Three weeks to go 🏎
Claudia Conway's reemergence as an independent, the Boys vs. Girls election, and the first-ever Yale Youth Poll.
And just like that, there are three weeks until Election Day 😱. You can expect more regular editions of The Up and Up in this final stretch, and if you have suggestions for ideas, please reach out.
I’m going to be in Philadelphia the final week of the election, so stay tuned :)
The first-of-its-kind Yale Youth Poll came out today and unlike their rival school Harvard’s IOP Youth Poll, it included the general electorate. That said, the Yale poll oversampled for young registered voters under 30 — with a sample of 2,750 ages 18-29 — to compare to all registered voters.
The poll found Harris with a 20-point lead over Trump amongst young registered voters under 30, leading amongst this cohort 56% to 35%.
Though it’s not laid out in the image below, the cross-tabs of the Yale Youth Poll reaffirm the youth partisan gender divide. The poll found that young women registered voters under 30 back Harris by a 32-point margin. Meanwhile, young men registered voters under 30 back Harris by just a 5-point margin.
Women < 30: Harris 62%, Trump 30%
Men < 30: Harris 48%, Trump 43%
As for an ideological breakdown, the Yale poll finds that of registered voters under 30:
53% self ID as somewhat or very liberal
20% self ID a moderate
26% self ID as somewhat or very conservative
The young registered voters surveyed see the Harris Walz ticket as somewhat to very liberal, while they are more likely to see the Trump Vance ticket as very conservative.
To learn more about the impetus behind their study and their key takeaways, I spoke with the poll’s founder and directors, Yale students Milan Singh and Jack Dozier.
“There's been a dearth of high quality polling of young voters,” said Singh, a sophomore, referencing the Harvard poll as one of the only other alternatives. “I haven’t seen much of specifically young voters, not just pulling cross tabs. To the extent that young voters are increasingly being discussed this election, I think it’s good to have more data to rely on.”
Singh laid out the generational gaps found in the poll on the issues of trade, transgender rights, and support for aid to Israel.
“Young voters are a lot less protectionist, seemingly a lot more pro-trade,” he explained. “Young voters are more liberal on particularly transgender issues. And there’s a big, big divide on whether or not end military aid to Israel,” Singh said. While 62% of registered voters under 30 supported ending military aid to Israel, just 44% of the general electorate said the same.
When it comes to government structures and democracy reform, the poll found a generational divide in perception of the politicization of the Supreme Court.
“We found that young voters and old voters both have high awareness of which party appointed majority of justices, of how the appointment process works, but we found that 46, 42 all voters think the Supreme Court mostly rules on the merits of the case rather than to the advantage a political party, whereas young voters 49, 33 said that the court mostly rules to the advantage one political party, rather than on the merits. And this is reflected in young voters saying that their top proposal for democracy reform was 18-year term limits for Supreme Court justices,” he said.
Claudia Conway’s reemergence as an independent
Over the past couple of months, I sat down with Claudia Conway, the 19-year-old daughter of Kellyanne and George Conway — two of the most prominent longtime voices in Republican politics. This weekend, our piece on her declaration of independence ran in The New York Times.
You may remember that Claudia gained internet notoriety in 2020 for speaking out against her parents — notably her mother who was working as a top aide to former President Donald Trump at the time.
These days, Claudia and Kellyanne speak on the phone multiple times a day. And Claudia is outspoken as an independent, hoping to sway fellow Gen Z voters ahead of Election Day. Claudia still speaks her mind with “spunk,” as she put it, “but in a tasteful way, in a more grown-up way.”
As democratic activist Olivia Julianna told me, she has “respect” for Claudia’s “hustle.” She said: “A lot of young people don’t identify with either party and find themselves in that independent category, and I think she can speak to a lot of those young people in a way some of us just can’t.”
Election 2024: Boys vs. Girls
And yesterday, my piece on the youth partisan gender gap ran in The Free Press. In conversations with young voters over the past many months one thing has become clear: young men and women have different priorities this election cycle.
While reporting the piece, I listened to more than 20 American men and women under 34, both in focus groups led by the Survey Center on American Life’s Daniel Cox and one-on-one interviews. I found that while many young women forged a sense of identity and solidarity from the #MeToo movement following Trump’s 2016 election, many young men felt alienated by that same movement—and felt at risk of being canceled for sharing their true social and political preferences.
As Cox, who’s an expert on the youth gender divide, told me:
“For many young women, the world is an unsafe and unfriendly place. Young men look around and see a culture of female empowerment that casts them at best as irrelevant and at worst as villains.”
While polls show that Harris is up amongst young voters overall, there’s a stark quantitative gender divide. The most recent Harvard IOP youth poll shows a more than 31-point gender gap, with young women backing Harris by 59 percent to Trump’s 28 percent in a two-way matchup. Among young men, Harris has only an 11-point lead over Trump, 49 percent to 38 percent.
Both presidential candidates have leaned into this — and could be at risk of alienating the other sex in doing so. Read our full story here.
Along those lines…
As Reuters’ Jeff Mason and Nandita Bose report, according to sources, Vice President Kamala Harris could join the Joe Rogan podcast as part of her quest for votes from young men… which would be fascinating, based on my conversations with young male voters. As Nick Kerkhoff, 21, a football player and fraternity president in at Carroll University in Wisconsin told me for The Free Press piece - Harris’ cameo with Alex Cooper on Call Her Daddy didn’t resonate with him (no shock there). But going on Rogan might.
VP Harris absolutely should go on Rogan. (Not to validate him or his platform but to reach his audience.)
VP Harris absolutely should go on Rogan. (Not to validate him or his platform but to reach his audience.)