Jonathan Della Volpe, polling director at Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, voiced concern on Friday’s episode of Fast Politics with Molly Jong-Fast that Democrats may be slipping with younger voters.
Della Volpe said he worries the Democratic Party has squandered a rare opportunity in recent years to cement its connection with young Americans.
“The concern I have for Democrats is just a handful of years ago, I would say that every day that, for every thousand young people who turn 18, Molly, like 700 of them, six or 700 of them, have values aligned with the Democrat Party,” Della Volpe said. “It was like this incredible opportunity for the Democrats to kind of cement kind of their values with an emerging generation. They didn’t communicate that very well.
“And now we’re living, you know, in what I think is the beginning of a post-ideological era with younger people, okay, where, because of the concerns about economics, they’re voting in what they would say is a much more pragmatic way than they did, you know, in maybe ’16 or, you know, in ’18 or even in ’20,” he continued. “So that’s a concern if younger people agree with Democrats on most issues, but they’re not voting in the numbers that they voted with Democrats in the past. That’s a huge concern because my generation is just getting more conservative, right?”
According to his website, Della Volpe is a member of Generation X, which includes individuals born between 1965 and 1980, as defined by the National Institute on Retirement Security.
WATCH:
CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten noted that in the 2024 election, President Donald Trump made notable gains with young voters in his race against former Vice President Kamala Harris, compared to his support from that key demographic in his 2020 matchup with former President Joe Biden.
“If you look at the Trump versus Democrat margin, you look at voters under the age of 25, you go back to 2020,” the data analyst said during a recent segment on the network. “Look, Joe Biden won this group overwhelmingly. Look at that, by 34 points. You look at 2024. Look, Kamala Harris won it, but just by 11.”
“Trump gained more among voters under the age of 25 than any other age group,” he continued. “If you think of young people as being Democrats, while they may still lean Democrat, not in any way in the same numbers that they used to just even four years ago, Donald Trump doing considerably better among younger voters.”
Trump also made significant inroads with Hispanic men during the 2024 election, securing a majority of their votes nationwide, according to polling.
The president has moved at breakneck speed in his second term, aggressively asserting executive power as he dismantles long-standing government policies and slashes the federal workforce through a wave of executive actions.
Since his January 20 inauguration, Trump has signed nearly 100 executive orders, according to a Fox News tally—far outpacing the early pace of his recent predecessors.
An average of the latest national polls that measure presidential approval shows Trump with ratings just below water. His numbers have dipped slightly since the start of his second term, when polling averages had his approval in the low 50s and disapproval in the mid-40s.
Driving the decline are growing concerns about the economy and fears that Trump’s tariffs on major U.S. trading partners could fuel further inflation—an issue that plagued former President Joe Biden and kept his approval ratings underwater for much of his term.
Still, the president’s 49% overall approval rating in the latest Fox News poll ties his all-time high in the network’s surveys—a mark he last hit in April 2020, near the close of his first term. It also places him six points higher than he was at this stage in his first administration, when he held a 43% approval rating in March 2017.