By Alexander H. Jones

A recent national poll found that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. leads Joe Biden among voters under the age of 40. This finding, even if debatably accurate, is arresting. Kennedy, with his air of toxicity and crankishness, has no business commanding the support of even trace elements of the electorate, let alone a plurality of a major and important voting bloc. But the poll’s result is believable in light of Biden’s documented and persistent weakness with Millennial and Gen-Z voters.

That the two leftmost generations would gravitate toward an insurgent spoiler is easily explicable. Millennials and Generation Z have fewer attachments to the formal Democratic Party organization than their elders. This proclivity to identify as Independent has removed an emotional barrier from the decision to back an alternative to the Democratic nominee. Furthermore, young voters have always been attracted to outsider political candidates. When Kennedy’s own father ran for president in 1968, college campuses swooned over Minnesota progressive Eugene McCarty. A half-century later, another outsider, Senator Bernie Sanders, enjoyed fervent support from many of the McCarthy movement’s grandchildren.

So Kennedy (junior)’s eyebrow-raising strength among the young can at least be explained; however, it still must cause intense frustration among President Biden’s team. If any president has earned the right to young people’s support, there’s a fair argument to be made that Joe Biden is the man. Yet in poll after poll, young people register their disapproval of the president. The largest share of this discontent has to do with the inevitable, unfixable conundrum of Joe Biden’s age. Politics is mostly about identity, and a president older than many Zoomers’ grandparents will be hard to relate to and a difficult vessel into which to invest youthful hopes. Biden’s hawkish pro-Israel stance on the war in Gaza is abhorrent to many young people who view Israel as an apartheid state that’s pulverizing a densely populated community of civilians in the name of counterterrorism.

These liabilities are a tough nut to crack. Biden is not Benjamin Button; he’s now 80, and a year from now he’ll be 81. There’s no way to contravene Father Time. And the exigencies of foreign policy will make it difficult for the president to retract his general support for the Israeli war effort. Biden can, however, take a few steps to remedy his lackluster support from Millennials and Generation Z. He can get over his reluctance, as an elderly Catholic grandfather, to robustly champion women’s reproductive rights, and he can position himself as the most forceful advocate for the LGBTQ community who has ever inhabited the White House. Many Zoomers may not know that it was Biden who pushed the Obama Administration to embrace same-sex marriage after North Carolina passed the homophobic Amendment One.

Biden must do all this because his weak support from young voters deeply endangers his reelection effort. In North Carolina, for example, Democrats depend upon young people to compensate for their failure to win older, culturally Southern voters. In the party’s fabled triumph in 2008, Barack Obama lost every age-group in the state except for 18-29-year-old Millennials. But Obama performed so robustly among my generation that he managed to win the state. Since that election, youth turnout has declined to such a discouragingly low point that young Tar Heels are voting at a lower rate even than young people in other states. Democrats, needless to say, are struggling.

Embracing social liberalism would address some of young Americans’ particular concerns and begin to reconcile the Biden camp with Millennials and Zoomers who have soured on the administration. But it’s important to contextualize Biden’s weakness with young people in a landscape of widespread disapproval for his presidency. Like older people, young Americans are suffering from inflation and have yet to be convinced that Joe Biden is the only realistic alternative to the rise of unvarnished fascism on our shores. To win young people, Biden needs to tackle these critical weaknesses. They may listen to different music, but young voters and older voters are ultimately citizens of the same republic, and driven to vote for a sound economy and an alternative to a Trumpism that threatens the existence of our 250-year-old democracy.

Alexander H. Jones is a Policy Analyst with Carolina Forward. He lives in Carrboro. Have feedback? Reach him at alex@carolinaforward.org.