Donald Trump Suffers Major Drop in Gen Z Support

Donald Trump is losing his Generation Z edge over President Joe Biden.

Trump saw his lowest support among voters aged 18 to 24 in Harvard CAPS/Harris’ March poll since the pollsters began surveying the age group this past December. In the most recent poll, conducted between March 20 and 21, only 35 percent of Gen Z voters said they would vote for the former president in a Trump-Biden rematch.

In February, 55 percent of 18- to 24-year-olds said they would vote for Trump over Biden, an increase from January’s 43 percent and December’s 48 percent. At the same time, overall support for the former president across all age groups has remained between 47 and 48 percent from December through March.

Before December’s polling, the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll designated the nation’s youngest voters as those 18 to 34, which included some millennial voters. Still, support for Trump, when faced against Biden, remained steady around the low 40s, dipping below that threshold only twice, to 38 percent in September and 39 percent in July.

“There has been considerable discussion about how well Trump is doing among younger voters,” Patrick Fisher, the author of The Generational Gap in American Politicscustoms Newsweek. “The 35 percent who supported him in March is much more in line with what you would expect.”

Young voters had been credited with helping Biden win the last presidential election, and the group has long been a stalwart voting bloc for the Democratic Party. But dwindling support among Gen Z Americans has been seen as a major obstacle for the president’s reelection campaign. That decline in support, compounded with recent gains made by Trump, has caused Democrats to worry about what this could mean for November’s election.

Several polls have shown Trump closing in on Biden’s lead with young voters. Last month, a Bloomberg News/Morning Consult poll found Trump leading Biden by 7 points among 18- to 34-year-olds in swing states. And in January, Trump led Biden by 4 points among young voters in a USA Today/Suffolk University survey.

Even in polls where Biden has the advantage with the Gen Z vote, his lead is considerably smaller than it was four years ago. An Axios/Generation Lab survey from February showed Trump trailing Biden by 4 points among young voters, while a New York Times/Siena College poll from March showed Trump behind by 11 points.

By comparison, in 2020 Gen Z and millennial voters favored Biden by 20 points, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Exit polls conducted by Fox News and CNN after the 2020 election found that 60 percent of voters under 30 supported Biden, while only 36 percent voted for Trump.

A Harvard Youth Poll released in December found that nearly 7 in 10 young adults who back Biden over Trump are being driven by their “opposition to Donald Trump becoming president again” rather than their “support for President Biden and his policies.” The survey also found that Democrats perform particularly well among young voters when it comes to the abortion issue.

Biden has a 16-point advantage over Trump on that issue, and it appears his campaign is well aware of how critical abortion is to securing the Gen Z vote. On Tuesday, a day after the Florida Supreme Court allowed the state’s six-week abortion ban to take effect, the president’s reelection campaign launched a $30 million advertising campaign across seven swing states that highlights Trump’s abortion record.

There was, however, some good news for Biden in the Harvard CAPS/Harris March poll. Not only was Trump’s support among Gen Zers falling, but the president himself saw an overall increase in support among all voters.

Support for Biden hovered around 41 and 42 percent from December to February, but in March 44 percent of voters said they’d back him over Trump. This is the first time the Harvard CAPS/Harris poll has recorded Biden receiving more than 42 percent support since October 2022, when he received 43 percent support among all respondents.

Even though Biden may be clawing back some younger voters, Fisher, who is a politics professor at Seton Hall University, said that Trump could still win the 2024 election with just 35 percent of the Gen Z vote.

“If he is getting 55 percent of the 18-24 vote found in the February survey, this would indicate that Trump is winning in a landslide,” Fisher said. “Trump may win in 2024, but given the highly polarized nature of American politics today it is highly unlikely that he is winning in a landslide.”