One explanation for the 2024 election’s biggest mystery

The story of the 2024 election is looking deeply strange.

Donald Trump boasts a small but significant lead over Joe Biden in national polls, while also besting the president in most surveys of battleground states. By itself, this is less than shocking. Voters have long disapproved of the president, lamented inflation, and expressed more faith in Trump’s capacity to manage the economy.

If the Trump coalition’s formidable size is unsurprising, however, the same can’t be said of its demographic composition.

In many polls, Biden’s level of support among white voters and senior citizens is comparable to his 2020 marks. Yet he has lost an extraordinary amount of standing with young and nonwhite voters.

Four years ago, Biden won voters under 30 by 23 points, Black voters by 79 points, and Hispanic ones by 35, according to the Democratic data firm Catalist.

Now, the latest New York Times poll of battleground states shows Trump leading Biden by 3 points among young voters. Last week, a Fox News poll of voters nationwide found Biden tied with Trump among those under 30 in a two-way matchup. When third-party candidates were included, Trump led Biden by 10 points with younger voters, as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. took 16 percent of the group’s support.

Polling of nonwhite voters paints a similarly counterintuitive picture. In Fox’s poll, with third-party candidates included, Hispanic voters favored Biden by 5 points, while Black voters backed him by 36.

Biden’s precise level of nonwhite support varies between polls. But virtually every survey finds that his support is much lower today with both Black and Hispanic voters than it was four years ago. Notably, the president is doing especially badly with nonwhite Americans who don’t reliably cast ballots in elections. As a result, in a departure from most of modern American history, high turnout may actually favor Republicans this year.

If November’s results match these findings, then 2024 will witness a historically rapid shift in the demographics of the Republican and Democratic coalitions. Which is odd, considering that the two parties are running the same candidates as they did four years ago.

There are various ways to make sense of these remarkable poll results. One is to dismiss them as a mirage. In past election cycles, polls this far from November have underestimated Democrats’ ultimate share of the nonwhite vote before. Meanwhile, if history is any guide, support for third-party candidates like Robert F. Kennedy will collapse between now and Election Day, and many young, left-leaning voters will grudgingly come home to Biden.

This view is reasonable, but not necessarily correct. An alternative explanation concerns the president’s unique weaknesses as a candidate. Biden was more than competitive in 2020. Since then, however, he presided over the biggest surge of inflation in four decades and became an octogenarian. It’s conceivable that concern with the Democratic nominee’s unprecedentedly advanced age — combined with resentment of price increases — might trigger a sudden wave of defections from Blue America.

And yet, this does not explain the demographic character of these defectors. Why would older white voters be largely untroubled by Biden’s age or economic record, even as those things alienated more Democratic voting blocs?

It’s plausible that Biden’s support for Israel’s obliteration of Gaza would be especially outrageous to young and/or nonwhite Americans, who are exceptionally likely to sympathize with Palestine. And the president’s foreign policy has surely alienated some Black, Hispanic, and Arab-American voters under 30. Yet the young and nonwhite voters who’ve been turning on Biden overwhelmingly identify as moderate or conservative, and are presently supporting Trump or RFK Jr., both of whom are even more ardently pro-Israel than the president. Further, a recent poll of 2,000 voters under 30 from the Harvard Institute of Politics found that only 2 percent considered the war in Gaza their top priority. It therefore seems doubtful that Biden’s complicity in Gaza's devastation fully explains his problem with these traditionally Democratic constituencies.

I’ve been toying with a different theory of the president’s woes, one that makes better sense of his peculiar demographic weaknesses: Voters with low levels of trust in society and the political system are shifting rightward.

Donald Trump redefined the GOP in the eyes of many, associating the party with a paranoid vision of American life and a populist contempt for the nation’s political system. In response, Democrats rallied to the defense of America’s greatness, norms, and institutions. As the parties polarized on the question of whether America was “already great,” voters with high levels of social trust and confidence in the political system became more Democratic, while those with low social trust and little faith in the government became more Republican.

This miniature realignment was apparent in 2016 and 2020, according to some analysts. And there is some reason to think that it may have accelerated over the past four years. If it did, then Biden’s peculiar difficulties with young, nonwhite, and/or low-propensity voters would make more sense, as those demographic groups evince unusually little trust in their government or fellow Americans.

This theory is merely speculative. It’s consistent with many data points but proven by none. If true, however, it does not bode well for the Biden campaign.

Some Americans generally trust their nation’s institutions and people. Others don’t.

Political scientists have long taken an interest in this distinction. To investigate the effect of trust on voter behavior and democratic health, researchers have attempted to measure two different types of trust.

“Social trust” describes a person’s degree of confidence in the decency of other people. Those high in social trust believe they can safely expect others to abide by social norms. People low in social trust aren’t so certain. Political scientists measure this trait by asking voters questions like, “Generally speaking, would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can’t be too careful in dealing with people?”

“Political trust,” meanwhile, describes a person’s level of faith in the government, the constitutional order, and other major institutions. Researchers gauge voters’ political trust by simply asking them whether various institutions have a positive impact on American life, or questions that tap into populist discontent such as, “Do you think that quite a few of the people running the government are a little corrupt, not very many are, or do you think hardly any of them are crooked?”

These two forms of trust are distinct, but low trust in others tends to correlate with low trust in politics.

Historically, a person with low levels of trust wasn’t much more likely to support one party over the other. There were Democratic misanthropes who believed that 9/11 was an inside job, and Republican crackpots who thought that globalist traitors and immigrants had corrupted the republic.

But this changed in the Trump era, according to the Democratic data analyst David Shor. Beginning in 2016, social distrust became associated with support for the Republican Party. Which makes some sense. After all, Trump campaigned as an outsider who would take on a rigged system and cleanse America of supposedly untrustable elements through mass deportation. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, explicitly appealed to voters who believed that America was “already great” and that people of all stripes were “stronger together,” sentiments more congenial to Americans who trusted their government and compatriots.

This trend continued in 2020, according to Shor, when Biden campaigned on, among other themes, the virtues of America’s existing political system and public health authorities.

If Biden did in fact lose support among distrustful Americans over the past four years, then it would make sense for his share of young and nonwhite voters to decline. This is because young Americans consistently evince less social and political trust than older Americans, while Black and Hispanic voters express less than white ones.

In a 2019 study of social trust in the United States, Pew Research broke the electorate down into “high trusters,” “medium trusters,” and “low trusters.” Among voters under 30, just 11 percent fell into that first category, while 46 percent qualified as “low trusters.” Among senior citizens, those figures were 37 percent and 19 percent respectively. Generational gaps on political trust are not quite as large, but in Pew’s data, younger voters generally expressed less trust in major American institutions than older voters did.

Meanwhile, 44 percent of Black voters and 46 percent of Hispanic voters evinced low levels of trust in the survey, while only 31 percent of white ones did the same. Racial disparities in political trust are more volatile and sensitive to the specific question asked. During the Obama era, Black voters were more likely to say that they trusted “the government to do what’s right” than white voters were; during Trump’s presidency, this pattern flipped. Over the long sweep of modern US history, however, political distrust has generally been higher among nonwhite voters.

Critically, distrust is particularly prevalent among Americans with a low propensity to vote. Therefore, if Biden were struggling to retain the support of low-trust voters, then we would expect him to be doing especially poorly with young and nonwhite Americans who don’t reliably turn out for elections.

And this is precisely what we’ve seen. As Nate Cohn observed last fall, in polls from the New York Times/Siena College, Biden consistently performed much better with young and nonwhite voters who cast a ballot in the 2022 midterms than with those who sat that election out.

Thus, Biden’s weakness with young, nonwhite, and low-propensity voters is consistent with a realignment along lines of trust. And there is some direct evidence that the Biden-Trump race is cleaving “high-trusters” from “low-trusters.”

Asked whether the American political system needed no change, minor changes, major changes, or “to be torn down entirely,” Trump supporters were nearly twice as likely as Biden supporters to choose that last option. Meanwhile, 49 percent of Trump voters agreed with the statement, “trained experts are generally too biased to be reliable,” while only 20 percent of Biden supporters said the same. And when the survey asked whether voters preferred a “candidate who promises to bring politics in Washington back to normal” or one “who promises to fundamentally change America,” 45 percent of Trump voters endorsed fundamental change while just 31 percent of Biden voters did.

Notably, as expected, young, nonwhite voters were much more likely than older white voters to favor drastic change to the American political system and a candidate who promised the same. It is precisely this slice of Biden’s 2020 coalition — under 30, nonwhite, pro-change — that has shifted most sharply toward Trump or RFK Jr. in the survey.

It is unclear exactly what kind of change these voters desire, as they generally identify as “moderate” or “conservative.” But this too is what we would expect if many were “low-trusters,” as such voters are often less firmly committed to any particular ideological program than to disdain for those currently in power.

All this indicates that a realignment of low-trust Americans could partly explain Biden’s woes with young and nonwhite voters. And yet, if low-trust voters have indeed shifted dramatically rightward since 2020, that might seem like its own mystery. After all, the two parties are running the exact same candidates this year as they did back then. So why would the partisan allegiances of the distrustful be different now than four years ago?

There are a few reasons to think that Biden might have a bigger problem with the distrustful today than in 2020.

First, Biden is now the incumbent, and therefore more closely identified with the existing political system. Research into low-trust voters has consistently found that they have more “volatile” voting intentions than high-trust voters. And low-trusters are especially likely to switch their partisan allegiances if they voted for the incumbent party in the last election.

There is some evidence that Biden is particularly weak with low-trust voters who backed him in 2020. In the Times’s polling, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who is campaigning on a comprehensively low-trust, conspiracy theorist message — drew 8 percent of voters who backed Biden four years ago.

Second, as president, Biden backed Covid-19 vaccination mandates for large employers and the federal workforce. Vaccine mandates were an extremely high-salience issue, as the policy initially aimed to coerce millions of Americans into changing their behavior. Vaccine mandates were also exceptionally unpopular with low-trust voters. There is some evidence that the policy hurt Biden with nonwhite voters. According to Morning Consult, following the rollout of that policy, the president’s approval with Black voters fell by 5 points while his disapproval rose by 7. Among unvaccinated Black voters, Biden’s approval plummeted by 17 points.

Third, it is possible that inflation increased the prevalence of political distrust within American society, turning “medium trusters” into “low trusters,” who then flocked to either Trump or RFK Jr., the two (rhetorically) anti-system candidates in the race.

For many voters, one’s degree of social and political trust is largely stable across time, reflecting a deeply rooted psychological disposition. But others’ levels of trust vary with events. One 2023 study of the Dutch electorate found that inflation was associated with declining trust in government, with voters who felt the most burdened by rising prices expressing the lowest trust in politics.

Finally, it is possible that the declining influence of mainstream news organizations is rendering the electorate increasingly distrustful. The past four years have witnessed a proliferation of podcasts and alternative media gurus who portray the government, medical authorities, and conventional journalistic outlets as hopelessly corrupt. As more voters get their information from such influencers, it’s plausible that political distrust would rise. In the Times’s most recent battleground polls, Biden leads RFK Jr. by 23 points among all registered voters. But among those who primarily get their news from social media, the president leads the third-party candidate by just 2 percentage points.

The theory that Biden’s struggles with core Democratic constituencies are rooted in a realignment of distrustful Americans is just that — a theory. It is a plausible explanation but an unprovable one, since there is currently little public data directly measuring the shifting partisan allegiances of “low trusters” over the past four years.

Further, there are some data points that cut against the theory. For one thing, young and nonwhite Biden 2020 voters are largely supporting Democratic House and Senate candidates, a fact that suggests the president’s problems might be entirely attributable to his unique weaknesses as a candidate. It is still worth noting that during some past realignments — such as the white South’s shift toward the GOP over the second half of the 20th century — voters first defected at the presidential level and then gradually shifted their allegiances down-ballot.

In any case, there are other ways to explain the president’s difficulties with these demographic groups. Biden was never personally popular with young voters to begin with. And young Americans may have a harder time weathering inflation than older voters who tend to have higher incomes and more savings.

Meanwhile, there have long been structural reasons to expect the Democratic Party’s share of nonwhite voters to decline over time. Historically, community institutions such as the Black church have been instrumental in keeping Black voters in political lockstep. In an increasingly atomized and secular culture, the influence of the Black church is fading, particularly with younger voters, who are now much more open to backing Trump than their elders. Meanwhile, it would not be surprising if Hispanic voters followed the same political trajectory as other immigrant groups, with first- and second-generation voters backing the Democratic Party reliably, while a growing portion of subsequent generations becomes open to the GOP.

Still, the possibility that part of Biden’s problem lies with low-trust voters is worth taking seriously — not least because, if true, it would imply that the president is actually in worse shape than polls suggest.

Distrustful voters participate in surveys, but they do so at much lower rates than high-trust voters do. Which makes sense: If you believe that you can’t be too careful with other people, you probably aren’t going to take a lengthy phone call from a stranger.

If polls’ respondents are systematically more trusting than the electorate writ large, and if trustful Americans are more pro-Biden than distrustful ones, then surveys will consistently overestimate the president’s actual level of support. There’s reason to believe that this was precisely what happened in 2020 and 2016, when Hillary Clinton and Biden both underperformed their polling on Election Day.

The president is reportedly averse to considering this possibility. To the contrary, according to Axios, Biden is convinced that the polls are underestimating his support. This is certainly conceivable, but there is little basis for assuming as much. And given the evidence that social and political trust might be influencing voters’ behavior, it would be reckless for Biden to run as though he’s ahead. More concretely, if the president is trailing badly — as a consequence of tepid support among distrustful voters who want change — he might be well-advised to embrace a much different messaging strategy than his current one.

To prevent distrustful voters from restoring Trump to the White House next year, Biden should probably have a bit less trust in his own campaign.