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Are young people turning away from the Democratic Party in 2024? Will turnout be as high as it was last time around? What about the gender gap? Today I’ll do my best to address some pressing questions about how young folks will behave in November. But first, here are three stories from The Atlantic:

The bone-marrow-transplant revolution Radio Atlantic: The crucial factor of the Stormy Daniels case Abolish DEI statements, Conor Friedersdorf argues.

The “Realignment” Mirage

What are the youths up to this election cycle? several readers asked me via email last week. Well, lately, they’ve been giving Democrats heart palpitations.

A handful of surveys from late last month suggested that Trump is performing better among young voters than he did in 2020—even, in some cases, better than Joe Biden. Some Democrats are worried about what Politico recently called a “massive electoral realignment.” For decades, Democratic candidates have secured younger voters by big margins. In the 2020 presidential election, for example, voters ages 18–29 broke for Biden by more than 20 points. So if young voters were to turn toward Trump, that would be an enormous deal.

But before Democrats freak out or Trump fans get too excited, let’s all take a nice, deep breath. Several other youth-voter polls from last month showed Biden on par with Trump, and even beating him.

“Following recent polls of young voters has been a bit like reading a choose-your-own adventure book,” Daniel Cox, the director of the nonpartisan Survey Center on American Life at the American Enterprise Institute, told me via email, when I asked him what he makes of the surveys that point to a realignment. “You can craft a completely different narrative,” he says, depending on which poll you see.

These surveys vary so much, in part, because polling young people can be tricky. Getting young people on the phone via the traditional cold-call method is a nightmare, because they don’t tend to answer (I get it: These days it seems like every call is a scam.) Lately, younger voters have been eschewing traditional party labels, and they’ve grown more cynical about the entire political system. These phenomena make it difficult to both identify younger voters by party and to get them to participate in a poll.

It’s unlikely that a total realignment is happening, Cox and other pollsters told me. Let’s not forget which voters we’re dealing with: Young adults today are less religious, more educated, and more likely to identify as LGBTQ than prior generations, Cox noted, which are all characteristics generally associated with left-of-center political views. “It’s hard to see this completely changing over the course of a single campaign.”

A brand-new poll from Harvard throws even more ice-cold water on the “great realignment” theory: Biden leads Trump by 19 points among likely voters under age 30, according to the poll, which was published today and is considered one of the most comprehensive surveys of young voters in the country. Biden is definitely underperforming among young people compared with this point in the 2020 election, when he led by 30 points. But today’s poll showed no hint of a Trump lead.

Instead, the bigger threat to Biden will be third-party-curious young people. In a recent survey of young voters from the nonpartisan polling organization Split Ticket, Biden led Trump by 10 points, and the young voters who did abandon Biden weren’t going to Trump—they were going to independent candidates like RFK Jr.

The real themes to watch in 2024, experts told me, are youth turnout and the growing gender divide.

Young people are less likely to vote than older Americans—that’s true. But the past three national elections have actually had really high young-voter turnout, relative to past cycles. In the 2020 general election, 50 percent of eligible voters under 30 cast a ballot, according to estimates from CIRCLE, a nonpartisan organization that studies youth civic engagement. Will more than 50 percent of eligible young voters show up to the polls again this November? Maybe: About 53 percent of young Americans say they will “definitely be voting,” according to the Harvard poll published today. That’s about the same as it was around this time in 2020, when 54 percent said they’d vote.

But some experts say that matching 2020 levels is a long shot. Biden and Trump are historically unpopular presidential candidates among all age groups. Given that, Lakshya Jain, who helped design the Split Ticket poll, doesn’t think young-voter turnout will be “nearly as high as it was in 2020.” That cycle was special, he says: “a black swan of events” during one of the most tumultuous times in America. The election followed four years of a Trump administration, and the start of a global pandemic. “I see this environment as much more like 2016,” Jain said, when turnout among young people was closer to 40 percent.

The other important trend is gender. More American men than women support Trump—and that gap is growing. Now it seems like the same phenomenon applies to young people. Among likely young women voters, Biden leads Trump by 33 points in the new Harvard poll; among young men, he only leads by six. (In 2020, Biden led young men by 26 points.)

This gender chasm may not actually be reflected in November’s outcome. But that, pollsters say, will be the possible realignment to watch. “It will make the youth vote less Democratic for one,” Cox said. And “a longer-term political gender divide could transform the character of the political parties.”

Related:

Are Gen Z men and women really drifting apart? Generation Z doesn’t remember when America worked (From 2022)

Today’s News

Twelve jurors were sworn in for Donald Trump’s hush-money criminal trial in New York; the selection of alternate jurors will resume tomorrow. A commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said that it is “possible and conceivable” that Iran will reconsider its nuclear policies if Israel attacks Iranian nuclear facilities. In a new package of bills dealing with aid to Israel and Ukraine, the U.S. House revived legislation that would force TikTok’s owner to either sell the social-media platform or face a national ban.

Dispatches

Work in Progress: Supercheap electric cars from China or an American industrial renaissance? Pick one, Rogé Karma writes. Time-Travel Thursdays: Helen Keller was funny, smart, and much more complex than many people know, Ellen Cushing writes.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Investigation Discovery

The Uncomfortable Truth About Child Abuse in Hollywood

By Hannah Giorgis

During Nickelodeon’s golden era, the network captivated young viewers by introducing them to an impressive roster of comedic talent—who happened to be kids, just like them … For nearly two decades, the network dominated not just kids’ programming, but the entire cable-TV landscape.

A new docuseries argues that at least some of this success came at a great cost. Quiet on Set: The Dark Side of Kids TV explores troubling allegations of child abuse and other inappropriate on-set behavior during this run at Nickelodeon. The documentary builds on a 2022 Business Insider investigation into programs led by the prolific producer Dan Schneider, and on details from a memoir published earlier that year by the former child star Jennette McCurdy. (McCurdy, who doesn’t identify Schneider by name in her book but describes an abusive showrunner widely believed to be him, was not involved with the documentary.) Over its five episodes, the series offers an important record of how the adults working on these shows—and Hollywood as a whole—repeatedly failed to protect young actors. But Quiet on Set also, perhaps unintentionally, ends up creating a frustratingly tidy narrative that elides some crucial complexities of abuse.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

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Culture Break

Millennium Images / Gallery Stock

Read. Our Kindred Creatures, by Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy, explores why Americans love certain animals and are indifferent toward many others.

Pace yourself. Scott Jurek ran a 2,189-mile ultramarathon—the full length of the Appalachian Trail, Paul Bisceglio wrote in 2018. What can extreme athletes tell us about human endurance?

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

In case you haven’t heard, it’s Pop Girl Spring! And tonight is the big night: Taylor Swift is releasing her new album, The Tortured Poets Department. I’m thrilled, because I love a breakup album, and this one promises to be moody and campy in equal measure. (The track list includes songs called “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and “But Daddy I Love Him”!) For a really thoughtful unpacking of the album, I recommend tuning into the Every Single Album podcast from The Ringer, hosted by Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard. They have a preview episode up now, and a new one will be out in a few days.

Even if Taylor isn’t your cup of tea (gasp!), their other episodes covering new music from Beyoncé, Maggie Rogers, and Kacey Musgraves are delightful and informative, too.

— Elaine

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Chinese electric vehicles—cheap, stylish, and high quality—should be a godsend to the Biden administration, whose two biggest priorities are reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to avert a climate catastrophe and reducing consumer prices quickly enough to avert an electoral catastrophe. Instead, the White House is going out of its way to keep Chinese EVs out of the U.S. What gives?

The key to understanding this seeming contradiction is something known as “the China shock.” American policy makers long considered free trade to be close to an unalloyed good. But, according to a hugely influential 2016 paper, the loosening of trade restrictions with China at the turn of the 21st century was a disaster for the American manufacturing workforce. Consumers got cheap toys and clothes, but more than 2 million workers lost their jobs, and factory towns across the country fell into ruin. Later research found that, in 2016, Donald Trump overperformed in counties that had been hit hardest by the China shock, helping him win key swing states such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania.

Upon taking office, the Biden administration committed itself to making sure nothing like this would happen again. It kept in place many of Donald Trump’s tariffs on China and even introduced new trade restrictions of its own. Meanwhile, it pushed legislation through Congress that invested trillions of dollars to boost domestic manufacturing. For Biden, the transition to green energy represented a chance to bring good jobs back to the places that had been hurt the most by free trade.

Then China became an EV powerhouse overnight and made everything much more complicated. As recently as 2020, China produced very few electric vehicles and exported hardly any of them. Last year, more than 8 million EVs were sold in China, compared with 1.4 million in the U.S. The Chinese market has been driven mostly by a single brand, BYD, which recently surpassed Tesla to become the world’s largest producer of electric vehicles. BYD cars are well built, full of high-tech features, and dirt cheap. The least expensive EV available in America retails for about $30,000. BYD’s base model goes for less than $10,000 in China and, without tariffs, would probably sell for about $20,000 in the U.S., according to industry experts.  

This leaves the White House in a bind. A flood of ultracheap Chinese EVs would save Americans a ton of money at a time when people—voters—are enraged about high prices generally and car prices in particular. And it would accelerate the transition from gas-powered cars to EVs, drastically lowering emissions in the process. But it would also likely force American carmakers to close factories and lay off workers, destroying a crucial source of middle-class jobs in a prized American industry—one that just so happens to be concentrated in a handful of swing states. The U.S. could experience the China shock all over again. “It’s a Faustian bargain,” David Autor, an economist at MIT and one of the authors of the original China-shock paper, told me. “There are few things that would decarbonize the U.S. faster than $20,000 EVs. But there is probably nothing that would kill the U.S. auto industry faster, either.”

[Andrew Moseman: The inconvenient truth about electric vehicles]

The president has chosen which end of the bargain he’s willing to take. The Biden administration has left in place a 25 percent tariff on all Chinese vehicles (a measure initiated by Donald Trump), which has kept most Chinese EVs out of the U.S. even as they are selling like crazy in Europe. That probably won’t hold off Chinese EVs forever, which is why the administration is contemplating further restrictions. “China is determined to dominate the future of the auto market, including by using unfair practices,” Biden said in a statement in February. “I’m not going to let that happen on my watch.”

One view of this approach is that Biden is choosing to sabotage his own climate goals by cynically pandering to a tiny group of swing voters. As Vox’s Dylan Matthews has observed, less than 1 percent of Americans work directly in the auto industry, whereas more than 90 percent of American households have a car.

The Biden administration, unsurprisingly, sees the situation differently. Biden’s team starts from the premise that decarbonizing the U.S. economy will be a decades-long effort requiring sustained political buy-in from the public. Chinese EVs might lower emissions in the short term, but the resulting backlash could help elect Trump and other Republicans intent on rolling back the Biden administration’s hard-won climate achievements. Keeping out Chinese EVs now, in other words, may be necessary to save the planet later.

“We ran this experiment before,” Jennifer Harris, who served as the senior director for international economics in the Biden administration, told me, referring to the first China shock. “We saw whole industries shift overseas, and Trump rode those grievances right to the White House. And last time I checked, he didn’t do much decarbonizing.” Already, Trump is trying to turn Chinese EVs into a wedge issue in the 2024 election; his recent “bloodbath” comments were a reference to what would happen to America if Chinese cars were allowed into the country.

That doesn’t mean the Biden administration is giving up on an electric-vehicle future; it just means that future will need to be built at home instead of imported from abroad. Threading that needle won’t be easy. Apart from Tesla, American automakers still make the bulk of their profits selling gas-powered pickup trucks and SUVs while bleeding money on EVs. (Last year, GM lost $1.7 billion on its EV business; Ford lost $4.7 billion.) Although the generous subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act are designed to speed up the pivot to electric vehicles, U.S. companies—including Tesla—aren’t close to profitably producing EVs nearly as cheaply as China can today.

The most straightforward way to buy time is by imposing further trade restrictions. But doing so effectively requires careful calibration: Expose American automakers to Chinese competition too quickly and they could whither and die, but protect them for too long and they might remain complacent selling expensive gas-guzzling cars instead of transitioning toward cheaper EVs. “The sweet spot is where you prevent a rapid shift of production to China while also holding the auto industry’s feet to the fire,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me.

Separating technocratic analysis of policy objectives from the vicissitudes of politics, however, is easier said than done. Trump recently called for a 100 percent tariff on Chinese cars; Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri recently proposed legislation to raise that to 125 percent. Even congressional Democrats—many of whom are facing close elections in Rust Belt states such as Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin—have recently begun pressuring the Biden administration to raise tariffs further.

That isn’t the only way political currents could undermine the transition to electric vehicles. In order to compete with Chinese EVs, American companies must, paradoxically, learn from Chinese battery makers, who have spent decades developing the best EV batteries in the world. The U.S. auto industry knows this, which is why in February of last year Ford announced a partnership with China’s leading battery maker, CATL, to open a factory in Michigan. Ford would pay CATL to, in the words of Ford’s chairman, “help us get up to speed so that we can build these batteries ourselves” and create 2,500 new manufacturing jobs in the process. (Such partnerships are common in the EV industry; Tesla, for instance, partnered with the Japanese company Panasonic to develop its batteries.) Everybody would win: Ford, CATL, American workers, the planet.

But the backlash was swift. Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin of Virginia called the Ford-CATL partnership a “Trojan-horse relationship with the Chinese Communist Party” and vowed to keep similar projects out of his state. House Republicans launched multiple investigations into the deal, claiming that it could pose a national-security risk. Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who was instrumental in passing the Inflation Reduction Act, has balked at the notion that a partnership with a Chinese company could qualify for the subsidies that that law provides.

[Zoë Schlanger: Joe Biden and Donald Trump have thoughts about your next car]

Perhaps not coincidentally, the Biden administration eventually announced new guidelines that could disqualify the deal, and others like it, from being eligible for some of the IRA’s tax credits and grants—a move that would make it much harder for American car companies to gain the expertise they need to produce better, cheaper EVs. “It’s ironic, really,” Ilaria Mazzocco, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told me. “Our efforts to cut China out from every part of the supply chain might actually be what prevents us from competing with their EVs.”

Herein lies the Biden administration’s deeper dilemma. Decarbonizing the U.S. while retaining a thriving auto industry requires a delicate balance between tariffs and subsidies, between protection and competition, between beating the Chinese and learning from them. The prevailing sentiment toward China in Washington, however, is neither delicate nor balanced. That America’s leaders are committed to preventing another China shock is commendable. But going too far in the other direction could produce a different kind of avoidable disaster.

Last year was widely hailed as a breakthrough for the American worker. Amid a historically hot labor market, the United Auto Workers and Hollywood writers’ and actors’ guilds launched high-profile strikes that made front-page news and resulted in significant victories. Strikes, organizing efforts, and public support for unions reached heights not seen since the 1960s. Two in three Americans support unions, and 59 percent say they would be in favor of unionizing their own workplace. And Joe Biden supports organized labor more vocally than any other president in recent memory. You could look at all this and say that the U.S. labor movement is stronger than it has been in decades.

But you could just as easily say that worker power in America is as low as it has been in nearly a century. Despite all the headlines and good feeling, a mere 10 percent of American workers belong to unions. In the private sector, the share is just 6 percent. After years of intense media attention and dogged organizing efforts, workers at Amazon, Starbucks, and Trader Joe’s still don’t have a contract, or even the start of negotiations to get one. Union membership is associated with higher earnings, better benefits, stable hours, protection from arbitrary discipline, and more—but most Americans haven’t had the chance to experience these advantages firsthand. In 2023, according to an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank, 60 million working people in this country wanted a union but couldn’t get one.  

How can this be? The answer, as I learned during my 25 years working for the AFL-CIO, the nation’s largest federation of unions, is that the story of organized labor in America is really two stories. On the one hand, established unions—especially those that emerged in the 1930s, when labor protections were at their most robust and expansive—are thriving. On the other hand, workers who want to unionize for the first time can’t get their efforts off the ground.

This is because the legal and policy shifts that hobbled the American labor movement were not primarily aimed at dismantling existing unions, at least not right away. Rather, they were designed to make it difficult to form new ones. Those efforts worked. In 1954, 16 million working people belonged to a union, and they accounted for about a third of the workforce. Today, nearly as many people are in unions—about 14 million—but they make up only 10 percent of the workforce. In other words, the numerator of unionized workers has held steady even as the denominator of overall jobs in the economy has grown dramatically. And all the support from the public and even the president can’t do much to change that. As hopeful as today’s moment might seem for workers, those hopes will not be realized without reversing the changes that laid unions low in the first place.  

A century ago, an even smaller portion of the workforce belonged to a union than does today, and it showed. Then, as now, income inequality had reached staggering heights. Industrial workplaces of the 1920s were police states, with corporate spy agencies, private armies, and company stores.

The tide shifted in workers’ favor during the Great Depression. In 1935, responding to years of rising labor militancy, Congress passed the Wagner Act, an integral part of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda. The law gave working people robust rights to form and join labor unions and to take collective action, such as strikes. It created the National Labor Relations Board, tasked with ensuring that employers didn’t violate these rights. And it declared that protecting “the free flow of commerce” also meant protecting the “full freedom” of working people to organize. Overall union membership rose from just 11 percent of the workforce in 1934 to 34 percent in 1945.

[Morgan Ome: What the labor movement can learn from its past]

Then the tide shifted back. After the Congress of Industrial Organizations began organizing multiracial unions in the South, segregationist Southern Democrats, whose votes had been crucial for passing the Wagner Act, joined forces with pro-corporate Republicans to stymie the New Deal labor agenda. This effort culminated in the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947, which stripped key labor protections from the Wagner Act. President Harry Truman denounced the bill as “a shocking piece of legislation” that would “take fundamental rights away from our working people.” But the Senate overrode his veto.

Taft-Hartley marked the beginning of the end of America’s short-lived period of strong organized-labor rights. It allowed states to pass “right to work” laws that let workers free-ride on union benefits without paying dues, which would help keep southern states low-wage and non-union. Taft-Hartley made it a crime for workers to join together across employers in “sympathy strikes” (unlike in Sweden, where postal workers refused last year to deliver license plates as a show of support for striking Tesla workers), or even across workplaces in the same industry. It also included anti-communist provisions that led to a purge of many of the labor movement’s most effective organizers, especially those most successful in promoting multiracial organizing. Taken together, these changes choked off the growth of working-class solidarity that was flourishing in other Western democracies at the time.

Taft-Hartley did not immediately doom the labor movement, however. It was more like a time bomb. Established unions remained strong and popular for decades, boosted by the conventional wisdom that a careful balance between labor and capital was the goose laying the postwar golden eggs. As Dwight Eisenhower wrote to his brother in 1954, “Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance, and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history.”

The time bomb finally began to go off in the 1970s, when a confluence of factors—the stagflation crisis, the rise of Milton Friedman–style economic theory, the fracturing of the Democratic coalition—made anti-union policy much more politically viable. And corruption in some unions, laid bare by high-profile congressional hearings, cast doubt on the integrity of unions generally. Richard Nixon appointed pro-corporate justices to the Supreme Court who over the following decades would dilute labor protections even further than Taft-Hartley had. And in 1981, Ronald Reagan crushed the air-traffic-controller strike, signaling that the federal government would tolerate aggressive union-busting actions by employers. This in turn gave birth to a new “union avoidance” consulting business that taught bosses how to exploit the vulnerabilities that had been injected into labor law. Those vulnerabilities turned out to be extensive.

During the period between the passage of the Wagner Act and Taft-Hartley, union organizing was relatively straightforward. Organizers would typically distribute cards to rank-and-file activists, who would collect signatures and return them to the organizers, who would file the signed cards with the NLRB. If a majority of a workplace signed the cards, the NLRB would certify the union. During bargaining, if the company and the union couldn’t reach agreement, the workers had various ways of exerting leverage, including calling a sit-down strike or blocking the employer’s goods from being accepted at other workplaces.

Today, even if a majority of workers sign union cards, the union has to win an NLRB election to be recognized. This process does not much resemble the free and fair elections we vote in every other November. The company can hire anti-union consultants, who will advise doing everything possible to delay that election, giving management time to intensify its lobbying efforts to scare employees out of voting yes. Thanks to Taft-Hartley’s so-called free-speech clause, employers have a broad range of tactics to choose from. For instance, although they are not technically allowed to threaten to close a warehouse if workers unionize, they can “predict” that the warehouse will have to close if the union goes through. They can make employees attend anti-union propaganda meetings during work hours, and they don’t have to let union organizers set foot in the parking lot to respond.

If a union overcomes these obstacles to win majority support, corporate higher-ups, though technically obligated to bargain in good faith, can drag their heels on contract negotiations with few repercussions. This helps explain why the Amazon Labor Union—which was founded in Staten Island in April 2021 and recognized by the NLRB in April 2022— still doesn’t appear close to having a contract. Labor might be regaining its cultural cachet, but after the triumphant vote is complete and the news cameras go away, employers hold almost all the cards.

[Adam Serwer: The Amazon union exposes the emptiness of ‘woke capital’]

This dynamic, rather than economic or technological shifts, is the key reason workers in more recently established industries are not organized. If Uber and Lyft had been invented in the 1930s, there would be a large, powerful Rideshare Drivers’ Union. If movies had been invented in the 2020s, the notion of an actors’ guild or a screenwriters’ union would seem absurd to most people. There is nothing more inherently “unionizable” about one job versus another.

Organized labor could still make a true comeback, one reflected not just in public goodwill but in actual union jobs. The Protecting the Rights to Organize Act, first introduced in 2019, is a comprehensive effort to restore the balance of power in the workplace—repealing much of the Taft-Hartley Act, including its so-called right-to-work provisions and its ban on solidarity actions. The PRO Act passed the House, but stalled in the Senate when a few Democratic senators refused to back filibuster-reform efforts in 2021.  

The PRO Act is a strong bill, and I fought for it during my time as political director of the AFL-CIO. But one of the lessons of the American labor movement is that legal change tends to follow cultural change. Recent trends are encouraging. Biden brags about being the first president to visit a picket line, and Trump, despite having pursued anti-labor policies while president, at least feels the need to try to appear pro-union. At the same time, with less fanfare, the strategic effort to dilute worker power continues apace: Red-state legislatures are rolling back basic labor laws, including those that protect children, and Amazon, Starbucks, SpaceX, and Trader Joe’s have asked the the Supreme Court to declare the NLRB unconstitutional.

The paradox is that it’s hard for labor law to become a top-tier political issue precisely because so few Americans have firsthand experience with union membership, or recognize what they have to gain from resetting the balance of power between workers and corporations. Overcoming that challenge requires recovering the wisdom that created the modern labor movement: that the fate of working people anywhere is the fate of working people everywhere. It happened once, nearly a century ago. The country was a very different place back then. But, for better and for worse, it was also much the same.