Support for Joe Biden has fallen 18 points among young women over the past six months amid questions about his age, his leadership and his response to the Gaza crisis.
The sector played a key role in achieving a narrow victory in the 2020 elections.
But an exclusive poll for DailyMail.com showed his support among likely female voters aged 18 to 29 fell from 60 per cent in June 2023 to 42 per cent at the end of last month.
His lead over Donald Trump in this group fell from 27 points to 10 points.
And it's one of the key reasons why Biden led by two points in our June poll and now trails Trump by three points in a head-to-head matchup.
'Dduring the Elections 2020There was a greater consensus and support for Joe Biden,” said Sanjana Shashikumar, 23, of New York, who works in government affairs.
JL Partners surveyed 984 likely voters in December, the fourth of its national polls. It showed that Biden's support for women aged 18 to 29 had fallen by 18 points in six months
Joe Biden has seen his slim lead in national polls disappear since the middle of this year. Donald Trump also leads a series of swing states that will likely determine the outcome
'But now he's certainly not as qualified as we thought. He's too old. He doesn't react the way we wanted him to react.
“I'm not sure I personally feel that way. But in the conversations I have with my peers, people my age, like early 20s, support for Joe Biden is much lower than it was before.”
She said her friends felt he had shown a general lack of leadership and had completely mishandled the war in Gaza.
But maybe he didn't lose them completely.
“If the option is Trump versus Biden…” she said, before her friend Andrea Chess, 34, finished her sentence: “The lesser of two evils would be Biden.”
Next week, the president will go on the attack and lay out the likely choice for voters in November. He will use the anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol to argue that Trump poses an existential threat to democracy.
His campaign officials say polls don't tell the whole story and point to a 2023 election that showed strong turnout among young people and on college campuses.
Yet groups representing young voters have already warned his campaign that that won't be enough and that Biden must build a positive case for his reelection.
This is evident from our latest poll. JL Partners surveyed 984 likely voters from December 15 to 20. The results have a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points.
“Much has been made of Biden's woes with 18- to 29-year-olds, but when you dig beneath the surface there's another nuance: His real problem is with younger women rather than younger men,” says James Johnson, co-founder of JL Partners.
The poll found that women generally turned away from Biden. His lead over Trump among female voters fell from twelve points to six in the last six months of the year
In a head-to-head confrontation, Biden has seen a two-point lead turn into a three-point deficit
'Other research shows that this group is much more socially liberal and probably has much more sympathy for the Palestinians than for Israel.
“I mention that last finding because it seems to influence the shift: frustration and disillusionment with Biden's early position on the war in Gaza.
“The big question is will this support rebound when the prospect of Trump is on the agenda, or will these women simply abstain from voting or move to a third party?”
Losing any group Biden carried in 2020 could mean defeat, he added.
“That's how small the margin of his victory was,” Johnson said.
Previous polls show that the Gen Z cohort is going its own way. They are more likely to have positive feelings toward the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas than, for example, the general population, and they are more likely to have negative views of Israel.
Other polls show young Democrats feeling particularly uneasy about Biden's close embrace of Israel after 1,200 people were killed in a Hamas attack.
A Biden campaign spokesman said young women “vote as if their rights depend on it, because they do,” as he laid out the stark choice on offer
JL Partners surveyed 550 voters in Arizona, Georgia and Wisconsin in November 2023. The results showed that Joe Biden was in danger of losing two states that helped him win in 2020
Our new poll does not delve into the reasons behind the specific decline in support among young women.
But youth groups have warned Biden that his handling of the Gaza crisis could depress turnout among Millennial and Gen Z voters on Election Day.
“You cannot win this election just by telling our generation that you are the lesser of two evils,” they said in a letter signed by leaders of March for Our Lives, Gen Z for Change, the Sunrise Movement and others.
“Your government's position is seriously out of step with the youth and the views of Democratic voters, who have been shown in multiple polls to support a ceasefire.”
The Biden campaign said the president and vice president would hit the road in the new year and emphasize choice for young voters.
“Young people — especially young women — vote as if their rights depend on it, because they do,” said Biden-Harris 2024 spokesman Seth Schuster.
“They have repeatedly rejected the extremist MAGA policies at the ballot box because they know that if Donald Trump is elected, young Americans will face very real threats of a national abortion ban that endangers women and punishes doctors, more guns in schools and on the streets, a rollback of policies to combat climate change, and their parents being cut off health insurance before they turn 26 – for no other reason than because he can.”