COVID-19 COULD CHANGE HOW WE VOTE, PERHAPS NOT A BAD THING

…Candidate, former VP, Joe Biden, Harvard Poll says young voters like Joe Biden over Trump

Since Sanders dropped out, Biden has taken many of Sanders supporters

There had been an assumption that former vice president Joe Biden might have a problem inspiring young people to vote for him this year.  That, and not only that he is a generation far removed from theirs, and he acts that way.

In the Democratic primaries, Biden got trounced by Sen. Bernie Sanders among people under 30, or at least among that low proportion who even bothered to vote.

But a survey released last week by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics suggests that Biden has something going for him that could matter more than anything else to young adults.  That issue is, that he is not Donald Trump.

The latest installment of the Harvard Youth Poll, a survey that the Harvard institute has been doing bi-annually for two decades, shows that 18-to-29-year-olds favor Biden over the president by 23 points.  Among those who are most likely to vote, Biden has a larger, 30-point edge.  Even more surprising: 30 points is almost identical to the margin that Sanders

would be enjoying if he were at the top of today’s Democratic ticket, the survey says.

Of course, with young voters, the question to ask is whether they will actually show up at the polls.  The survey indicates that 54% say they plan to, which is a slight up-tick from this point four years ago, when 50% said they would vote.

By the time the 2016 election did roll around, only 46% showed up. By comparison, 71% of those older than 65 did turn out.  It must be understood that this younger generation had been buffeted by anxiety and fear and their economic prospects took a gut-punch during the recession that followed the financial meltdown of 2008.

They have grown-up terrified of mass shootings in their schools, and now comes the Covid-19.  So, it is not all that startling that less than 10% of them say the country is working today as it should be.

What has changed in this latest crisis are the specifics that worries them the most.

As recently as last fall, young voters said the economy and the environment and climate change were their top concerns.  The proportion who mention those issues hasn’t changed much since then, but now 19% are mentioning the coronavirus, and the percentage who say that health care is a chief concern has more than doubled, to 17%.  Many of them are from families that have Obamacare, which Trump has been attacking.

As John Della Volpe, director of polling for Harvard, put it: "Self-defense, in 2020, is one of the primary motivations for voting.”  All of which brings us back to Trump: “It’s very hard to find someone my age who feels that President Trump has made their life better,” said Harvard student Richard Sweeney, class of 2022, who was chair of the polling project last year.

The number is that 66% in the poll this year said they disapprove of the president’s overall performance. The poll was conducted March 11-23, during the early days of the Covid-19 crisis. That was just a month ago, but it already feels as though it was back in a different era.

Whether this translates into the kind of intensity that brings young people out to vote will be the big question, and potentially a decisive one in November.

Certainly, Biden still has some work to do when it comes to connecting with this particular generation. But if, as Bill Clinton used to tell us constantly, elections are about the future, it is worth keeping an eye on the voters who have the greatest stake in it.

All of us have a big stake in the November election, but those 18 to 29 years old are the ones with the biggest future stake in this country.

Copyright G. Ater 2020