CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten on Wednesday said Vice President Kamala Harris is not retrieving the young voters that President Joe Biden had hemorrhaged to former President Donald Trump.
Trump led Biden 48% to 40% with young voters ages 18-29, according to an early July New York Times/Siena College poll. Enten on “CNN News Central” said Harris might be doing “slightly better,” but that it is not a significant improvement over Biden and that she is doing much worse than the president did in 2020 with young voters. (RELATED: EXCLUSIVE: Biden News Prompts Prominent Republicans At RNC To Wargame The Kamala Scenario)
WATCH:
‘She Is Way Down’: CNN’s Harry Enten Dumps Cold Water On Kamala Harris Winning Back Young Voters pic.twitter.com/AxiHwfOlss
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“You know, all this stuff about Brat Summer and all that jazz. So I want to take a look at Trump versus Democratic margin. Just remind folks where we were at the end of the 2020 campaign. Joe Biden won voters under the age of 35 by 21 points,” Enten told host John Berman. “What do we see with Kamala Harris? Well, she’s still ahead, but the margin here is significantly less than what we saw with Joe Biden back in 2020. She’s up by just nine points. You may make the argument that was better than Biden was doing before he got out, but compared to that Democratic baseline, where Democrats have historically in presidential elections, at least this century, been carrying that young vote by 20 or more percentage points, she is way down from that. ”
“So if this is unique support among young voters, I would like to know what non-unique support is. Is it even worse than this? She was doing slightly better. Maybe Biden was up by like six on average or five. This is maybe slightly better, but this is not game-changing stuff, Mr. Berman,” he added.
Enten also noted Harris has not uniquely energized young voters to cast ballots in the 2024 election.
“But let’s also talk about motivation, right? Because it’s not just who you would support, it’s whether or not you’d come out to the polls,” he said. “And this I think is rather interesting. Do Democrats say they’re more motivated to turn out after Biden left the race? Well, we do see a significant portion of Democrats who say yes, 39%. The thing I was interested in: Was it disproportionately younger voters who said that they were more likely to turn out or more motivated to turn out? And what we see here is it’s 42%. Not a big difference between 42 and 39%. So this idea, again, that the vice president has unique potential to dig in and get young voters to turn out, John, it’s just not there in the numbers despite all the internet memes that are going around.”
The data reporter added that young voters have also increasingly been identifying as Republicans.
“So when we say that Harris is doing worse than Biden, it’s not that she’s uniquely bad. It’s rather she’s fighting uphill,” Enten said. “She’s trying to fight against a wave that is going against the Democrats among young voters. And Harris may be unique in some ways, maybe she does slightly better than the generic Democrat, but not all that much.”
Enten also sounded the alarm Tuesday about how “difficult” it will be for Harris to defeat Trump because of the popularity he amassed following the Republican National Convention and surviving an assassination attempt.
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