Young ex-Biden supporters 'bailing' on president, agonizing over 2024: 'Could not live with myself'
Young voters are increasingly "bailing on Biden," according to an NBC News article from Monday.
"Jayden Camarena, in Northern California, is contemplating blowing off the 2024 presidential election," NBC reported in a story headlined, "Young voters explain why they're bailing on Biden — and whether they’d come back."
"Evan McKenzie, in battleground Wisconsin, is looking for any other candidate than the current front-runners. In Philadelphia, Pru Carmichael isn’t even convinced this race matters," NBC reported.
These voters are three examples of people who voted for Biden in 2020 but "now say the president can’t count on their support in 2024."
Other young voters told NBC News that they felt obligated not to support Biden anymore.
"I genuinely could not live with myself if I voted for someone who’s made the decisions that Biden has," McKenzie, a 23-year-old resident of Madison, Wisconsin, said. "I didn’t even feel great about" voting for Biden in 2020, he explained.
"It’s so complicated, because it almost feels like if I were to give my vote for Biden, I will be showing the Democratic Party that what they are putting out is enough, which is the bare minimum in my opinion," Camarena, a 24-year-old living outside the Bay Area in California, told NBC.
Former President Trump is leading Biden among young voters by a 13-point margin, according to a recent Fox News poll. The polling results come as the Trump campaign is targeting young voters and widening its support among GOP voters.
On Saturday, Trump made a stop at the University of New Hampshire and railed against Biden's economy and the migrant crisis at the southern border. According to a USA Today report that interviewed Republican and Democratic college students outside the rally, some young voters agreed that Biden's handling of the economy and foreign affairs were critical issues heading into the 2024 election.
Another unhappy voter, 25-year-old Austin Kapp, living in Colorado, said Biden has not delivered on most of his campaign promises.
"I mean, he made a lot of really big promises in his campaign and virtually none of them were followed through on," Kapp said. "I mean, he could have codified Roe v. Wade, he could have stood up for the rights of people all over the country, he could have done a lot of things, but he didn’t."
Some Democratic Party strategists and pollsters are taking the warnings from disaffected, young Biden voters seriously.
"This is the alarm bell that we needed to make sure that not only the Biden campaign, but every other Democratic operative out there and all the campaigns down the ballot — state and local — actually invest in young people, because we know how much they can change the outcome," Democratic polling firm HIT strategies researcher Ashley Aylward said.
