It's Truly a Mystery Why Young People Don't Love Joe Biden

Get Hercule Poirot on this one!

Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images

There’s a new political head-scratcher on the block: what’s with these youngsters not seeming to like Joe Biden all that much????

A recent Gallup analysis and a Quinnipiac poll have combined to set this particular cat among the pundit pigeons, and people are agog, simply agog. Here’s CNN’s Chris Cillizza, possessor of the smoothest brain in Washington, sharing his utter bafflement about this over the weekend:

Young Americans have turned on Joe Biden.

That's the shocking finding of a Gallup analysis of its polling over the breadth of Biden's term released this week.

In the early days of Biden's presidency (from January 2021 to June 2021), an average of 6 in 10 adult members of Generation Z -- those born between 1997 and 2004 -- approved of the job Biden was doing. During the period spanning September 2021 to March 2022, that number had plummeted to an average of just 39%.

Among millennials -- those born between 1981 and 1996 -- the collapse is similarly stark. Biden's approval rating among that group stood at 60% in aggregated Gallup numbers in the first half of 2021, compared with 41% more recently.

[…] What explains Biden's precipitous drop-off among young Americans? It's hard to pinpoint any one reason, but there's no question the delta between what young people expected out of the Biden presidency -- particularly when it came to dealing with Covid-19 -- and what they got is substantial.

Get Hercule Poirot on this one!!! Call Columbo! Paging Jessica Fletcher! There’s a case to crack!

Cillizza helpfully ends this crackerjack (or, if you like, crackerjill) dispatch with these helpful words (emphasis his): “The Point: There are a lot of reasons for Democrats to be concerned about the midterm elections. This finding is right at the top of that list.”

Yes, thanks for that. Cillizza is not alone in seeing a mystery here. Vox’s Zack Beauchamp was similarly perplexed on Monday:

Zack Beauchamp/Twitter

(Beauchamp then said that the many, many responses he received were “extremely tedious.” No satisfying some people, I guess!)

Now, I won’t profess to be in Cillizza or Beauchamp’s league, but I still have a few vague ideas about what could be behind this puzzling decline.