Many Young Voters Have Turned on Biden. But a Different Group Just Might Rescue Him.

As the already unbearable 2024 election drifts toward its conclusion, breath by raspy breath, President Joe Biden’s standing has barely improved from two months ago. The FiveThirtyEight polling average shows Biden gaining just 1.3 points on former President Donald Trump since the beginning of March, and the New York Times/Siena College team dropped another set of bleak, panic-inducing battleground state polls last Monday. One of the factors driving these wobbly numbers against Trump are significant declines in support and turnout intention for the youngest voters—the same age bracket that went for Biden by 24 or 25 points in 2020, depending on which analysis you use. But early polling also suggests that the president might have a secret weapon: a reversal of fortunes with the elderly.

Not all survey researchers publish their crosstabs—data on how different demographic subgroups intend to vote—and they don’t all publish the same age breakdowns. But those that do show some movement toward Biden from the 2020 baseline with voters 65 and older. Trump won this group by 3, 4, or 5 points in 2020, depending on which analysis you prefer. It is important to keep in mind that crosstabs, by virtue of their much smaller sample size, are “noisier” and less reliable, with a much higher margin of error than the surveys from which they are drawn.

But Adam Carlson’s December analysis for Split Ticket, which averaged crosstabs from a number of recent surveys, showed Trump leading elderly voters by just 1.3 points. Of the April polls with freely available crosstabs (some firms will also charge you for this exquisite knowledge), Quinnipiac’s April 24 survey had Biden with a 2-point advantage with registered voters over 65, and an April 22 Marist poll that gave a breakdown for voters 60 and older had Biden up 11. Yet both an April 29 CNN survey and an April 29 Harvard CAPS-Harris poll showed Trump up 4 with elderly voters, while an April 18 Yahoo News poll had Trump up … 13. And in an April 13 New York Times/Siena College poll it was Biden up 9. You can see why researchers don’t necessarily want us to draw firm conclusions from this data, but nevertheless, the average of those six polls for this age group is Biden +1.

To help make sense of this barrage of data, FiveThirtyEight recently debuted a tool that it calls the Swing-o-Matic, which allows you to futz around with candidate support and turnout rates for a variety of demographic subgroups that pollsters believe are crucial to party coalitions. Chillingly, a mere 5-point drop in support from 18–29 year-olds, holding everything else constant from 2020 including youth turnout, is enough to torpedo Biden’s campaign. If you drop youth turnout 5 points from FiveThirtyEight’s estimate of 46 percent to 41 percent, Biden can only afford to shed 1 point of support from that group before Donald Trump once again wins the Electoral College and becomes our president and tormentor for four more long years.

The fact is, very little remains unchanged in between presidential elections, and there will inevitably be swings from Biden to Trump and vice versa among a variety of groups, some of which will surprise even people who study these things for a living. One constant in American politics for decades, though, has been that a much larger percentage of older Americans turn out to vote than their younger counterparts. That gap reached a high of more than 35 points in 2000, with more than 67 percent of the oldest eligible cohort showing up and less than a third of 18-to-24-year-olds voting. In 2020, 18-to-24-year-olds turned out at the highest rate since 1972, and still fell short of 50 percent participation.

Given the age polarization that has shaped American politics since about 2002, with younger voters veering sharply left compared to the rest of the electorate, Democrats could basically have run the table this whole century with fairly modest turnout gains among young voters. It also means that, dollar for dollar, candidates simply have more robust political incentives to appeal to the elderly than they do to the young.

This dynamic tells us something important about 2024: According to the Swing-o-Matic, Biden can offset quite dramatic losses with young people if he makes marginal improvements among the elderly.

The tool’s 2020 baseline is set to an 11-point margin for Republicans among voters 65 and older (that’s yet another estimate that’s quite different from the 2020 results). But if we drop that margin slightly to 9 points, Biden can withstand 5-point drops in support and turnout among young voters. Take it down to a 6-point older-voter edge for the GOP, and Biden still wins with a 10-point erosion in the youth margin and a 9-point drop in young voter turnout. Cutting 5 points off of Trump’s margin with older voters would also allow Biden to ride out 5-point declines in youth and Hispanic support as well as a 10-point erosion in his margin among Black voters.

There is, of course, some danger in taking the crosstabs from preelection polls too seriously. Polling in 2020 showed Biden making bigger gains with elderly voters than materialized on Election Day. Quinnipiac’s final preelection survey, for example, showed Biden carrying voters 65 and over by 15 points, and Fox’s last poll had Biden winning them by 10. Remember: He lost them by the single digits to Trump—a significant departure from the polls. That discrepancy explains a big part of Biden’s smaller-than-expected victory in 2020, and may have cost Democrats a series of winnable Senate seats as well, including in North Carolina and Maine.

But this isn’t a zero-sum choice. There’s also no reason that Biden can’t shore up the youth vote while also appealing to older folks. Strong-arming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu into a cease-fire in Gaza wouldn’t just be the right thing to do; it could be the first step in reversing Biden’s declines among young voters—and not just the ones getting their skulls cracked by cops on university lawns.

The most recent Harvard Youth Poll, the gold-standard survey of America’s young people, showed that even respondents who aren’t in college favor a cease-fire by 30 points. And while polls show that young people don’t rank Gaza particularly high as an issue that will influence their vote, those who do may be disproportionately likely to sit out the election or switch their vote from 2020 as a consequence. Think about it this way: Biden cannot wave a magic wand and make inflation (consistently voters’ top problem across all generations) go away, but he has substantial leverage over the course of the Gaza war that he seemed reluctant to use until his administration paused some arms shipments two weeks ago. And given just how much the administration is still propping up Israel’s military, there’s a lot more where that came from.

Of course, that might risk his standing with the oldest age cohort, who tend to be the staunchest supporters of Israel. Yet when you consider a May 8 Data For Progress survey showing that 7 in 10 Americans supported the U.S. calling for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, it is actually hard to see the downside. Americans may still disproportionately support Israel in the abstract, but the monthslong toll on innocent civilians in Gaza—who are also effectively hostages of Hamas—has led even many pro-Israel voters to want an end to the carnage.

Knowing that elderly voters might be the key to his reelection, Biden would also be wise to hit Trump extra hard on issues most important to seniors, like Social Security, Medicare, and prescription drug prices, where Democrats have what political scientists call “issue ownership.” It helps that GOP leaders can’t seem to go a single year without talking about cutting or privatizing America’s gold-standard old-age programs, and that Biden also has a genuine policy record of success on drug prices, something his opponent yapped endlessly about instead of getting anything meaningful done.

But a real breakthrough with the elderly might require departing from this well-worn partisan script. One under-the-radar issue that Democrats should have a significant advantage on that neither Biden nor really anyone else has talked much about is the coming crisis in elder care. According to a recent AARP survey, nearly 6 in 10 voters over 50 serve as a loved one’s primary caregiver, amid a rolling crisis as the oldest surviving baby boomers—once the largest generation in American history—approach their 80^th birthdays.

Biden needn’t roll out a series of wonky white papers to address the growing crisis of caring for the elderly to stake it out as a Democratic priority. “Republicans want to cut Social Security and Medicare,” he could argue, “leaving the elderly and their grown children to care for ailing loved ones alone.” But that’s not enough, he should say. “We need a comprehensive new commitment to helping older Americans live and thrive in dignity, and making sure that their families have every single resource they need to care for them without going broke.”

The key takeaway he should hammer is that without more robust support for caregivers, more and more elderly Americans are going to end up homeless, cut off from society, or stashed in bleak, underfunded elder care facilities while their kids file for bankruptcy trying to pay for it. He could roll out a Caregivers Bill of Rights, including access to subsidized in-home care, tax breaks for caregivers, and policies designed to appeal to younger voters in the so-called sandwich generation, who are looking after young and school-age children while simultaneously assuming financial and logistical responsibility for their aging parents. And he could make a renewed push for paid family leave, emphasizing its utility not just for new parents but also for those who need time off to take care of a parent or spouse after a hip replacement or quadruple bypass.

Will a renewed focus on issues facing older Americans be enough to offset ongoing sourness about inflation as well as what increasingly look like baked-in losses among young voters? Short of someone talking Biden into dropping out and making way for a younger, more dynamic politician, it might be one of the only paths forward for Democrats—a fact that doesn’t appear completely lost on Biden’s strategists.