October 31, 2024

‘A game of margins’: A breakdown of young Pennsylvania voters

By Allie Miller >>

For Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald J. Trump, there is no clear path to victory without a win in Pennsylvania, and the state’s young voters could help decide the race.

Among the swing state’s young voters is 20-year-old Temple University junior Cecilia Schleinitz, a political science and economics dual major. Originally from Massachusetts and a student ambassador with PA Youth Vote, a nonpartisan organization that aims to empower and educate youth voters, Schleinitz said before President Joe Biden dropped out of the race and named Harris the democratic candidate, she still planned to vote for Biden. But since Harris entered the race, Schleinitz noted “ a complete energy change,” not just for herself but for a lot of young people.

“Okay, we have this younger woman of color who really does have energy like a young person, and is constantly involved with young people, has some outspoken stances on important issues,” Schleinitz said.

Of the 7.8 million eligible Generation Z voters ages 18 to 27 across the battleground states of Wisconsin, Georgia, Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, the Keystone State has the most at 1.6 million. This means some of the deciding ballots are coming from the nation’s youngest voters, many of whom will be voting in their first presidential election this year.

As of Oct. 15, Harris and Trump are tied at 48% in Pennsylvania, according to the New York Times.

Nationwide Harris has a 31-point lead among likely young voters — ages 18-29 — , according to the Harvard Youth Poll.

In the final days leading up to Election Day, both campaigns are still vying for votes in Pennsylvania on the campaign trail more than any other state — including several visits to the western part of the state from prominent members of both campaigns — making the outcome an unpredictable toss up.

When it comes to Pennsylvania, its landscape is geographically diverse: from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, from urban to rural communities, issues that matter to voters have regional patterns, said Kabir Khanna, deputy director of Elections & Data Analytics at CBS News.

“The regional patterns within the state are a microcosm of the country where you have these urban, cosmopolitan cities that are these blue hubs, so that would be Philly and Pittsburgh in this example, and often the surrounding counties, like the Philly suburbs — Bucks, Montgomery, Delaware, Chester — have been trending even bluer as we see this widening split by education and party support,” Khanna said. “Meanwhile, the smaller rural counties, well outside those areas, are deeply red and have certainly become even more Republican over the past few cycles.”

The 2020 presidential election had the highest turnout of young voters in the nation’s history, with about half of U.S. eligible youth casting a vote, an 11-point increase from the 2016 election. While this gives good reason to believe young voters will turn out again, Khanna said, “The best predictor at the individual level of whether someone will vote in an upcoming election is whether they have a history of voting.”

Brian Schaffner, professor of political science at Tufts University and co-director of the Cooperative Election Study at Harvard University, also said young voters’ habits can be hard to predict. But Pennsylvania’s Gen Z voters could have a big influence, he said.

“Most polls are probably predicting that 18 to 29 year olds, a lot of them won’t vote, and so their views on how they would vote are being discounted essentially when we talk about likely voters, because we think they’re pretty unlikely as voters,” Schaffner said.

“But if they suddenly did vote, that could very well shift the margin, especially if they were voting overwhelmingly in one direction or the other.”

One place that poses a big question is deep blue Philadelphia, Khanna said. Though about eight out of 10 Philadelphia voters will vote Democrat, he said “it’s a game of margins.”

“When we’re talking those kinds of margins, the precise margin in Philly matters if it’s an 84% win or a 78% win,” Khanna explained. “Similarly, whether voters of color and young voters match their 2020 turnout, or whether some of them decide to stay home, those kinds of things can be pivotal.”

Nationwide, 26% of Black men under age 50 are planning to cast their vote for Trump, according to an August NAACP survey.

In Pennsylvania, about one in 10 voters are considered to be persuadable, meaning they potentially could be convinced to vote for either party, Khanna said. But zooming in on Pennsylvania voters under 30, about 20% of them fit the persuadable voter profile — younger than the average voter, racially diverse, and tend to use social media as a source for news and politics — which is twice as much as voters overall, he said.

Issues that matter most

Twenty-year-old junior Cynthia Alvarado, president of the Latin American Student Organization at Lycoming College in Williamsport, Pa., said feminism and race matter to her most as a Latina, and she will be casting her vote for Harris. While Alvarado hails from Houston, she will be casting her vote in Pennsylvania where she said she knows it counts even more.

“I don’t agree with everything that Donald Trump stands for, being an immigrant and being a person of color, it’s always just scary to see him being in a powerful chair, and knowing what people across the border are having to deal with in Americas, and just people here in general, being scared of being deported, not having the freedom that America said it would provide them.” Alvarado said. “So knowing that Kamala Harris is coming from an immigrant household of a person of color, knowing that she will help middle class rather than upper class, is very good.”

Khanna said though the issues that matter most to young voters tend to be the same across all age, racial, and gender groups — with the economy and inflation reigning most important — there are some issues among youth voters that pop more, like race and diversity.

Fifty-six percent of young voters in Pennsylvania said issues of race and diversity are a major issue influencing their vote, compared to only one-third of voters overall, Khanna said. Housing costs are another standout issue among young voters in the state: Six in 10 youth voters said in a CBS News Poll that housing is either “somewhat” or “very unaffordable” in their part of the state, Khanna said. And abortion is another big-ticket issue, he said.

“About two thirds of young voters in PA say abortion is a major factor in their vote. That’s compared to just about half of voters overall,” Khanna said. “So it’s not all of them, but it’s more of a motivating issue for that group.”

Climate change and gun control are issues that are especially important to young voters, Schaffner said.

Gun control is an issue that is influencing Justin Boehm’s vote, a 21-year-old from Pittsburgh attending Westmoreland County Community College for electrical engineering and robotics. Boehm said he didn’t vote in the last election and isn’t a fan of either candidate this year, but said he’s likely voting for Trump Nov. 5 because of his views on gun control.

“My biggest thing is, these are just tools. They are objects…” said Boehm, who leans Libertarian. “But as someone who loves things like rifles and all that, I understand the capabilities of these rifles that we use.”

Boehm, like other voters on each side of the vote, said the economy and inflation are important to him. In a Sept. 3-6 CBS News Polll with YouGov of 1,085 registered voters across all age groups in Pennsylvania, 66% of respondents under age 30 rated the condition of the state’s economy as “fairly bad” or “very bad.”

Overall, Alvarado said she is planning to elect the president looking out for citizens as individual human beings.

“I’m very open minded to hearing both sides. I’m very open minded to hear what other people are saying,” Alvarado said. “But once this person keeps re-stating things that do not agree with my values, really pushes me to the other side,” Alvarado said. Knowing Trump “doesn’t agree with my values, such as caring for me as a female, as a person of color, really influences my vote for the other side.”

For Alvarado, the decision on who to vote for isn’t a challenging one. But for others, like Kristin Newvine, a 26-year-old nonbinary doctoral student at Penn State from Jersey Shore, a rural town in Central Pennsylvania, it’s not easy.

Though Newvine’s current plan is to vote for Harris, they don’t agree with much of what Harris has done under the Biden Administration, specifically her handling of the war between Israel and Palestine. But one of the main issues driving their vote is socialized health care. Newvine said they are the power of attorney for their 77-year-old grandfather, and when they leave State College in five years following the end of their Ph.D. program, they are hoping the Harris Administration could be a proponent for helping their situation.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to him if I don’t stay, so it’s like the idea that she may be fixing that area would be extremely helpful in my own personal life, and so I care for it,” said Newvine, who is studying sociology. “But I also think that aging with dignity is very important, and in this country especially, we do not value the elderly and their care in a way that some other cultures do.”

For Schleinitz, living in Philadelphia has made all of these issues matter to her. And Gen Z voters are among the first group to have grown up with social media and started conversations surrounding mental health, she said, giving them “immense power” in the upcoming election, especially in Pennsylvania.

“People like to talk a lot about, ‘Oh, my one vote doesn’t matter,’ or ‘How’s my one vote going to matter?’” Schleinitz said. “Well, I like to flip it and say, ‘How does your voice or your perspective matter if you don’t vote?’ Because politicians, they pay attention to the people that vote, and so it’s important that we take a hold of our political power in that.”

Another predictor of voter turnout is education, Khanna said, with those in college or holding a college degree potentially having had more civic exposure.

“In the turnout models I’m running in Pennsylvania, while according to our latest voter files there are more like raw numbers of people Philadelphia County than Allegheny County — Philadelphia County is younger — our turnout models say that Allegheny County might end up with more voters this year than Philadelphia does, and it’ll probably be close,” Khanna explained. “Those will be the two biggest counties. They’ll probably end up around 10% of the electorate each.”

Allie Miller is a Pittsburgh-based freelance journalist.