Hey, everyone. I'm David Chalian, CNN's Washington Bureau Chief and Political Director, and welcome to the CNN Political Briefing. As the Trump transition continues its breakneck pace of cabinet appointments, some of which are proving to be quite controversial, and a new Republican majority in the Senate prepares to take over control of the upper chamber in January, it may seem like we've moved on pretty quickly from Election Day. So this week, I want to focus on one particular demographic that got a lot of attention this election season: young people. In the weeks leading up to the election, we heard over and over again how hard both campaigns were fighting for these voters who have long tended to vote Democratic. Most of them still did, but Trump's campaign gained significant ground. What's behind that shift? John Della Volpe is the director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. He's been on the show before to talk about young people and is joining me again to discuss what we've learned in these last few weeks as we absorb these historic election results. John, thanks so much for being here, appreciate it.

It's great to be back with you, David.

'So, let's just start with the election results themselves. And we look at younger voters, for the purposes of these data, I'm looking at 18-to-29-year-olds, but we can discuss any slice of the youth vote you want to discuss. In 2020, 18-to-29-year-olds, according to the exit polls, made up 17% of the electorate nationwide. Their share of the electorate went down a bit. According to the 2024 exit polls, 18 to 29-year-olds made up 14% of the electorate. And in 2020, Joe Biden bested Donald Trump by 24 points, 60% to 36% support among that 18-to-29-year-old cohort. And in 2024, that 24-point advantage shrunk to an 11-point advantage for Kamala Harris. So a 13-point swing towards Trump in the margin. She bested him 54% to 43%. We saw his support go up seven points, her support among that group go down six points from 2020, what Biden had. So laying that out there, my first question to you, sir, is what happened with the young vote and why was Kamala Harris, at the end of the day, underperforming with what Joe Biden had done with this group four years prior?

'Again, thanks for having me, David. Let's talk about the recent history and the context in this century. When Democrats are able to win 60% of the youth vote, there's a 100% correlation with them winning. We said Joe Biden did it in '20. And Obama did it two other times. The job of any Democrat is to move what is generally the generic support for a Democrat from the mid-fifties to 60%. You do that and the chances are, you'll be president. Republicans don't need to win the youth vote. What they need to do is dig into that margin. And I feel like that's been a part of what Donald Trump's strategy has been about for years, David. You know, he knew obviously losing in 2020, he needed to expand his base, expand his franchise. And I think he spent tens of millions of dollars himself and with coordinated groups to focus on young voters, specifically young men. And it's clear that that paid off because when you dig just a level deeper than this 18-to-29-year-old cohort, the folks who voted four years ago or were eligible four years ago, basically 25-to-29-year-olds, that group was relatively stable. Women shifted perhaps a couple of points towards Trump. Men maybe shifted a couple of points toward Harris. Again, the exit polls will continue to evolve over the next couple of weeks before we have a final set of data, but that looks relatively stable. The real movement was with essentially first-time voters, these 18-to-24-year-olds, both men and women, shifted 20 points, 24 points toward the right. So this is a story of what was Donald Trump doing with the first-time voter cohort that Kamala Harris and the Democrats really weren't able to counter. So that's the story, I think. And then, you know, I've spent a lot of time in the last couple weeks. I don't think in the data I can make a compelling case that this is necessarily a shift to the right, a significant realignment. I think what these first-time younger voters are saying is they feel left behind. And I think that Donald Trump met them kind of where they are and talked about the issues that are most concerning to them, which, by and large, are the same issues that concern most other Americans, the day-to-day cost of living and potential of a future of living their best life.

So something we heard, John, from the Harris campaign throughout is that throughout the fall campaign, they weren't just concerned, as any campaign would normally be, about losing some in a persuadable universe from Harris to Trump. They were also concerned of losing in a persuadable universe between Harris and the couch, as they said, or folks would be disengaged and tuned out. What do you make of the initial suggestion here in the numbers that there just was a lower turnout among this group? I take everything you're saying about Trump's appeal. Trump met them where they are. But what do you make of those that just sort of dropped out of this process?

'The one thing I want to caution most about is the exact vote share. I do believe it will be down, David, from the record of 2020. But generally, we want to wait until we see the census data in May of next year. But I do think, you know, it looks like there's certainly some erosion, and the erosion seems to come from the Democratic side. This was a winnable race, I believe, for Harris. We're talking if you just look at the three blue wall states, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, we're dealing with, if one out of 100 people shifted their votes from Trump to Harris, she's a president-elect today. That's how close it was. Or, as you said, if some of those folks who have progressive ideals and ideology voted, got off that couch, she's president today. It was that close.

'I totally take that point. I think it's about like 240,000 roughly votes across those three states if they flipped the other way, this election would be different. I just want to note that is actually not as close as the previous two contests in the Electoral College, right? Like, Hillary Clinton lost across three states by 70,000-ish votes. Joe Biden won the presidency across three states. If 44,000 votes had gone a different way. So, his electoral victory here, and I agree with you, is obviously, it's close, and this could have made the difference, but it's actually less close than the last two presidential elections.

Completely fair. Completely fair. And my point of that, David, is that, yes, inflation was high. Turnout was low in some pockets. You know that she only had 170 days. All of those things are true, deep polling deficits. But it was still winnable.

Without a doubt. Without a doubt.

'Yeah. You know, you know, let's look at Michigan. We know what happened in Dearborn and how much better Trump did within, you know, the Arab-American community. But you can extend that, I think, to college towns and college precincts like Ann Arbor. Again, I don't know the exact turnout. I think it was not as high as it was in 2020. But beyond that, there were 20-point shifts from Biden to Trump in some of those Ann Arbor precincts. So even though, you know, a majority of those folks aren't necessarily Arab-American, I don't think, they certainly could have connected, I think, with their friends and peers who care deeply about Gaza. I think that was probably a significant effect in depressing the vote in Michigan. Certainly, the early indications seem to be that's the case.

'When you and I talked before the election, I think around the time of your most recent pre-election survey of young voters, one of the things we talked about, I recall, was the gender gap being all the more pronounced among younger voters even than the general electorate at large. And you were just talking a little bit before about how Trump actually was able to make some inroads with particularly young men, but also in some cases, young women. How did the gender gap play out at the end of the day here? And did the Harris campaign, do you think, miss something strategically in terms of its appeal to young women?

'I think that in the final weeks, an over-reliance on reproductive health and abortion messaging was one of the reasons that perhaps she even underperformed with the younger women. The younger women I talked to in my focus groups — and I do them often and on college campuses and other places — who were ambivalent about voting or really kind of soft supporters on one side or the other, undecided, told me time and time and time again, a couple of things: one of which is that they were having a hard time choosing whether they should vote for their own financial self-interest or for their reproductive health. They saw, obviously, one being a vote for Trump, one being a vote for Harris. That was a challenge, number one. And number two, they would tell me that we're more, young women are more than just abortion voters. It's not just about when I'm going to get an abortion. It's about talking to me about the other things that keep me up at night, you know, paying for education, paying my rent, affordability of the cost of living, what my life might be like unless I can get some more financial stability. And I don't believe the Harris campaign focused as much on those issues as perhaps they could have because that was very loud and clear from the young people I talked to in the closing weeks.

We're going to take a quick break right here. We're going to have a lot more with John Della Volpe in just a moment. Stay with us.

Welcome back, we're here with John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. John, we've gone through what went wrong here in, as you call it, an eminently winnable race for Harris and her team. I wonder, because you did so much work looking at young voters and this is your expertise, looking ahead now, where do you believe young voters are in terms of expectations for a Trump administration and where they think that their lives may be improved, at least, I guess, those that supported him? What did you hear along those lines about what they might anticipate and expect from Trump 2.0?

It's a great question. I've been hearing a consistent set of expectations all year, from the winter to the spring through now, which is they expect to have what they think they had back in the first term of Trump, whether or not that was true or not. They expect to have lower taxes. They expect to have more money in their bank account, and they expect to have less chaos in the world. Those are essentially the three things that younger people are expecting. And, David, when I'm engaging with young people, and I might ask them, hey, do you make more than $400,000 a year? Because if you don't, I don't think your taxes went up the last four years. They just don't believe that; they don't want to engage in that, right? That's something that, you know, you can't argue with a lot of these young voters about. So, I think that's what it really is. They expect less chaos. They expect more order, and they expect to have a more comfortable financial footing.

How does the information flow, the information consumption among young voters have an impact on the way in which these campaigns are playing out? How do you believe young voters are getting their information? And do you sense that this current generation of young voters are as engaged politically as previous generations or less so? And what does their information intake tell you about how they learn about politics?

Well, I mean, to the degree to which young people aren't following politics, it's often because they find it stressful and chaotic in a world where there's already a lot of anxiety and depression. One of the ways in which they can try to minimize that effect on them is to not pay attention to traditional news sources. Okay, so I hear that time and time again, and we can see that clearly in the survey work that we do at the IPO, which therefore makes, I think, the effort by Trump that much more effective, where he has embedded himself essentially for the last decade, David. A young voter today was 10 or 12 years old or younger when they were first introduced to Trump. He has been a part of their life through culture for the last 10 or 15 years or so. They've kind of grown up with him.

He's not a disruptive force to them, right? He is just the state of play. Like he's just what they know.

'He is the state of play. And they see him through Barstool Sports, through UFC, through golf. They see him through culture; they see him through music, etc. So it's just not about Trump. It's about the message that permeates throughout MAGA, which is, he's strong, the opposition is weak, and he exudes this confidence that a lot of younger people clearly are seeking. Three-quarters of young men, and women aren't so far behind, are stressed out on a regular basis about their future, okay? And they don't have anything that they tell me to give them hope. They think of the world as scary and unclear, and the vision of their future is blurry. So when someone says, I will take care of this, I will make sure that you're taken care of for the economy, etc. There's clearly some resonance of that. Not to say he is winning large majorities of this vote. He isn't. But that seems to be effective enough, right, to peel away some of what would be traditionally the foundation of the Democratic Party. That is the concern that I have for Democrats is you've lost, you know, a significant share among Hispanic Americans. You held on with most Black Americans. But again, turnout among Black men is certainly kind of a question. If you're not in the working class, we know what the issue is. So, if you're bleeding around those segments, you cannot afford to do anything except build and grow the base of what is a progressive generation. That's the thing. People were trying to deal with their their real life experience and economics versus their ideology, where probably seven out of ten questions, they probably agree with Democrats. It's just the day-to-day living expenses and the confidence that Trump gave them. I think that was the difference.

'I think that makes perfect sense, John. So, that begs the question, I mean, obviously, prices I don't think are going to come down, right? That's just not the way that works. But I think society gets adjusted after some time to a higher price point that hopefully no longer increases. And so therefore, every election occurs obviously in a different political environment. So, understanding that we can't figure out a future political environment in this conversation, I do want to get from you, given what you just said, given the pieces of the coalition that Democrats need to work on, if indeed they're going to be successful and so the focus on this piece of the coalition of young voters — how would you design in a laboratory right now a Democratic candidate that could get back over that 60% hump, that could re-energize this youth vote, that can build a more permanent piece of the Democratic coalition to contribute to potential future victories? What would that candidate look like, and what would be the main appeal that you think could bring young voters back in larger numbers?

'I can't tell you exactly what they would look like, because what we've found is that young people respond to people and to Democrats who are authentic at their core. So that could be, in the case of Bernie Sanders, I'm not suggesting Bernie Sanders, but they've responded to an 83-year-old Jewish senator from Vermont. They have responded to a 30-something-year-old Hispanic Latina in AOC and Pete Buttigieg and everyone in between, okay? So it's not about who they look like, their gender, their race, their sexual orientation. It's not about that. I think it begins with, David, do they listen? Do they internalize what they're hearing from younger people and can they speak to these concerns in a compelling way? My concern was that Kamala Harris did just that the last couple of years, okay? She flew down to Memphis. She flew down to Nashville to address the injustice that she saw in Tennessee around shootings and with the legislature. She visited, I don't know, untold numbers of college campuses and just listened and incorporated the feelings of Gen Z into her platform and into a lot of her speeches. It just didn't get translated in the last several weeks in a compelling way where younger people could see how their life would improve in a dramatic way with her as president. So I don't think necessarily there needs to be a wholesale shift. As I said, you know, you're talking about one out of 100 voters you're trying to get from 55 or so to 60%. It really, I think, starts with recognizing that younger people are more than single-issue voters in the degree to which economic pain is there. It just needs to address that. There aren't, there are very few focus groups I assemble where I don't meet people who are, have been or are on the verge of being homeless. I just don't think that was a priority, for some reason. I think they oversimplified it and asked too much of a single cohort of younger women.

John, that is super fascinating. It's a good place for us to, I say, pause this conversation because I have no doubt in the months ahead we will be talking again. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you. I hope so.

'That's it for this week's edition of the CNN Political Briefing. We want to hear from you. Is there a question you'd like answered about this election cycle? Is there a guest you really want to hear from? Give us a call at (202) 618-9460. Or send us an email at CNNPoliticalBriefing@Gmail.com. And you might just be featured in a future episode of the podcast. So don't forget to tell us your name, where you're from, how we can reach you, and if you give us permission to use the recording on the podcast. CNN's Political Briefing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Emily Williams. Our senior producer is Felicia Patinkin. Dan Dzula is our Technical Director, and Steve Lickteig is the Executive Producer of CNN Audio. Support from Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, Jon Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. We'll be back with a new episode on Friday, December 6th. Thanks so much for listening.