raise wages and boost pensions, while also reminding voters that Greece’s worst-ever train wreck came on Mitsotakis’ watch and that his government was caught spying on other politicians. The social democrats of PASOK are polling third, with promises to address climate change, inequality, and corruption.
A big X-factor is the youth vote, representing a “lost generation” whose opportunities were suffocated by a decade of economic and financial strife. Today, nearly a quarter of young Greeks are jobless. For them, Syriza is promising to scrap university entry requirements, while New Democracy is offering to pay people 150 euros just for turning 18.
Polling suggests that there won’t be a clear winner. With New Democracy and Syriza about as compatible politically as oil and water, PASOK could be a kingmaker in coalition talks. But if those talks fail, Greeks of all ages will have to gear up for another election later this summer.