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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.

This month, Professor Randall L. Kennedy, an eminent scholar of race and civil rights, published an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson denouncing the use of diversity, equity, and inclusion statements in academic hiring. “I am a scholar on the left committed to struggles for social justice,” he wrote. “The realities surrounding mandatory DEI statements, however, make me wince.”

More and more colleges started requiring faculty to submit these statements in recent years, until legislatures in red states began to outlaw them. They remain common at private institutions and in blue states. Kennedy lamented that at Harvard and elsewhere, aspiring professors are required to “profess and flaunt” their faith in DEI in a process that “leans heavily and tendentiously towards varieties of academic leftism.” He concluded that DEI statements “ought to be abandoned.”

Conor Friedersdorf: The hypocrisy of mandatory diversity statements

But a “contrasting perspective” on diversity statements that the Crimson published argued that “furor over diversity statements in hiring is a red herring.” Edward J. Hall, a Harvard philosophy professor, acknowledged flaws in the way DEI statements are currently used, going so far as to declare, “I share my colleague professor Randall L. Kennedy’s anger.” However, he continued, “we should direct that anger at its proper target: not diversity statements themselves, but rather the horribly distorted view that has taken hold about what they should contain.”

The headline of his op-ed, “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” seemed to endorse a reformist position on DEI statements that I’ve begun to encounter often in my reporting. Lots of liberal-minded academics feel favorably toward diversity and inclusion as values, but they also dislike dogmatism and coercion, qualities that they see in today’s DEI statements. If only there were a way for a hiring process to advance DEI without straying into illiberalism.

But people who see the flaws of the status quo should not be seduced by the illusion that tweaking how DEI statements are solicited or scored is a solution. In fact, interviewing Hall, the ostensible reformer in the Harvard Crimson debate, left me more convinced that abolishing DEI statements is the best way forward.

In Kennedy’s case against DEI statements, he provides an example: a job opening for an assistant professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, where applicants are required to submit a statement of teaching philosophy that includes “a description of their ‘orientation toward diversity, equity, and inclusion practices.’”

Notice what is implied: that there is a set of known DEI practices professors can deploy to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion, if they possess the desire to do so. In reality, however, there are robust scholarly debates about how best to advance or even define diversity, equity, and inclusion, let alone a bundle of all three values. One cannot reliably distinguish among applicants by their “orientation to DEI practices” without advantaging one side in such debates, infringing on academic freedom and contributing to an ideological monoculture.

I am not a neutral observer here. In 2023, I published “The Hypocrisy of Mandatory Diversity Statements,” in which I argued that forcing all who seek faculty jobs to pledge fealty to the same values will make colleges less diverse. I interviewed a math professor who grew up in the Soviet Union about why he abhors diversity. I documented how California’s community colleges are violating the First Amendment rights of their faculty by enforcing conformity with DEI ideology. And I endorsed Utah’s decision to eliminate diversity statements in public institutions.

Still, each time I encounter a new proposal for a reformed diversity-statement regime, I try to evaluate it on the merits. Frustratingly, Hall’s op-ed stopped short of offering details about what an improved system for DEI statements would look like. In a best-case scenario, what specific prompt would applicants be compelled to write on? How would the answers be evaluated? When pressed, Hall was up for wrestling with my skeptical questions. And his answers were illuminating. To my surprise, he and I barely disagree.

Although Hall’s op-ed was titled “Don’t Eliminate. Improve,” the position he actually wants to stake out is better summed up this way: Critics should be clear about what makes today’s DEI statements flawed, because otherwise the understandable and necessary backlash against them could go too far. It could convey the conclusion that there is no legitimate reason a faculty hiring process would be concerned with diversity, inclusion, or belonging. He believes an applicant’s orientation to diversity, if defined in the right way, is useful to probe.

“Students should come out of a liberal-arts education vastly more skilled at diagnosing, combating, and guarding against ignorance,” Hall said. “I don’t mean mere lack of knowledge but the kind of ignorance that is akin to having a blind spot.” He recounted the old riddle about the father and son who get in a car accident. Both are rushed to the hospital, where the surgeon says, “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son.” How can that be? Those confounded by the riddle have a blind spot: They assume the surgeon is a man, when, of course, the surgeon is the boy’s mother.

“You don’t produce knowledge without well-structured inquiry. You don’t have well-structured, healthy inquiry if it’s infected by this kind of ignorance,” Hall said. “A good liberal-arts education should provide the kind of flexibility of mind and social skills needed to identify, guard against, and combat ignorance. And if this kind of vaccination against ignorance is a core part of what we’re trying to give our students, it’s essential that students learn how and why to disagree with each other and with us.”

[Conor Friedersdorf: The state that’s trying to rein in DEI without becoming Florida]

And “disagreement requires diversity,” he said. “So now you’ve got a rationale for valuing diversity. You’ve got a rationale for valuing inclusion and belonging, understood the right way.” He sees belonging as classrooms where all students have “equal standing to have their voices taken up, responded to, and engaged with,” so their diverse viewpoints can work to combat ignorance.

I followed his logic. But in this example, why not ask prospective hires how they’d teach students to combat ignorance rather than about their perspective on diversity?

He agreed, noting that there is no shared understanding of what diversity means today, and that lots of applicants try to guess at what those evaluating DEI statements want to hear. “The language has been corrupted,” he said. To yield useful information, better to avoid the word diversity. Then he offered what he’d consider an improved prompt: “What do you do to foster a culture in the classroom in which students can engage in serious, good-faith, curiosity-driven disagreement? That’s a question I would like to see.”

I asked how he would evaluate different answers to that prompt.

Say one applicant writes, Having delved deeply into research literature on authoritarian personality types, I feel the best way to minimize racial animus in classroom culture is to treat members of every racial group in a color-blind manner, because who we consider “other” is malleable and raising the salience of race could foster a climate that resulted in more minority students being othered.

Meanwhile, a competing job candidate writes, Having delved deeply into critical race theory, explicitly race-conscious approaches to classroom management strike me as vital for students of color to participate as equals in curiosity-driven disagreement.

Both applicants are earnestly and cogently propounding theories that are plausibly derived from peer-reviewed scholarship and utterly in conflict. Who scores more highly?

“They both can’t be right, but they could both be excellent candidates, and they’ve signaled that by the seriousness with which they took the question,” Hall said. “I would probe for signs that they try to evaluate whether their approach is actually working. Are they absolutely convinced of the soundness of their theory, which would be worrying, or are they empirical about it and open to adjustments if it isn’t working? But on the content, I would judge them equally strong.” In a university, he argued, “you shouldn't take for granted that something as complex as teaching is an area where we should all agree there’s one right way to do it. I’m happy with a kind of pluralism.”

The information that Hall wants to elicit from job candidates, and his pluralistic attitude toward evaluating their answers, strikes me as defensible and even sensible.

But his approach is wildly different from every actual DEI-statement process I’ve seen. “Wouldn’t most supporters of today’s DEI statements hate the approach you’re proposing?” I asked.

[Conor Friedersdorf: A uniquely terrible new DEI policy]

“What I’m proposing is absolutely a different thing,” he said. “My vision would be viewed as hostile by many who are ardent supporters of DEI in its current incarnation.”

Hall told me that “given the current climate, it’s really not possible to get useful information from diversity statements.” In fact, “we probably should just get rid of them,” he clarified soon after. “There is not any kind of useful purpose that they’re serving, and there’s a pretty destructive purpose that they can serve.” As a result of all the signaling around DEI in academia, “we need to do some counter-signaling,” he added, to make clear that hiring committees are open to diverse perspectives from job seekers––otherwise, the effect is “perceived pressure to align with politicized concepts” that “narrows the range of perspectives we get in our applicant pools.”

After talking with Hall, I want to slightly amend my position in this debate: Colleges should fully abolish diversity statements in hiring––while noting that by doing so, they aren’t in any way implying that diversity, inclusion, or any other value is irrelevant to good teaching.
In fact, my ideal college press release announcing the end of mandatory DEI statements would clarify that lots of values, including DEI, can bear on research and teaching––and that healthy universities allow faculty members to contest how best to define and prioritize such values. The alternative, where the DEI bundle is treated as so important as to justify coercion, is anti-diversity and authoritarian.