It’s a hard sell when no one is listening
Two new polls help shed light on why Democrats are struggling with voters.
WASHINGTON — The last few months have been rough on the nation’s governing party.
Voter frustrations, resurgent inflation, a stubborn pandemic and the loss last month of a closely watched election for governor in Virginia have put Democrats into a funk. They’ve responded as political parties often do — fighting among themselves about what’s gone wrong.
Two very different polls provide some fresh insights into that question.
First, the Harvard Youth Poll, which the university’s Kennedy School Institute of Politics has conducted for two decades, showed that young people, much like the electorate as a whole, have grown less supportive of President Biden and his party.
Second, a poll on voter attitudes toward homelessness in Los Angeles, which The Times published last week, highlights the mounting frustration many voters feel — as well as their disappointment with the region’s political leadership, nearly all of them Democrats.
The two surveys cover different groups and different sets of issues, but a couple of common themes run through them that highlight the difficulties of governing in the current era.
In March, when Harvard last surveyed the nation’s 18to 29-year-olds, Biden stood at a high point of popularity. Young people widely approved of his job performance, with 59% giving him a positive mark.
A bit more than seven months later, Biden’s job approval among 18- to 29-yearolds has sunk to 46%.
Democrats, Republicans and independents each have soured on the president by similar amounts.
One group stands out, however: Biden’s job approval among young Latinos has dropped by 21 percentage points, the poll found.
That’s consistent with other surveys that have shown Democrats losing ground with Latinos, along with voting data from Virginia that indicate a decline in the Democratic vote in heavily Latino precincts.
John Della Volpe, the director of polling at the Institute of Politics, who has overseen the Harvard Youth Poll since its inception, notes that the pattern is a familiar one.
During President Obama’s tenure, Della Volpe said, he was continually struck by the unchanging nature of the support the president received from young Black voters. The attitudes of white voters didn’t change much either.
“Latino attitudes were much more fluid; they bounced around a lot,” he said.
As a major study by Equis Research found this year,
The partisan warfare of the last decade has produced high levels of voter engagement and record voter turnout. It’s also left many Americans desperate for a break.
Latino voters are less firmly partisan, on average, than either Black or white voters, making them more likely to shift in response to economic conditions and major events.
The poll can’t tell us why Biden has lost more ground with young Latinos than with Black or white young people. It can, however, rule out a couple of possibilities.
First, the problem is not that young people have grown more supportive of Republicans. Former President Trump, in particular, remains extremely unpopular among young people, with just 30% holding a favorable impression compared with 63% with an unfavorable one, essentially unchanged from the spring.
Nor does the poll support the belief — often expressed in the Washington political establishment — that Democrats have alienated swing voters by taking more progressive positions.
The Harvard Youth Poll over the last decade has charted a steady shift to the left among American young people as Generation Z has entered the electorate.
That hasn’t changed: On climate change, racial politics, the role of government in the economy and other issues, young people have continued to move left.
Nor are young people disengaging from politics. The share who say they are certain to vote in the next election remains at about onethird — extremely high compared with a decade ago, presaging what Della Volpe predicts will be another large turnout of young voters in next year’s midterm election.
But while young people remain politically engaged, the poll does show them disconnecting from news coverage.
Between spring 2019 — essentially the start of the presidential campaign — and now, for example, the share of young people who report going to Facebook for news has dropped roughly in half, Della Volpe said.
That’s not because young people were shifting to other — perhaps more reliable — news sources. The poll found similar, although smaller, declines in use of other social media sites for news. Similarly, Comscore, which tracks usage of news sites, has reported that nearly all have suffered significant declines in the aftermath of last year’s campaign, with most of the top sites down about 20% compared with last year.
“The media environment — how Americans are engaging — is changing more radically than we appreciate,” Della Volpe said. Why? “It’s stressful,” he said. The partisan warfare of the last decade has produced high levels of voter engagement and record voter turnout in the last two elections. It’s also left many Americans desperate for a break.
That may be particularly true of young people who, according to the Harvard Youth Poll, have been experiencing a sharp increase in mental health problems. This fall’s poll found that 51% of young Americans reported having felt down, depressed or hopeless on at least several days in the last two weeks. One-quarter had thoughts of self-harm.
Young people are tuning out news, in part, Della Volpe thinks, “to protect their mental health.”
What does all that have to do with Biden’s problems?
Well, as virtually every press secretary of the last generation, in either party, has said, getting across a consistent message about what you’ve accomplished is far harder now in an era of hundreds of channels and sites competing for people’s attention. That task gets even tougher when fewer people are paying attention.
What does cut through are examples of things going wrong, whether that’s higher-than-expected inflation, a new variant of the coronavirus, or an expected holiday gift suddenly on back-order because of shipping delays.
“Bad news sticks with you,” as Della Volpe said. And bad news drives down support for whichever party is in charge.
That’s where the results of the poll on homelessness dovetail with the Harvard Youth Poll.
Local governments in Southern California have poured billions of dollars in recent years into housing and services for the region’s homeless population. But the poll found that only 13% of voters said they knew “a lot” about what local governments had done on the issue, while 40% said they knew “very little” or nothing.
What voters do know is that they keep seeing tents in parks, people sleeping on the sidewalks and the homeless encampments that have become fixtures of so many L.A. neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, as the poll showed, that’s left them deeply frustrated.
That frustration hasn’t dramatically changed the political complexion of a mostly liberal city. But it does pose a clear challenge for the Democratic officials who hope to succeed Eric Garcetti as mayor.
Nationally as well as locally, Democratic officials, who believe in activist government, have the burden of persuading the public that they’re producing tangible results. It’s a difficult task, made harder by a fractured news environment and voters’ understandable desire to look away from the oftencontentious world of politics.
But if Democrats are to revive their flagging fortunes, there may be no goal that’s more crucial to achieve.