Panelists at an event hosted by the Institute of Politics and Public Service (GU Politics) affirmed April 4 that politicians must engage with young voters, who they said will prove to be a defining factor in the 2024 election cycle. 

The panel, officially titled “What Politicians Are Getting Wrong About Young Voters,” featured Laura Barrón-López, a current GU Politics fellow; Patrick Ruffini, a republican pollster; and Waleed Shahid, a democratic strategist. Allegra Kirkland, the politics director at Teen Vogue, moderated the discussion, which analyzed the different patterns and predictions of the youth vote for upcoming elections.

Kirkland said that throughout the next 40 years, Millennials and Generation Z, those born between 1981-1996 and 1997-2012, respectively, will represent the largest eligible voting population. 

“This has happened at a time when I think a lot of young people feel increasingly disillusioned about electoral politics, about the officials representing us now, especially at the national level,” Kirkland said at the event.

Barrón-López, who is also a White House Correspondent for Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) NewsHour, said the upcoming election between current President Joseph Biden and former President Donald Trump could be decided through young voters, who historically lean toward Democrats with policy focuses such as climate change and reproductive rights. 

“Based on polling, based on focus groups, we’ll say that they believe that the government should be involved in a lot of fixes across the board,” Barrón-López said at the event. “You name the existential crisis that young voters see as looming on the horizon.”

In the 2020 election, Biden won the youth vote with approximately 65% of voters, an 11% difference from any other age group that he won. Currently, pollsters project that 49% of voters aged 18-29 plan to vote for Biden in 2024, a roughly 15% drop. 

Patrick Ruffini, a founding partner of Echelon Insights, a data insight company that focuses on polling, said he believes that Biden will win the youth vote, yet the margins of Biden’s win will grow smaller because of the diversity of the youth vote. 

“He’s convincing less people, and fewer people are turning out,” Ruffini said at the event. “That’s a pretty dangerous situation and that kind of compounds.”

Waleed Shahid, a spokesperson and communications director for Justice Democrats, an organization that helps elect progressive representatives, said the policies that youth focus on for the election would be more influential closer to the actual election, including the economy, climate change and the ongoing war in Gaza.

“Who knows what the crisis will be in October,” Shahid said at the event. “Elections are defined by what happens overnight, not what happened before”

Shahid said the recent shift among voters and young voters to classify themselves as independent instead of Democrat or Republican represents a recent shift through party politics. 

“I think some of that is a symptom of the two party system, which is that you have so much of our politics is determined about how much you hate the other party, most people vote for their candidate because they don’t want the other candidate to get it and that sort of dampens a lot of enthusiasm for partisan identification,” Shahid said. 

Gallup’s study found that 43% of voters identified as independent, with 27% of voters identifying as Democrat and 27% of voters identifying as Republican, which represents a record low for the number of Democrat and Republican-identifying voters. 

Barrón-López said the perception of Biden’s age may also influence the election, and this information may be connected to the media’s portrayal of both candidates. 

“Republicans have been very effective about really attacking President Biden on his age, and Donald Trump has made that a key aspect of his attacks on Biden,” Barrón-López said. 

Biden is currently 81 years old, and Trump will be 78 by November’s election. 59% of voters believe that both Biden and Trump are too old to serve additional terms as President. 

Ruffini said the question of the age of both Biden and Trump will represent one of the largest growing concerns from young voters. 

“The problem with Joe Biden is not that he is old, but that to many young voters he represents an old politics,” Ruffini said. “I think to some extent, reinforces the idea that for a lot of people, democracy seems to not be working, institutions don’t seem to be working really well, particularly for this generation.”