It’s not just young Democrats who like lefty candidates
Both young and old Democrats rate figures like Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez highly. But the young sharply criticize their party, driving defection from "establishment" picks
I have published four long articles this week — and done approximately one trillion interviews about the primary polls in Wisconsin and elsewhere (and recording for NPR’s Weekend Edition today) — and am quite tired. Of course, it’s a privilege to be able to write 3,000 words about weighting polling microdata and make a living doing so, but sometimes you run out of gas.
That’s just to say there will be no standalone Friday column this week. Instead, I’m sharing some graphs that got left out of my Tuesday piece on the anti-system vs left-right divide within the Democratic Party right now.
These charts do a good bit of myth-busting about the role age is playing in the party’s ideological divide right now. Reading news coverage of the recent wins for Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan or DSA candidates in New York and Denver, you’d get the impression that only young Democrats support this new wing of the party. El-Sayed’s win in particular generated headlines crediting his young base for his victory. Look out, it’s a youthhhhhhquaaaaaaake!
But if you look at ratings for key left-leaning figures in our June Strength In Numbers/Verasight poll, age is not so predictive after all. While favorability rating is not the same as primary vote choice, it tells us a lot about the direction of the party and appetite for new, fresh, urgent thinking.
This is post is free to read, but if you want to support my independent data-driven political journalism and get premium posts like these sent to your inbox 2x a week, become a paying subscriber to Strength In Numbers today. Members also get early access to data products, a private community on Discord for our political data nerds, and an ad-free newsletter experience.
If a paid subscription is out of reach, the next best thing you can do is to share this article with a friend. Organic recommendation is the #1 driver of new readers here at Strength In Numbers.
Older Democrats like Mamdani almost as much as young Democrats
According to our survey, older Democrats rate Zohran Mamdani at about 72 on the 0-100 “feeling thermometer” scale.
Young Democrats are at 76 — a difference the poll can’t distinguish from zero.
Young Democrats, however, are sharply more critical of their party. Mamdani significantly out-polls the party brand and its congressional leadership among young respondents — not because under-30s (a category I sadly recently passed out of) rate lefty Dems better, but because they rate the “establishment” worse:
And it’s not just Mamdani. Young Democrats rate the party’s other left-wing figures about the same as older Democrats do — but they rate the party’s current management much colder. Schumer (34) and Jeffries (44) are the only figures under-30 Democrats put below the midpoint of the scale.
Finally, a point about absolute differences. The age gradient is strong. But if you compare feeling thermometer ratings for Mamdani and AOC vs Schumer and Jeffries, not one group of Democratic voters prefers the leadership:
This may sound pedantic, but there is a big difference between “only young people like left candidates” and “young people are voting left because they are more likely to hate the Democratic Party.” Remember, among self-described moderate and conservative Democrats, Bernie Sanders rates higher than any other current party figure we tested — Obama excepted:
The generational split in the Democratic electorate isn’t really about who likes Mamdani or AOC — Democrats of most ages do, more or less. It’s about who’s fed up with the leaders currently running the party. And that’s an anti-system thing, as much as or more than it is an ideology thing.
If you get value out of data-driven coverage of polling and public opinion, the best way to support this work is with a paid subscription to this newsletter.
*According to our survey, older Democrats rate Zohran Mamdani at about 72 on the 0-100 “feeling thermometer” scale.
Young Democrats are at 76 — a difference the poll can’t distinguish from zero.*
Is it possible this survey is reading a different sentiment; MAGA fatigue - a strong disgust of Trump and his blunders, stridency and constant bullshitting and lying? What worries me is we Democrats not only have to win, we also have to govern successfully, to rehabilitate our brand with low propensity non-ideological voters.
I feel very unconvinced our Party, with an undisciplined and strident faction on the Progressive Left can gain the mainstream approval mandate to govern constructively and not be constantly defending some of the lunatic ideological positions DSA candidates have in their baggage.
reader who will soon move into the 65+ demographic. There has almost never been a time in my life where voting for a Democrat was a positive thing. it was almost always a lesser of 2 evils thing. the 2 exceptions were the 2016 primary, where I voted for Bernie. 1, he identified the cause of problems & proposed solutions, not the bandaid/weak dishwater proposals that Third Way/new Democrat/what is their 3rd name? Democrats from Bill Clinton forward propose & he harkens back to the New Deal & Great Society Democrats. 2) was 2020, when we HAD to vote for the pro-Democracy candidate. & even then I was ready to be plenty disappointed with Biden. I will say, I was pleasantly surprised by him. more progressive than I expected.