A Major Factor Political Pundits Have Overlooked in Trump vs. Harris
Death and taxes are certain, but the so-called experts and analysts covering the 2024 Presidential have ignored the impact that death among Baby Boomers will make on Donald Trump’s effort to defeat Kamala Harris for a second, non-consecutive term as the United States Commander in Chief.
Trump’s campaign can’t ignore the fact that baby boomers have been replaced by younger generations as the largest voting group in America.
Members of the baby boomer generation are dying while thousands of young voters register daily. Millennials became the largest generation group in the U.S. in 2023, with an estimated population of 72.7 million. Approximately 15 million baby boomers have died since 2016. That’s a landslide-making dropoff when you also consider the fact that Millennials now constitute the largest election-day active voting block in 2024, and Generation Z adds thousands of new voters to the rolls each day.
Regardless of which survey, study, or poll you pick from the past eight years, the most reliable base of Trump supporters has been elderly voters who are categorized among the Baby Boom era (Those born between 1946-1964) and “The Silent Generation”, born between 1928-1945. Generation X’s timeline is debatable, thanks to the recent addition of “X-Ennials”, who were in high school as the internet became common in most American households, but the oldest among Generation X will turn sixty within the next two years. The youngest Millennials have been of voting age for the better part of a decade, and more than 40 million Generation Z Americans are currently registered to vote.
Generation X-ers are less religious than their parents, and as they become seniors, their comparatively left-of-center perspectives will change the dynamics for conservative candidates who have counted on elderly white Christians as reliable Republican voters.
- Harris is leading former President Donald Trump by nearly 20 points among registered voters under 30, according to The New York Times/Siena College poll.
- An Axios/Generation Lab poll of voters under 35 showed the same margin of victory.
Another trend that should create even more concern for Trump is that Harris is expected to easily surpass Biden’s youth vote turnout in 2020 when Biden still managed to win young voters by a solid 25-points. Some data experts said the increase in younger voter participation was the specific reason three states swung from red to blue, and in the 2020 Georgia Senate runoff, among 220,000 newly registered voters, almost half were under the age of 30, and those under 30 voted Democrat by a 31-point margin.
Vote.org, a nonpartisan registration platform, saw more than 38,500 people register to vote in the two days after Harris announced she’d run. By last Friday, they had surpassed 100,000 new registrants. Within 48 hours of Biden stepping down, approximately 40,000 new voters had registered, and over 80% of these voters are under the age of 35.
Even when Trump’s approval rating was at its highest levels during his first year in office, his support among voters under the age of 40 typically ranged between 12 to 15 points lower than voters over the age of 40.
