Young voters unhappy, 'highly skeptical' of news coverage

Posted by Aldo Pusey on Tuesday, August 27, 2024

Young voters were key to President Joe Biden’s 2020 victory, and they could be key to his defeat this fall if they switch sides or don’t head to the polls.

Biden is “battling the couch” for this “crucial constituency for Democrats,” said Dante Chinni, the founder and director of the American Communities Project at Michigan State University.

His group, led by graduate student Viet Anh Phan, interviewed young voters about their news consumption – a key factor in political engagement.

This was “true qualitative research,” Chinni said Wednesday.

But their interviews with nine young voters reinforced what figures from larger surveys tell us.

“They are highly, highly skeptical,” Chinni said. “I mean, they are really skeptical of journalism and journalists in the news. And you know that can be good, (but) that can be bad.”

He also said young voters aren’t happy.

“Even if they voted for Biden, this isn't exactly what they wanted,” Chinni said.

And that leads to questions about who young people will vote for, or whether they’ll vote for anyone.

Oklahoma State University politics professor Seth McKee previously told The National Desk that young voters see Biden and his 2024 rival, former President Donald Trump, as retreads.

“I don't think young people are scared like older people are scared and motivated by fear,” McKee said. “I don't get that sense. I think young people are sort of like, ‘What do these old geezers have for me? And I don't want to see them again. And sure enough, we got them again.’”

Biden got 59% of the youth vote in 2020, after Hillary Clinton got 58% in 2016, according to the Pew Research Center.

The Harvard Youth Poll now shows just 45% of people 18-29 would vote for Biden if the election were held today, with 37% picking Trump and 16% undecided.

That’s an eight-point advantage currently for Biden.

At this stage in the 2020 election, the Harvard Youth Poll showed Biden with a 23-point advantage.

Voters 18-29 really delivered the White House to Biden in 2020, Todd Belt, the Political Management program director at The George Washington University in D.C., previously told The National Desk.

The 2020 election was only decided by 41,000 votes across three states, Belt said.

“And so small changes can have big ripples on the election,” he said.

Chinni noted, as McKee and Belt have, that it’s still early. A lot can change before November. And a lot of voters, including young ones, haven’t tuned into the race yet.

But Chinni said he’s not sure how enthusiastic unhappy young voters will be to participate this fall.

The American Communities Project found that young people discover news on social media and then look to verify fishy information.

“On social media, everyone has a platform, and not everyone is fully and completely educated on what they're talking about,” Eva Medill, 23, a Michigan State senior in interdisciplinary studies, told Phan for the American Communities Project interview. “And so, you're getting a lot of different sources of questionable quality.”

Medill said she uses NPR to verify information but avoids CNN and other “large news outlets that tend to favor one side or the other.”

Nam Phan, 22, who recently graduated from Michigan State, said he tries to get news from mainstream media outlets.

“I find that on social media a lot of things can become really exaggerated and used essentially just to ... make people quick on their article instead of others,” he said.

But he wanted to see more “uncensored” and “raw” coverage.

The American Communities Project interviews support the findings from the Pew Research Center, which found that young adults were more likely to rely on social media for political and election news, followed by news websites and apps.

Fewer young adults got their election news from print, radio, local TV, national TV and cable TV.

And a Pew Research Center report this week found only around a third of young adults are closely following news about the candidates, compared with a majority of people 50 and older.

“They’re more tuned in than I thought they would be,” Chinni said of young voters in their research.

And he was pleased to see them skeptical of what they see on social media.

But he was concerned about the distrust he saw seeping into other aspects of media consumption among the young voters.

They distrust context in reporting, he said.

The young voters they spoke with just wanted the facts, wary of opinions mixed into news coverage.

But Chinni said they’re missing an important distinction between opinions and context.

“I can select facts to make a story that I want. Without proper context, it's going to be misleading, as well,” he said.

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