Congressional Democrats’ approval ratings plummeting among young Americans, Harvard poll shows

Congressional Democrats’ approval ratings among young voters have plummeted by 19 points since 2017, according to a Harvard Youth Poll released Wednesday.

The 50th edition of the poll found that the amount of young Americans who approve of Congressional Democrats was just 23%, down from 42% in spring 2017. Meanwhile, Congressional Republicans’ approval ratings increased slightly in the same period, reaching 29%, up from 28% in 2017.

While the survey showed that Congressional Republicans notched higher favorability ratings than Congressional Democrats, President Donald Trump’s job approval rating among voters was relatively low. Of those surveyed, 31% said they approved of the job Trump is doing as president, compared to the 32% reported in spring 2017 and the 29% recorded in Fall 2020, according to the poll.

Still, Trump’s approval among young black Americans increased from just 6% in 2017 to 16%, an improvement the survey called “statistically significant.” At the same time, the president’s approval among young white Americans declined from 44% to 39%.

The Democratic Party has reportedly been having difficulty developing a strategy to communicate with voters ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Several recent surveys have shown that many Americans disapprove of Democrats’ leadership and favor the Republican Party over the Democratic Party. A Yale Youth Poll released April 15 found that when asked whether they would vote for the Democratic or Republican candidate in the 2026 midterms, voters aged 18 to 21 favored the GOP candidate by a margin of 11.7 percentage points.

This poll of 2,096 18-to-29-year-olds was organized with undergraduate students from the Harvard Public Opinion Project and supervised by John Della Volpe, Director of Polling. Data was collected by Ipsos Public Affairs using the KnowledgePanel. The poll’s margin of error for the total sample was plus or minus 3.21%.

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