Top Pollster Says Dems Losing Younger Voters: ‘Huge Concern’
Jonathan Della Volpe, polling director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, expressed concern on the Fast Politics podcast with Molly Jong-Fast, warning that Democrats may be losing ground with younger voters.
Della Volpe emphasized that he fears the Democratic Party may have missed a critical chance in recent years to solidify its relationship with young Americans.
“The concern I have for Democrats is just a handful of years ago, I would say that every day that, for every thousand young people who turn 18, Molly, like 700 of them, six or 700 of them, have values aligned with the Democrat Party,” Della Volpe noted. “It was like this incredible opportunity for the Democrats to kind of cement kind of their values with an emerging generation. They didn’t communicate that very well.
And now we’re living, you know, in what I think is the beginning of a post-ideological era with younger people, okay, where, because of the concerns about economics, they’re voting in what they would say is a much more pragmatic way than they did, you know, in maybe ’16 or, you know, in ’18 or even in ’20,” he continued. “So that’s a concern if younger people agree with Democrats on most issues, but they’re not voting in the numbers that they voted with Democrats in the past. That’s a huge concern because my generation is just getting more conservative, right?”
According to his personal website, Della Volpe belongs to Generation X, which includes individuals born between 1965 and 1980, as classified by the National Institute on Retirement Security.
WATCH:
CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten pointed out that in the 2024 election, former President Donald Trump made significant progress with young voters in his matchup against Vice President Kamala Harris, marking an improvement compared to his 2020 contest with Joe Biden.
“If you look at the Trump versus Democrat margin, you look at voters under the age of 25, you go back to 2020,” the analyst explained during a recent CNN segment. “Look, Joe Biden won this group overwhelmingly. Look at that, by 34 points. You look at 2024. Look, Kamala Harris won it, but just by 11.”
“Trump gained more among voters under the age of 25 than any other age group,” he added. “If you think of young people as being Democrats, while they may still lean Democrat, not in any way in the same numbers that they used to just even four years ago, Donald Trump doing considerably better among younger voters.”
Additionally, Trump made notable advances among Hispanic men in the 2024 election, capturing a majority of their votes nationwide, according to polling data.
Since beginning his second term, the president has acted swiftly, wielding executive authority to overhaul longstanding government policies and implementing drastic cuts to the federal workforce through a series of executive actions.
From his inauguration on January 20 onward, Trump has signed nearly 100 executive orders, according to Fox News—far surpassing the early pace of his predecessors.
Recent national polling averages tracking presidential approval indicate Trump’s ratings remain slightly underwater. His numbers have dipped compared to the start of his second term, when he held approval in the low 50s and disapproval in the mid-40s.
A key factor in the decline has been mounting economic concerns, particularly apprehensions that Trump’s tariffs on major U.S. trading partners could contribute to rising inflation—an issue that previously plagued Biden’s administration and weighed down his approval ratings.
Nevertheless, Trump’s 49% overall approval rating in the latest Fox News poll ties his all-time high in the network’s surveys—a level he last reached in April 2020, toward the end of his first term. This figure also places him six points ahead of where he stood at the same point in his first administration when he held a 43% approval rating in March 2017.