Young people appear to be flocking to the Republican Party, according to the figures in a new poll from the Pew Research Center that surveyed Americans’ party affiliation.
The National Public Opinion Reference Survey (NPORS) published by Pew Research on Tuesday has drawn significant attention from analysts because it shows the GOP leading among those under 30.
There are just four months until the presidential election where former President Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, is hoping to defeat President Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate.
The NPORS found that, among all respondents, 47 percent said they were Republican or leaned Republican, while 46 percent said they were Democrats or leaned toward the Democrats.
The poll was conducted from February 1 to June 10 among 5,626 U.S. adults.
Analysts were quick to point to the detailed figures regarding party affiliation among young people.
“By subgroup, the headline is age,” The New York Times’ chief political analyst Nate Cohn wrote on X, formerly Twitter. “NPORS found the GOP ahead on leaned party ID among 18 to 29 year olds, even though the sample was Biden+20 on 2020 recall vote. The sample size is fairly large (n=496) and it hasn’t shown anything like this in previous cycles.”
In an earlier post, Cohn said: “NPORS found leaned party identification at R+1. That’s the first time NPORS gives the GOP a party ID edge. Last year, it was D+2.
That’s significant in its own right, given the quality of the survey. But it will effect other polls — like that Ipsos poll that recently showed Trump/Biden tied.”
Matt Blackwell, a political scientist at Harvard who researches statistical methodology and U.S. politics, also drew attention to the figures for young people who are registered voters.
“Uhhhhh…. one odd tidbit from the Pew NPORS: respondents under 26 that are registered to vote are almost R +30,” Blackwell wrote on X. He shared a screenshot of the polling showing that the GOP led with 63.8 percent to Democrats’ 34.3 percent among registered voters under 26.
Blackwell added in a subsequent post: “Sorry, was dropping non-responses to the gender question with those back in it’s only R +26.”
He shared a screenshot of figures showing Republicans on 62.2 percent support compared to 36 percent for the Democrats.
Sharing the unweighted numbers from the poll, Blackwell said: “Maybe just sampling noise? MoE [margin of error] for each one is ±8 or so.”
“To match @Nate_Cohn’s age bracket of 18-29, here’s the breakdown for them. R +7 among the registered voters,” Blackwell wrote in another X post.
G. Elliott Morris, editorial director of data analytics at ABC News and FiveThirtyEight, wrote on X the results could be caused by “sample noise” but added that there are other explanations.
Morris said that one of the possibilities was that “we’re seeing a historic realignment among young voters, to the point where they are as GOP as the silent gen and white evangelical Christians.”
Morris added another possibility: “Selection into taking a poll is correlated with some unmeasured very political variable that’s throwing off most to all polls right now, even literally the best in the industry, and will cause havoc on Election Day (on the level of 2020, 2016, 1980, 1960, 1952, 1948).”
NEWSWEEK