Politico reports:

Democratic senators had two charts waiting at their chairs when they arrived at a caucus luncheon in February. They showed youth participation in national elections since the 1980s, with two impossible-to-miss spikes: 2018 and 2020, when huge turnout among 18- to 30-year-olds propelled Democrats into power in Washington.

Those graphs led off pollster John Della Volpe’s myth-busting tour on young people and politics across the top levels of the Democratic Party. Young people do vote, he told the senators, and they’re not policy purists, snowflakes or socialists, either. Perhaps the most important point Della Volpe could make for that audience, though, is that young voters are not locked up for Democrats.

His pitch to engage and empower the 30-and-under set comes at a uniquely perilous moment for the party. Democrats have faced brutal midterm climates and slim margins in Congress before. But the current iteration of the Democratic Party has rarely, if ever, been on such shaky ground with young people.

Earlier this year, approval for President Joe Biden among people aged 18-30 hit depths no Democratic president had plumbed in decades: the mid- to low-30s in Gallup and other polls. (Barack Obama never dropped below 42 percent among that group in Gallup’s surveys.) In some cases, the swing against Biden in 2021 totaled anywhere from 20 to 30 percentage points. He has since made gains in some polls but is still on unstable ground.

An alienated youth vote is an existential threat for Democrats in 2022: They backed Biden by a 25-point margin in 2020, voting at all-time highs. And in their hour of need, powerful Democrats are looking for answers from Della Volpe, a 54-year-old pollster with salt-and-pepper hair who is not on TikTok. [Continue reading…]