When Donald J. Trump held a rally in Rome, Georgia, in March, his audience included a second-generation supporter and first-time rally attendee named Luke Harris.
“My parents always supported him — especially when he was against Hillary,” recalled Harris, who was in sixth grade in Cartersville, Georgia, when Trump defeated Hillary Clinton in 2016 to win the presidency.
Harris, now a 19-year-old student at Kennesaw State University, “grew up looking at him, listening to him, watching him,” he said. “I kind of grew into it.”
Trump’s victory, for both supporters and detractors, represented a profound break with politics as usual in the United States. The people who voted against him feared he would turn the American presidency upside down. The people who voted for him hoped so.
But for younger Trump supporters taking part in their first presidential elections this year, Trump represents something that is virtually impossible for older voters to imagine: the normal politics of their childhood.
Charlie Meyer, a 17-year-old high school student who volunteered at a Trump rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, last month, said he first became attracted to Trump at age 13, during his presidency, because of your views on abortion. , which resonated with his as a Christian.
He has little memory of pre-Trump politics. “I was very young at that time,” he said.
While President Biden continues to lead among 18- to 29-year-olds in most polls, several polls in recent weeks show that Trump is performing much stronger with young voters than he did at the same point in 2020, and stronger than than before. he went against Mrs. Clinton at the same time in 2016.
In the latest New York Times/Siena College poll last month, Trump and Biden were tied among 18- to 29-year-olds. In the latest Harvard Youth Poll, conducted in March by the Harvard Politics Institute, Trump trails by eight points.
“He’s not even close to actually winning,” said John Della Volpe, director of the Harvard poll, which surveyed young voters for Biden’s 2020 campaign, when Biden ultimately defeated Trump among 18- to 29-year-olds by 24 points. . But “he’s doing as well as any Republican candidate at this stage of the election since 2012, and that’s significant.”
Della Volpe and other researchers note that these findings come with many caveats. Trump’s relatively good standing with young voters is at odds with their broadly liberal views on most issues, which have led them to favor Democratic candidates for decades.
In polls like Harvard’s, Biden performs much stronger among registered or likely voters than in polls among all adults, suggesting he is weaker among those less interested in the race. Young people, who are often late to upcoming elections, appear to be especially turned off by this year’s race, a contest between two familiar candidates in their 70s and 80s.
“It’s incredibly early to take the temperature of candidates and elections,” said Daniel A. Cox, director of the American Enterprise Institute Survey Center on American Life, who noted that polls show young voters pay much less attention. election this year than in 2020. “A lot of them just didn’t tune in.”
Still, the Trump campaign sees opportunity in signs of changing demographics. In recent years, a stark gender divide has emerged in youth politics, with Republicans enjoying an advantage among young people. In a February Times/Siena poll, young voters were much more likely to say they were personally helped by Trump’s policies than by Biden’s, and much more likely to say they were personally harmed by Biden’s policies than by Biden’s. Biden. Trump’s (although in both cases, about half said none of the president’s policies made much of a difference).
John Brabender, a Trump campaign media consultant who focuses on young voters, pointed to the long shadow of the coronavirus pandemic, which has transformed and defined the high school and college experiences for many of this year’s young voters. That discontent hurt Trump in 2020, but Brabender argues it is more likely to hurt Biden in 2024.
“His whole life has been set back compared to previous generations,” he said. “And they are extremely frustrated with Biden for this.”
Biden ran successfully in 2020, appealing to voters’ desire to return to the pre-Trump status quo, and in this election his campaign drew attention to Trump’s breaks with democratic norms as president. But these appeals may carry less weight with voters who were in high school at the time of Trump’s election.
They formed their opinions and identities in a political landscape in which it is a constant, not a cataclysm.
“This was the world I was born into,” said Makai Henry, 18, a student at Florida International University in Miami. “For better or worse, I think this is the Trump era.”
For some first-time voters, this made Trump more of an afterthought in the evolution of his politics than a defining figure.
Allyson Langston, 20, became a supporter of Trump during his presidency, but described the change as more about Republican values than about the former president.
A high school student when Trump was elected, Langston lived in Orlando, Florida, at the time, with Republican parents and a sister who supported Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent from Vermont, in the Democratic presidential primary. Watching the presidential debates, she was skeptical of Clinton and Trump, but “I thought I was more Democratic,” she said.
But in high school and college, she realized she was doing well. When her mother and sister lost their jobs during the early days of the pandemic, she had to help support the family with her part-time restaurant salary. She has begun to question Democratic priorities, such as student loan forgiveness, which she now considers an irrational proposal in light of other demands on federal spending.
“I agree with a lot of things that Democrats like, like free college and things like that,” she said. “But I understand that this is no longer possible in a world like this.”
An unexpected miscarriage at age 19 led her to rethink her views on abortion, which she now opposes with a few exceptions.
And although she is bisexual and supports gay rights, she has rejected liberals’ views on transgender politics. “At the end of the day, there are only two genders,” she said. In her first presidential election this year, she plans to vote for Trump.
“It follows what this country was built on,” she said.
Mr. Henry followed the opposite trajectory. The son of immigrants from Dominica whose politics were center-left, he attended Barack Obama rallies with his mother when he was a child and, when he was in sixth grade, accompanied her when she campaigned for Clinton in 2016.
When Trump was elected, he recalled, “I wasn’t pro-Trump, but he was kind of funny.”
In middle and high school, he developed an interest in current affairs and, informed by a steady diet of YouTube videos from experts like Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson and organizations like Turning Point USA and Prager University, considered himself a conservative.
But he ended up broadening his media diet, and that and the success of the federal government’s pandemic stimulus efforts under both Trump and Biden have made him skeptical of conservative claims about deficit spending and government programs.
Henry now considers himself an independent and is inclined to vote for Biden in his first presidential election, although he considers Democratic alarms about the threat posed by another Trump presidency to be exaggerated.
“I feel like this isn’t necessarily a case of choosing between two evils,” he said. “It’s somewhere between moderately good and mildly ‘meh’. Trump is ‘meh’.”
