Dem
51
GOP
49
Last week, we had an item about the latest Siena College poll. It asserted that Joe Biden's lead among voters 18-29 was just 1 point, 46%-45%.
Yesterday, the newest from CBS/YouGov was released, and it tells a very different tale. The numbers agree that many younger voters are unhappy with the state of the world, and that they blame the older generations. However, they are not equally enamored of Biden and Donald Trump. No, according to the CBS/YouGov numbers, voters 18-29 favor Biden 61% to 38%. That's a gap of 23 points, which is rather larger than 1 point.
If you asked us to choose which poll we believe, we would obviously go with the latter. First, the CBS/YouGov results are much more in line with historical trends. Second, the CBS/YouGov results are internally consistent. For example, the poll finds that the issues young people care most about are the economy, abortion, climate change, and race and diversity. At least three of those are the blue team's bread and butter.
That said, here is the real takeaway from these two polls: Polling this demographic is really, really hard. They don't answer calls, e-mails and texts from pollsters, which can result in very low response rates, and thus great acrobatics when trying to crunch the data and fit it into the model. On top of that, they are the least reliable age cohort when it comes to actually showing up to vote. If you track all 18-29 voters, Biden will do very well. If you track likely voters, the numbers will start to shift in Trump's direction, because his base is fanatical. If you track only certain voters, the numbers will shift in Trump's direction even more, again because of the fanatical base. The Siena poll was based on voters who are certain they will vote, while the CBS/YouGov poll was based on likely voters. And look how different their results were. (Z)