Why younger voters are rapidly turning their backs on Joe Biden

Joe Biden meets students in Houston during the 2019 campaign. Picture: AFP

President Joe Biden has another age problem: growing numbers of young voters are telling pollsters they back Donald Trump, and Biden’s approach to the Israel-Hamas war appears to be turning off more of them every day.

He was already struggling to inspire Gen Z amid a proliferation of social media memes about his doddery behaviour.

Now a CNN poll has Biden, 81, trailing his rival among those aged under 35 by 51 to 40 per cent. That echoes an 18-percentage-point Trump advantage among those younger than 30 in a Fox News poll in mid-March.

The trend is especially worrying for Democrats, because younger voters were crucial to Biden’s victory in 2020: exit polls showed they backed him over Trump by 59 to 35 per cent.

Since coming to power, Biden has tried to appeal to the youth vote by pledging to banish federal student loan debt, but the move has fallen a long way short of expectations.

Emails were sent to 16 million Americans in 2022 saying they qualified for student loan forgiveness, but the scheme was struck down by the Supreme Court.

Biden then sought to make it easier under existing programs for certain groups, such as public sector workers and disabled borrowers, to qualify for debt forgiveness.

His administration has approved the cancellation of about $US144bn ($220.5bn) in federal student loans, equal to 9 per cent of the $US1.6 trillion of federal student loan debt, in what Republicans describe as blatant election handouts.

Democrats blame Trump, 77, for scuppering the original scheme, arguing that the three conservative judges appointed by him tipped the balance in the Supreme Court.

Young women are far more likely to back Biden than young men.

This is partly due to the move by the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v Wade, the 1973 ruling that guaranteed the universal right to abortion access. It has become a big rallying cry on campuses, but mainly among women.

Pollsters say also young men are not nearly as bothered by Trump’s bombastic style and find his iconoclasm appealing.

Gen Z voters feel left behind by an economy that works for older people, while many young white men feel there has been an overcorrection against them that favours women and ethnic minorities. Trump talks to those men, and Biden does not.

The President’s team has tried all sorts of gimmicks, such as inviting young influencers to the White House and pushing the “Dark Brandon” meme, which uses the disparaging nickname deployed by his conservative critics (from the euphemistic slogan “Let’s go Brandon") to cast Biden as a secret superhero.

But Biden’s main problem is that he cannot speak to young voters effectively: he has never even tried to make an address to them about his Gaza policy.

His team knows Biden’s reflexive support for Israel has become a turn-off for many younger Americans and so it simply keeps him away from the microphones.

That will change once he has a ceasefire to talk about, if one can be achieved. Only then can he hope to try to turn the tide of campus revolt and voter apathy.

Meanwhile, his opponent has a simple message: he will stop all wars.

Trump hammers the message that neither Ukraine nor Gaza would have happened on his watch, and that Biden is unable to end either.

However simplistic this approach may be, it seems to be working.

The Times