Democratic coalition has a crack that is getting bigger

The good news for Democrats in the latest comprehensive survey of Americans’ partisan identities is that among young voters, the party has regained a lead, a 6-point advantage among those ages 18 to 29.

The bad news: Four years ago, the advantage was 32 points.

Every year, the Pew Research Center publishes its National Public Opinion Reference Survey, the big kahuna for tracking the trends of partisanship among the major voting blocs. It’s one thing for a voter to make a snap decision about one candidate in one election, but something different if he or she changes jerseys. That’s the difference between a wave and a realignment.

And in the year after a presidential election and before midterms get hot and heavy, Pew gives us a chance to see what the longer-lasting implications of 2024’s wild and wooly presidential election may be.

The overall trend of this decade is unmistakable: America has been getting more Republican, something you didn’t need an exhaustive survey of 5,022 adults to tell you. In 2020, 49 percent of Americans identified as Democrats, compared to 43 percent of Republicans. The next year, in the wake of the Jan. 6 sacking of the Capitol and Donald Trump’s effort to overturn the election results, Democrats widened their advantage to 10 points, 52 percent to 42 percent. But since then, it’s been a steady retreat for the blue team. 

By 2024, Republicans actually enjoyed a 1-point advantage, 47 percent to 46 percent, a nearly perfect indicator of the results of the presidential election that fall. 

Now that the dust has settled, we find the parties in pretty much the same position, with Republicans holding that same 1-point advantage, but both parties a tick lower, 46 percent Republicans, 45 percent Democratic and 8 percent declaring themselves pure independents. 

These are historically good numbers for the GOP, which had traditionally been the smaller party for generations. The way Republicans won elections nationally was to harness the power of their high-propensity, affluent base in the suburbs to out-vote lower-income, working-class Democrats. If they could tip a majority of the true independents, Republicans could win substantial majorities, especially in midterms, despite starting from a smaller base.

But the Trump era has turned a lot of that on its head, as Republicans emerge as the plurality party, but also the one that struggles to get its lower-income, lower-propensity voters to the polls. If you wanted one convincing argument for why Democrats are favored in midterms, this would be it — even more than the midterm curse, which has left the party in power with a record of three wins and 22 losses in the past 100 years’ worth of midterms.

After a century of being the bigger party, but the one with the turnout problem, Democrats find themselves in the other role: the smaller party with the more reliable voters. That’s how Republicans fumbled their chance for a big win in 2022 but still won convincingly in 2024. It’s also why the smart money is on Democrats in 2026. Then it’s back to the bigger, presidential-year electorate in 2028, and advantage Republicans … and so on.

Is that the future for American politics? Whole Foods Democrats versus Walmart Republicans, with the corresponding advantages and disadvantages?

Another arrow pointing in that direction is that perennial bane of campaigns’ get-out-the-vote efforts: younger voters.

In 2020, Democrat Joe Biden won voters ages 18 to 29 by 25 points, 61 percent to 36 percent. In 2024, Democrat Kamala Harris won the same demographic group by just 4 points, 51 percent to 47 percent.

Looking at the broader category of voters under the age of 45, we see women shifting away from Democrats by 7 points, dropping from 61 percent for Biden to 54 percent for Harris. Men dropped 7 points for Democrats, too, but slid into an outright minority, with just 45 percent for Harris, down from 52 points four years earlier.

Compare that to the recent high-water mark for Democrats with young voters, when Barack Obama won 66 percent of voters under 30 in 2008.

Many Democrats have concluded that this slide among younger voters, particularly men, is at the root of their problem these days. Operatives and donors are pouring tens of millions of dollars into youth outreach, including the very buzzy “manosphere.” 

Bro pandering aside, what younger voters often have in common is that they aren’t that well off, having just begun the game of life, and tend to vote at a fairly low propensity, typically accounting for just 15 percent or so of the national electorate.

But as they age and begin voting at a higher frequency, they become more valuable members of a political coalition. Political habits and attitudes formed in one’s 20s often persist through life.

Voters have long tended to move rightward with age. A Republican majority with young voters now could be the bedrock of electoral dominance over the next two decades as the folks born in the 2000s enter prime voting age.

So, how does the new Republican youth coalition look as we emerge from the shadow of 2024?

The aforementioned good news for Democrats shouldn’t be overlooked. The Pew numbers show a Democratic plurality at 49 percent. Yes, it’s not the 63 percent of four years ago, but it does reverse a trend in partisan identification that saw Democratic declines for three straight years. Republicans dropped 4 points from last year. 

The gender gap for young voters remains massive, with young men split 52 percent Republican and 34 percent Democratic and young women going 58 percent Democratic and 37 percent Republican. Compare that to the 2024 election, when 59 percent of young women voted Democratic and 41 percent of young men did. Women under 30 are about as Democratic now as they were on Election Day, but young men are down considerably.

No matter how much Democrats can juice their share among young women, there’s no winning coalition for their party that can’t get at least 40 percent of young men. 

One year’s worth of data isn’t sufficient to tell us about a radical realignment, and the Republican youth wave certainly seems to have ebbed since last fall, but Pew provides us with yet another blinking light on the dashboard for Democrats.