Harris Erases Trump’s Lead on Economy: CNBC/Generation Lab Poll

Young Americans do not appear to hold Vice President Kamala Harris responsible for what many of them believe is a worsening U.S. economy under the Biden-Harris administration, according to a new poll from Vscek and Generation Lab.

The latest quarterly Youth & Money Survey, conducted after Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July, finds that 69% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 believe the economy will get worse under Joe Biden.

But they also think that the best candidate to improve the economy is de facto Democratic nominee Harris, not Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump.

Harris was considered the best candidate for the economy by 41% of respondents, while 40% chose Trump, while 19% said the economy would have done better with someone else, such as third-party candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

The results amount to a seven-point swing in Democrats’ favor on the economy since Vscek asked the same question in its Youth & Money poll in May. At the time, only 34 percent of respondents thought Biden, then the likely Democratic nominee, was the best candidate to revive the economy, with 40 percent picking Trump and 25 percent saying Kennedy.

The shift in support for voting for Harris is even broader among respondents overall. If the presidential election were held today, the latest poll found Harris would have a 12-point lead over Trump among young Americans, 46 percent to 34 percent, while 21 percent said they would vote for Kennedy or another candidate.

Three months ago, the same poll found that Trump and Biden were effectively tied, with 36% favoring Biden and 35% favoring Trump, while 29% expected to vote for Kennedy.

This surge in support for Harris is even more remarkable when you consider how much the economy impacts the voting choices of young Americans.

According to new Vscek poll data, “the economy and cost of living” was cited more than any other issue when respondents were asked what would impact their decisions about who to vote for, with 66 percent of respondents naming it among the top three. In second place at 34 percent was “abortion access and reproductive rights,” followed by “violence/gun control” at 26 percent.

However, these results also contain warning signs for Harris and the Democratic Party.

To win the White House, Harris will likely have to perform even better among young people in November than her current 12-point lead in the Vscek and Generation Lab poll.

With less than 90 days to go until the Nov. 5 election, these new results could have significant implications for a presidential race that has been altered by Biden’s decision to withdraw.

As pollsters scramble to gather data on how Harris’s candidacy is (or isn’t) changing the presidential race, one of the biggest unanswered questions for both parties is whether Americans will transfer their well-documented frustration with Biden, after years of high inflation and interest rates, directly to Harris.

These findings suggest that the political impact of “Bidenomics” has not yet rubbed off on Harris, at least not among younger voters.

In 2020, for example, Biden won voters ages 18 to 29 by a margin of 24 percentage points, with 59 percent of the vote to Trump’s 35 percent.

And while young people have long been a key constituency for Democratic candidates, this year, depending on which states Kennedy appears on the ballot, the struggling anti-vaccine independent may still be able to wrest enough votes from Harris to make a dent in her overall margins.

Voter turnout is also a potential sticking point for Democrats. The 18- to 34-year-old age group makes up about a quarter of the total U.S. population, or about 76 million people, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. During the last presidential election in 2020, 57% of this age group went to the polls.

In this poll, 77% of respondents said they would definitely or probably vote. But in past elections, the number of people who said they would vote has typically been much higher than the number who actually do.

Finally, as always happens in an election, the economy itself could hurt or help Harris, depending on how things play out.

For example, this survey was conducted between July 22 and July 29, before the latest jobs report showed a contraction, fueling renewed fears of an economic recession.

It was also taken before the August 5 market sell-off, which was triggered in part by fears over a difficult jobs report.

Meanwhile, most polls that measure all adults, not just younger ones, still show Trump maintaining his lead when it comes to picking the candidate voters trust most to improve the economy.

Further bad economic news between now and November could prompt voters to blame Harris, who has yet to articulate an economic agenda different from Biden’s, and return to the perceived safety of Trump’s usual economic agenda.

The survey involved 1,043 adults aged 18 to 34, with a margin of error of 3.0%.