In a New York Times interview back in March, centrist Democratic pollster David Shor told Ezra Klein that, with the exception of minority women, young people preferred Donald Trump to Kamala Harris. “I find this […] shocking,” Klein replied. For years, he said, Republicans had been ignoring young people and concentrating on the senior vote. Yet “75-year-old white men supported Kamala Harris at a significantly higher rate than 20-year-old white men.”
Writing in the Atlantic on Friday, prominent author Jean Twenge — whose work has informed that of Jonathan Haidt — claimed that Shor is wrong, and that young people are actually pretty liberal.
The truth is that both Shor and Twenge are wide of the mark. Rather than being Right- or Left-wing, it is best to think of young people as more polarised than older age groups on culture war questions. There is also a significant opinion gap between elite and non-elite young people. With questions that offer response categories on a 5- or 7-point scale from “strongly oppose” to “strongly support” (for instance, that the US is a racist country), young people are more likely than their elders to select “strongly” options in either direction. Likewise, European youth incline towards the populist Right or Left rather than mainstream parties, even as the median young voter leans to the Left of their elders.
Continue reading the entire piece here at UnHerd
______________________
Eric Kaufmann is an adjunct fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London.
Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
