CNN's Harry Enten pours cold water on Kamala Harris winning back young voters

CNN Senior Data Reporter Harry Enten said Wednesday that Vice President Kamala Harris is not recapturing the young voters that President Joe Biden bled from former President Donald Trump.

Trump led Biden 48% to 40% with young voters from 18 to 29 years old, seconds in an early July New York Times/Siena College poll. Enten told “CNN News Central” that Harris might be doing “a little bit better,” but that it's not a significant improvement over Biden and that he's doing much worse than the president in 2020 with young voters.

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'She Is Way Down': CNN's Harry Enten pours cold water on Kamala Harris winning back young voters pic.twitter.com/AxiHwfOlss

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“You know, all this stuff about Brat Summer and all that jazz. So I want to take a look at the margin of Trump versus the Democrat. Just remind people where we were at the end of the 2020 campaign. Joe Biden won the voters under 35 by 21 points,” Enten told host John Berman. “What do we see with Kamala Harris? Well, she's still ahead, but the margin here is much smaller than what we saw with Joe Biden in 2020. She's only up nine points. You can make the argument that it was better than what Biden was doing before to get out, but compared to that Democratic baseline, where Democrats historically in presidential elections, at least this century, have carried that youth vote by 20 percentage points or more, she's well below that.”

“So if that's unique support among young voters, I'd like to know what non-unique support is. Is it even worse than that? She was doing a little better. Maybe Biden was up an average of six or five . That might be a little better, but it's not a game changer, Mr. Berman,” he added.

Enten also noted that Harris has not only motivated young voters to vote in the 2024 election.

“But we also talk about motivation, right? Because it's not just who you would support, it's whether you would go to the polls or not,” he said. “And I think that's pretty interesting. Do Democrats say they're more motivated to get involved after Biden left the race? Well, we see a significant portion of Democrats who say yes, 39 percent. What I was interested in: were the disproportionately younger voters who said they were more likely to participate, or more motivated to participate? So this idea, again, that the vice president has a unique potential to go deep and get young voters to turn out, John, it's just not there in the numbers despite all the internet memes that are going around.”

The data reporter added that young voters have also increasingly identified as Republicans.

“So when we say Harris is doing worse than Biden, it's not that she's solely bad. It's more that she's fighting an uphill battle,” Enten said. “He's trying to fight a wave that's going against the Democrats among young voters. And Harris may be unique in some ways, maybe he does a little better than the generic Democrat, but not that much.”

Enten also sounded the alarm Tuesday about how “difficult” it will be for Harris to defeat Trump because of the popularity he built up after the Republican National Convention and surviving an assassination attempt.

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