The Democrats managed to keep the Senate, even picking up a seat, in the 2022 midterms. The party lost the House, but Republicans only have a slight majority.
Democrats celebrated those outcomes, but the party might have problems in 2024 because the young voters in 2022 weren’t as enthusiastic about them. From The Associated Press:
Voters under 30 went 53% for Democratic House candidates compared with only 41% for Republican candidates nationwide, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping national survey of the electorate. But that level of support for Democrats was down compared with 2020, when such voters supported President Joe Biden over his predecessor, Donald Trump, 61% to 36%. And in 2018, when Democrats used a midterm surge to retake control of the House, voters 18 to 29 went 64% for the party compared with 34% for the GOP.Biden’s party nonetheless exceeded midterm expectations, holding the Senate and surrendering only a small Republican House majority. The president himself hailed young voter turnout as “historic.” Still, the trend line for younger voters may be an early indicator of the Democrats’ challenge to maintain the coalition of Black people, women, college-educated voters, city dwellers and suburbanites that has buoyed the party in the years since Trump won the White House.Weakness in any part of that voting bloc could have implications during the next presidential race. Biden, who will be a few weeks shy of his 82nd birthday on Election Day 2024, says he intends to run again. Trump, 76, has already announced his candidacy.“There might have been retrenchment in youth voters,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida and an expert on voting and data.
McDonald warned the data “could be an anomaly” since the “[Y]oungest people also have the weakest partisan attachments.”
Voters under 45 “exceeded” Biden’s 2020 support in the governor races in three states and the Pennsylvania Senate race:
Democratic Lt. Gov. John Fetterman beat Republican celebrity heart surgeon Dr. Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania’s Senate contest while getting 62% of the vote of those 18 to 44. That was slightly better than Biden’s 56% with such voters in 2020. In the Pennsylvania governor’s race, Democrat Josh Shapiro also won while outpacing Biden’s support in 2020, earning 64% of that age group.Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly won a second term by modestly outperforming 2020 margins with voters under 45 in the red state, 52% to Biden’s 45%. Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer also commandingly secured reelection while garnering a somewhat larger percentage of the state’s voters under 45 in 2022, 61%, than Biden did in 2020, 54%.
About 36% of “voters under 45 identify as progressive Democrats.” Only 20% of the older voters hold those views.
But the normal, which has gone on for a while, is that young voters tend to be independent:
Not being fully enamored with one party or the other also showed up in VoteCast results. Even in places where Democratic support among young voters was strong, voters 18 to 44 tended to be less enthusiastic about candidates they supported than older voters.That was true in the swing states of Arizona, where Democrats won the Senate and governor’s race, and in Wisconsin, where the party won the governorship but Republican Sen. Ron Johnson was reelected. And in Georgia, where Republican Gov. Brian Kemp was reelected but Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock secured a second term in a runoff.Santiago Mayer, a political science major at California State University, Long Beach who founded the student-led advocacy group Voters of Tomorrow, said those findings didn’t surprise him given that young voters tend to be independent. But he also said many are also deeply progressive, which means that currently, “Republicans have declared war against Generation Z.”“Young voters are voting against Republicans, and Democrats are obviously the better option,” said Mayer, 20, whose group used volunteers nationwide to call and text Georgia voters ages 18 to 29 some 2.5 million times. “But eventually, when we’ll have two years when Republicans hopefully will transition back to sanity, the emphasis will be in getting elected officials that actually represent what Gen Z wants.”
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