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But by 2024, a clear age gap had opened up among Black Americans, at least when thinking about a Biden-Trump matchup. Older Black voters remained overwhelmingly Democratic: For example, Black respondents aged 65-74 supported Biden by 70 points. But as you can see in the next chart, younger Black voters favored Biden by much smaller margins. In fact, Black voters between 25 and 34 gave just about equal support to Biden and Trump.

Why were younger Black Americans less supportive of Biden?

Of course, it's possible that the key factor wasn't age itself, but rather something correlated with age, like propensity to turn out to vote. Back in April, using the same data set, I found that Trump performed much better — and Biden much worse — among Black voters who turned out less frequently. Biden's margin over Trump was 81 points among Black voters who voted in 2018, 2020 and 2022, while it was only 10 points among those who voted in none of those three elections.

Younger voters tend to turn out less consistently, so maybe Biden's underperformance with young voters was really a weakness with infrequent voters. But vote history wasn't the whole story. When we fit a linear regression model to account for the relationship between prior turnout and voter preference simultaneously, age-based differences in voter preference among Black voters were reduced but not eliminated.

Another factor could have been Black voters' personal experiences with politics. In theory, Black voters who were young adults during the civil-rights era might be especially loyal to the Democratic Party because of the party's role in passing landmark legislation like the 1965 Voting Rights Act when they were most impressionable. But if that were true, we might expect to see a discontinuity for people in their late 70s, since someone who is 77 today was 18 in 1965. Instead, the actual trend by age groups looked more like a straight line, suggesting that other processes were at work.

Indeed, there are other factors that also vary with age and might explain the age gap we saw. Thirty years ago, political scientist Michael Dawson published the book \"Behind the Mule,\" which argued that Black voters are an unusually cohesive voting bloc because of something called \"linked fate.\" To an important extent, Dawson wrote, Black Americans see their own opportunities as tethered to those of the Black community, so they vote overwhelmingly for the party they see as best for that community.

In the early 2024 survey, we measured this idea partly by asking Black respondents, \"Do you think what happens generally to Black people in this country will have something to do with what happens in your life, or not?\" Overall, our respondents tended to agree, with 75 percent saying what happens generally to Black people has \"a lot\" or \"some\" to do with their own life. But there was an age gap here too, albeit a more modest one: Black respondents aged 55-64 reported the highest sense of linked fate (79 percent), while those who were 18-24 reported the lowest (60 percent). It's plausible, then, that weaker perceptions of linked fate among younger Black voters helps explain the age gap in presidential support.

But let's be precise about the magnitude of the relationship. As respondents shifted from the lowest sense of linked fate (\"not at all\") to the highest (\"a lot\"), their support for Biden increased by about 0.11 on a 0-1 scale, according to a linear regression model. So linked fate was a part of the explanation, but it was not the whole story either. Even when we accounted for linked fate in statistical models, the age gap remained meaningful.*

What this means for the fall campaign

For years, Democratic campaigns have devoted a lot of time and energy specifically to mobilizing Black voters. That will surely also be the case this year since, even if the Biden-level performance holds, Democrats will still benefit from high Black turnout — but some quick math shows us that those benefits may be dampened compared to prior years.

If Black voters as a whole cast more than 90 percent of their ballots for the Democrats, turning out 100 new Black voters will result in a net gain of 80 Democratic votes — that's assuming, though, a very high margin of Democratic victory among Black voters, and that the Black voters who only vote occasionally have the same levels of support as those who vote consistently. But if Black voters who wouldn't have otherwise voted are only with the Democrats by a margin of, say, 47 percent to 29 percent, turning out 100 new Black voters produces just 18 votes for Democrats on average. So if Democrats are losing the support of younger Black voters or less engaged Black voters, they may find that their get-out-the-vote efforts don't bear the same fruit as in past years.

Sophia Leung and Gall Sigler contributed research.

Footnotes

*In these regression models, we also saw that women were about 0.07 points (on the same 0-1 scale) more pro-Biden and that neither income nor education was a strong predictor of Black respondents' presidential preference.

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