Why Biden is losing young Democrats like me

The generation that was raised during the global financial crisis and the onsets of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars has been a stalwart for the Democratic Party for over a decade. I was knocking doors for President Obama and local Democrats in 2012 even before I could vote.

I served as a College Democrats chapter president through the 2016 election cycle, and then voted for President Biden in 2020. In 2024, less than four years into the Biden administration, the world and our country have entered alarming trajectories. If Biden is nominated for reelection, he will be the first Democratic nominee whom I do not support.

Biden is currently sitting on top of a seismic shift in the political parties’ voting coalitions. His average approval rating under 38 percent unfortunately is historically low for a president at this time in a first term. In 2020, Biden won young voters by 25 points.

Now disapproval of Biden is widespread among young voters, with him losing 18–29 year-olds and all under-45 voters when polled against all general election candidates. The dissent is not baseless, and not all young dissenters are doing so because of American support for Israel’s war against Hamas. Beyond Biden’s personal cognitive challenges, his administration’s policies are having indefensible consequences.

The United States is now entrenched in numerous international conflicts, each of which is increasingly dangerous and more complicated than a good-versus-evil narrative. Biden is largely responsible for escalating the Russia-Ukraine war, funding Ukraine through their incremental defeat while ignoring diplomatic negotiation and ceasefire offers. Biden has also allowed the funding of Iran throughout their proxy war against American and our Middle East allies. Meanwhile, North Korea has abandoned the decades-long reconciliation process with South Korea, following our escalation of multilateral military exercises in the region. Nuclear world war is now more probable than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

At home, the future looks dire for middle-class and low-income Americans. Most people worry about how we’ll deal with this historic inflation and the mounting federal debt. Rent prices are still above pre-pandemic levels, and half of all Americans now spend more than one third of their income on rent. Homelessness also spiked from 2022 to 2023 to the highest level since 2006. Each of these issues is even more alarming when considering this year’s expansion of BRICS, an informal coalition of emerging nations, and their increasing movement away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.  

In the meantime, an imminent national security risk has been generated by the border crisis. U.S. Customs and Border Protection have encountered at least 8.1 million people unlawfully crossing the southwest border since 2021, which is all in addition to the estimated 10 million undocumented immigrants who were already in the country when Biden took office.

The ethical question of whether to let in people who need help is difficult, but it is analogous to the obligations of parents to ensure the health and security of their own children before they can adopt anyone else’s children.

The border has been open because of the executive enforcement of existing law, not a need for new legislation. Biden’s 2021 Executive Order 14010 changed the policies on amnesty and catch-and-release, among other things. The 2023 and 2024 bills in Congress may have been useful, but the crisis could be solved at any point simply by executive order. Biden’s new executive order this June conceded exactly that, albeit too little, too late.

Biden was legislatively effective while Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, but not enough to tip the scale. Legislative success should not outweigh executive failures when evaluating the chief executive. Regardless, the Inflation Reduction Act and the CHIPS and Science Act, totaling over $800 billion in public spending, have neither fixed inflation nor made a competitive American microchips industry.

The full effects of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act and the American Rescue Plan Act, which together cost more than $3 trillion, remain to be seen. These new laws take steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but they are insufficient to meaningfully curb climate change. On the other hand, Biden has failed to secure legislation to codify abortion rights and same-sex marriage, leaving those issues to the court. 

Biden supporters may say that none of these issues are dispositive because they pale in comparison to President Trump’s “threat to democracy.” Yet, if protecting American democracy is a top priority, as it should be, then we all must be alarmed by the unprecedented prosecution of a presidential candidate on novel legal theories, in the middle of a campaign. Regardless of what the appellate court decides, the political weaponization of prosecutorial discretion is anti-democratic and disconcerting. 

Many voters in the younger generations are thinking about these various crises and their consequences for the rest of the 21st century when evaluating Biden’s administration, not just one issue like some suggest. They are looking for a president who can stand up to the corporate lobbies and transcend partisanship to execute meaningful reform. Biden demonstrably is not that president.

Jeremy Etelson worked as a Democratic campaign staffer in Maryland. He received a J.D. from George Washington University in 2024 and an M.Phil. in the history of political theory from the University of Cambridge in 2019.