New York magazine columnist Jonathan Chait is cautioning his fellow progressives that several recent polls showing President Biden losing young voters to Donald Trump aren’t an aberration. “The unthinkable has become, at least for the time being, undeniable,” he warns.
Central to Biden’s weakness with the young is that
Black Democrats are more likely than white Democrats to identify as moderate or conservative and take more moderate positions than white Democrats on a host of issues: They favor stricter immigration enforcement, prioritizing fossil-fuel production over mitigating climate change, increasing spending on reducing crime, opposing abortion, etc.
“Progressive activist groups,” Chait says, “have built a business model” out of assuming that young, non-white voters embrace their ideology, and “the media has often accepted these claims uncritically.”
Another myth being dispelled by recent polls concerns voter turnout. A December New York Times poll finds Biden doing noticeably worse among young voters who didn’t vote in 2020 than among those who did. Chait says that “the new rule is that the fewer people who show up to vote, the better Democrats do.”
Talk about the political world being turned upside down.