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“American youth today has its fringes, but that’s part of the greatness of our country. I have great faith in American youth. The youth of today can change the world, and if they understand that, I think we are going to go forward to a great age.” — former Vice President Richard M. Nixon, in a television campaign advertisement, 1968 EOSTON » Maybe the important gap in next month’s election isn’t only gender. Maybe it’s generational, too. The gender gap — yawning again this political season — has been a hardy perennial of American politics for 40 years, first emerging in the 1980 election, when Jimmy Carter outperformed Ronald Reagan among women by 8 percentage points. But the generation gap that is emerging in the 2020 political cycle has the potential to have as much effect on American politics as the gender gap had in the past four decades — perhaps to redeem the statement Mr. Nixon made in an election in which Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey had a 9-point advantage among voters under 30.

More than a half- century later — and when the voting age is 18, not 21 — a series of polls shows former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a substantial edge over President Donald Trump among young voters. The Forbes Under 30 Voter Survey, for example, gives Mr.

Biden a 22-point advantage. At this point in a political column like this, readers often ask the same vital question: “Fine, but will they vote?” A separate poll undertaken by the Institute of Politics at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government found that 63 percent of young people say they will “definitely be voting” — a huge surge from the 47 percent of the same age group surveyed at this point in the 2016 election cycle.

Why? A third poll holds the answer. More than four out of five of these young people, according to a survey conducted by the Tisch College at Tufts University, say they believe their generation has the power to change the country, with three out of five saying they consider themselves part of a movement determined to express its views.

This is both a new phenomenon and a very old one.

But either way, it is potentially a very powerful one. And it occurs in a circumstance in which, historically, young people have had enormous influence. This year — with young people in the streets calling for a new American reckoning on race and, according to polls, with their political awareness heightened because of the coronavirus — voters under 30 are choosing between a Republican candidate who is 74 years old and a Democratic candidate who is 77 years old.

“So much of the energy we are seeing in protests and movements is coming out of a young demographic,” Democratic Gov. John Carney of Delaware said in an interview, “and that energy comes from a generation different from that of the nominees.”

In some ways, that is part of a great American tradition. In a landmark 1961 article in Political Science Quarterly titled, “The Founding Fathers: Young Men of the Revolution,” historians Stanley Elkins and Eric Mckitrick wrote, “The Republic is now very old, as republics go, yet it was young once, and so were its followers.”

Three- quarters of a century after the American Revolution, a number of insurgencies emerged with telling names and important adherents: Young England (with Benjamin Disraeli), Young Ireland (with a group that would for a time ally with Daniel O’connell), Young