Young voters right now overwhelmingly prefer Biden: The Economist/YouGov poll

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Young voters right now overwhelmingly prefer Biden: The Economist/YouGov poll
thehill.com

Young voters overwhelmingly say they would support President Biden over former President Trump in a hypothetical head-to-head match-up if the 2024 presidential election were held today, according to a poll released Wednesday.

In the Economist/YouGov poll — conducted via web-based interviews Dec. 16-18 — more than half (53 percent) of registered voters under 30 said they would support Biden, and less than a quarter (24 percent) said they would support Trump.

Another 10 percent said they would support another candidate, 4 percent said they were not sure, and 9 percent said they wouldn’t vote.

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Biden is a great president and best panacea to the ugliness of current politics. Feel free to not like him though. Nothing against polls but it is still far out so even as a Biden supporter I'm not going to wave this poll around like I'm Dean Phillips.

One of the political sites I frequent that keeps track of polling data has a phrase they repeat often "in politics, a week of a long time." It means that a week from now, some scandal or major local/national/world event could occur and the polls from now could be useless.

And if a week is a long time, then 11 months before the election is forever. You might as well poll for DeSantis vs Newsom in 2028. It would be just about as accurate.

By November, there are a lot of factors that could change which could alter the polling figures/voting results. Maybe Trump is convicted. That could drive people away from him or it could strengthen the right as they flock to him to "save" their leader. Maybe once Biden is the official nominee (as opposed to virtually the only candidate officially recognized by the party), Democrats will flock back to him or maybe people will follow through on their threats and refuse to vote in 2024. Maybe in 11 months, Biden will be boosted by a booming economy or maybe something will happen to cause a crash that pulls his numbers down. Maybe the situations in Israel, Ukraine, the border, etc will change to boost or hurt Biden's numbers.

And this is just stuff we know about now. For all we know, the headlines in October of 2024 could be about some major event that we have no clue about now. For example, the headlines in December 2019 were not about a global pandemic. If I was typing this in December 2019, "Trump will be hurt by his response to a global pandemic that shuts down nearly everything" would not have been in my listings."

If Biden is down in the polls in September or October, I'll worry, but I'm not going to worry about polls in December 2023.

He is, unfortunately for his polling, a chief executive that is more involved in production than brand loyalty or celebrity. He's been in government so long he understands how things get done, what he has the power to move, and what he does not. Tilting at windmills is how you fire up a base but it achieves nothing in practical terms. He's a tortoise in a world of hares.

What surprises me is that the pollsters managed to find young voters. Anyone under 35 probably doesn't answer their phone unless they know the number, and they don't even have landlines to call from a published list. This was a web-based survey, which sounds rather self-selecting already.

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