During the 2020 elections, young people turned out at the polls at unprecedented rates and propelled Democrat Joe Biden to victory. Now, 100 days after Biden has assumed command in the Oval Office, the youth of the United States respond to his policies with approval and guarded optimism, while also making clear they want to see more progress on a number of issues central to their agenda.
A majority of youth expressed favorable views toward President Biden in a poll conducted by the Harvard Public Opinion Project among 18 through 29-year-old Americans. The recently elected president currently boasts a 59% approval rating among young people, almost double Trump’s analogous approval rating of 32% four years ago in the spring of 2017.
This may be in large part due to Biden’s handling of COVID-19, an issue which has consumed much of the public’s political energy this past year. Within his first three months in office, Biden ushered the historic American Rescue Plan through the halls of Congress and onto his desk, signing into law a $1.9 trillion package that would send Americans direct payments of up to $1,400; bolster state, local, and tribal pandemic infrastructure; and invest nearly $20 billion in the development and distribution of vaccines. His political messaging around the issue — including mandating mask usage and centering medical experts in virus-related communications — has also signaled a departure from the signage of the prior president, who consistently downplayed the threat of the pandemic as its victims continued to rise. Owing to swift and early action, the Biden administration recently moved up its vaccination timeline, announcing that healthy adults aged 16 and older would be eligible to get shots into their arms by April 19.
This promise of recovery on the horizon and Biden’s concrete strides toward it have done well to bolster the new president’s favorability among the youth. As reported by the HPOP poll, 65% of youth approve of the current president’s measures to combat the spread of the virus. Only 37% of young Republicans agree, and this support drops further to 27% among young people who voted for Donald Trump in the 2020 elections. Despite these ideological divisions, however, support for Biden’s COVID-19 recovery agenda remains broad, and the burgeoning availability of vaccines presents a tangible outcome of the current administration that directly impacts the lives of youth. As such, 40% of young people expect Biden to improve their lives, compared to the 15% who expected the same of Trump four years ago.
Jonathan Denny, a high school student in New Orleans, can testify to the direct impact of Biden’s pandemic policy on the lives of the youth. “It felt like the turning point,” noted Denny after receiving the first dose of a vaccine in March. “We used to be so afraid, we were bleaching all of our groceries and never seeing anyone, but now it feels like, wow, maybe in a few months I can kind of have my old life back again.”
Beyond his action on COVID-19, Biden has also focused on a number of issues which are high on the agenda of young people. For youth passionate about racial justice, for instance, Biden has served as a respite from the four years of divisiveness and heightened racial tensions stoked by Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric. Despite his checkered resume on race relations — particularly with regard to his opposition to forced busing in the 1970s and his authorship of the racially charged 1994 crime bill — he has now indicated movement in a different direction. He has mandated that racial equity sit at the center of government department operations, stressed the importance of investing in communities of color through his infrastructure and stimulus plans, and funneled funding toward schools in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods.
The president’s action on racial justice also mirrors trends in public opinion which are increasingly warming to policies that support racially marginalized communities. In 2020, with Trump at the helm of the Oval Office, 70% of young people stated that the government should do more to improve race relations. Following the transition to a new administration, 57% of young people in this year’s HPOP poll indicated that they approved of Biden’s handling of race relations; this figure includes 68% of Black youth and 63% of Hispanic youth.
This support for action on race relations also maps onto growing favor for particular concrete measures, such as affirmative action. From 2019 to 2021, the percentage of young people who have voiced approval for special hiring and educational preferences to qualified individuals of marginalized identities has increased nine percentage points, from 24% to 33%. While support for preferential selection remains low on the whole, it has seen a remarkable increase over a short, two-year period.
Increased support for these policies arrives against the backdrop of renewed Black Lives Matter protests, led in large part by young people. “I think a lot of the time young people are not looked to as leaders,” shared Madison Crenshaw, a leader of the Atlanta-based coalition Buckhead for Black Lives, in an interview with Rolling Stone. “This really taught me that we can speak up, use our voice, and make a difference.” For young people, social media platforms emerged as virtual landscapes of coalition-building and awareness-raising, allowing them to elevate social justice causes through embellished Instagram squares and short TikTok video spurts.
The youth might also be attracted to Biden’s focus on reducing income inequality by raising the minimum wage, a provision that has been popular among the youth. While Biden had initially proposed mandating a $15 minimum wage, he soon walked back his promise in favor of compromising with the political opposition. Sen. Bernie Sanders remains the major purveyor of the living wage, refusing to back down on what he terms a “moral imperative.” Sanders is not alone in his conviction; 61% of youth overall expressed support for the $15 minimum wage, including 31% of young Republicans.
Taken together, these measures have signaled an executive atmosphere friendlier to marginalized identities and progressive causes than the administration prior. Accordingly, 46% of young Americans reported feeling included in Biden’s America, compared to the 27% who reported feeling included in Trump’s America. While this percentage still fails to reach a majority, its significant increase under Biden’s tenure may be the result of both his unexpectedly progressive policies and his insistence on ensuring a representation of diverse identities at the highest levels of government. His cabinet made headlines these past few months as the president assembled a team more diverse with respect to race and gender than ever before in this nation’s history. In March, Deb Haaland was named the first Indigenous woman to join Biden’s cabinet as the Secretary of the Interior, a position overseeing tribal affairs. A number of other cabinet members, including Janet Yellen, the first woman to oversee the Treasury Department, and Cecilia Rouse, the first woman of color to serve as chair of the Council of Economic Advisers, have brought new perspectives to the nation’s executive chambers. For the generation of youth who are poised to become the most diverse and best educated cohort of Americans yet, these plans herald a more inclusive society.
Overall, Biden has aligned his agenda much more closely with that of the youth by eschewing the ideological centrism he once espoused and instead venturing into progressive territory, a landscape more familiar to young people than those of any other age group. During the 2020 elections, a vote for Biden was largely perceived as a vote against presidential incumbent Donald Trump, who was broadly unpopular among the youth; it was a shadow ballot, looking to avoid a reprise of the past four years rather than claim full confidence in the four years to come. Upon taking office, however, Biden has deviated significantly from the down-the-middle road he had set for himself while campaigning. Beyond the legislative behemoth that was the COVID-19 stimulus package, additional policy proposals such as the American Jobs Plan and the American Family Plan have launched Biden into the progressive arena most commonly inhabited by young people.
A vote for Biden, then, has turned out to represent a lot more than a vote against Trump; but there is further ground yet to cover if the president seeks to fulfill the political wishlist of young people. As Biden sets his agenda for the future, what may be most crucial for his plan to address the needs of the youth is his handling of mental health. In the HPOP survey, approximately a quarter of young people responded that they had thoughts of self-harm or suicide several days or more in the last two weeks. This falls within a larger trend of rising mental health concerns since the onset of the pandemic. As students and young workers have been pushed into remote enclaves or dangerous workplace environments, feelings of isolation, anxiety, and depression have skyrocketed. Following these developments, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee declared a state of emergency in March for youth mental health.
This mental health emergency has been especially pronounced among low-income and racially marginalized communities. 35% of Black, non-Hispanic respondents reported thoughts of suicide and self-harm at least for several days in the past two weeks, a 10 percentage point increase from the average among all respondents. 31% of Hispanic respondents reported experiencing such thoughts as well.
The crisis has been especially acute for low-income and impoverished individuals, who during the pandemic have borne the brunt of heightened financial insecurity. Among young people whose families make less than $10,000 a year, 70% reported feeling down, helpless, or hopeless at least several days in the past two weeks, and 47% reported being visited by suicidal and self-harming thoughts just as frequently. For those whose families furnish an income of $10,000 to $24,999, those numbers were 59% and 35%, respectively.
The alliance between income insecurity and mental health concerns is especially concerning for young people due to the particular challenges they have faced during the COVID-19 pandemic. As Ellie Kaverman of The Century Foundation reported, young people — particularly members of Generation Z — are likely to bear the greatest burden of the pandemic’s economic impact for years to come.
In early March, Biden responded to this crisis by announcing a plan to allocate $825 million specifically to mental health treatment programs through states. Mental health advocates have called on the administration to do more, including bolstering telehealth services, investing in community-based care programs tailored to the youth, and removing law enforcement from calls regarding mental health. Biden has also worked to include youth voices in decision making, with his transition team Zooming with young leaders — including students and organizers of youth engagement coalitions such as Student Voice and 18by Vote — to talk about mental health and also announcing the inclusion of an 18-year-old student on his COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force.
Biden’s appeals to young people have done well to tap into a rising generation’s newfound political currency — what NextGen America’s Ben Wessel has termed a “youthquake.” “I think that every Democrat, Republican or independent who’s running for office needs to recognize that Gen Z and Millennials are the most important political force in our country now,” shared Wessel.
Biden’s first 100 days have channeled this political force and given the youth a glimpse of what a few of their desired policies might look like in practice. While young people have responded to his policies with approval, they have also made clear that more definitive change is needed to address the issues most pertinent to them. For that, they will have to wait and see how the Biden administration will spend its remaining time in office.
Image by Manny Becerra is licensed under the Unsplash License.
