CNN’s Harry Enten Shreds Myth That Kamala Harris Has ‘Unique Support’ Among Young Voters

CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten shredded the myth that young voters are enamored with Vice President Kamala Harris on air Wednesday morning.

After an intro in which John Berman noted that Harris campaign chair Jen O’Malley Dillon has asserted that the presumptive Democratic nominee has “unique support” among voters, Enten joined Berman on to dive into the numbers.

“You know all this stuff about Brat Summer and all that jazz. So I want to take a look at Trump versus Democratic margin, just remind folks where we were at the end of the 2020 campaign. Joe Biden won voters under the age of 35 by 21 points. What do we see with Kamala Harris? Well, she’s still ahead, but the margin here is significantly less than what we saw with Joe Biden back in 2020,” began Enten. “She’s up by just 9 points. You may make the argument that was better than Biden was doing before he got out, but compared to that Democratic baseline where Democrats have historically in presidential elections at least this century, been carrying that young vote by 20 or more percentage points, she is way down from that. So if this is unique support among young voters, I would like to know what non-unique support is. Is It even worse than this?”

“What have we seen in terms of motivation?” asked Berman in a follow-up.

“Yeah, so you know, the other thing is we talk about vote choice, right? But let’s also talk about motivation, right? Because it’s not just who you would support, it’s whether or not you come out to the polls,” replied Enten. “And this I think is rather interesting. Do Democrats say they’re more motivated to turn out after Biden left the race? Well, we do see a significant portion of Democrats who say, yes, 39%. The thing I was interested in: Was it disproportionately younger voters who said that they were more likely to turn out or more motivated to turnout? And what we see here is it’s 42%, not a big difference between 42% and 39%. So this idea, again, that the vice president has unique potential to dig in and get young voters to turn out; John, it’s just not there in the numbers, despite all the internet memes that are going around.”

Enten went on to argue that Harris was “fighting uphill” as there is a larger generational shift in young voters’ preferences.

“I want to look at party identification again. Voters under the age of 35, go back to 2020, this is the Pew Research study, this is one of the best studies that we have. And look at that: 56% of young voters said that, in fact, they were Democrats. They identified as Democrat or lean Democratic. You look down at 2024, it’s 49%. Look at the Republican jump from 39% to 49%,” said Enten. “So when we say that Harris is doing worse than Biden, it’s not that she’s uniquely bad. It’s rather she’s fighting uphill. She’s trying to fight against a wave that is going against the Democrats among young voters. And Harris may be unique in some ways, maybe she does slightly better than the generic Democrat, but not all that much.”

“Yeah, what this was was shaping up to be a generational shift. The question is, was it just about Biden or was it about his administration? We may find out soon,” offered Berman.

But Enten rejected the premise. “We may find out soon, but at this particular point, it doesn’t look like Harris is going to be able to fight against the grain too much,” he said.

Watch above via CNN.