Biden’s numbers are critically low among minorities and young people, but are they all going third-party?

In the past few months, we’ve seen unprecedented fracturing of the Democratic Party’s base, with young people and minorities withdrawing their support from President Joe Biden in record numbers across multiple national polls.
With Biden’s approval ratings falling below 40% and economic issues as well as the divisive wars in Ukraine and Israel remaining top issues for voters, this movement appears to only be escalating.
However, much of the recent reporting on these shifts away from Biden has attempted to soften the reality. It isn’t so much that these voters are eschewing Democrats as they are simply annoyed with Biden and threatening to support third-party candidates – or so goes the mainstream narrative. There is little appetite to report on the way these shifts might bolster a certain challenger – former President Donald Trump. Yet there is strong evidence that they do.
A new USA Today/Suffolk University poll shows young people and minorities retracting their support from Biden, and Former President Trump earning significant gains with these same voters at the same time.
According to the poll, just 63% of Black Americans plan to vote for Biden – a twenty-four percentage point decline in support compared to 2020, when Biden won Black voters 87% to 13%.
Biden is outright losing Hispanics by five points in the poll, after winning them by a two-to-one margin in 2020. The poll shows Trump leading Biden with Hispanics 39% to 34%, after losing Hispanics by a full 33 percentage points, 65% to 32%.
Among young people, Biden continues to suffer steep losses. Trump now leads Biden narrowly with voters under 35 – 37% to 33% – after losing younger voters by twenty-four points in 2020.
While several media outlets have tempered these numbers, arguing that the majority of these disgruntled voters plan to support third-party candidates, not necessarily move to Trump’s camp, there is evidence that both could happen.
According to the USA Today poll, around a fifth of Black, Hispanic, and young voters respectively plan to vote for someone other than Trump or Biden, and since these voters heavily skewed Democrat in 2020 these votes will largely detract from Biden.
However, there is also strong evidence that minorities and young people are firmly considering supporting Trump at rates unseen in 2020 or 2016.
The November New York Times poll of six battleground states found Biden’s support has dropped a startling 33 percentage points among non-whites compared to 2020 results, and a significant share of these voters have moved to Trump’s camp.
The Times poll shows Trump’s support among Blacks has risen 10 points compared to 2020 – from 12% to 22%. While a significant share of Blacks may indeed vote third-party, Trump is within shouting distance of doubling his share of the Black vote according to the Times poll.
Among Hispanics, The Times poll shows a startling 22 percentage-point decline in support for Biden compared to 2020. That decline is not entirely drifting into the third-party category either. The Times poll shows Trump gaining seven percentage points with Hispanics compared to 2020, going from 32% to 39%. Clearly, a significant portion of Hispanics who supported Biden in 2020 are angling toward a third-party candidate, but one cannot ignore the drift toward Trump as well.
What about young people? The Times polling found Biden leading Trump by a single percentage-point among voters under 30, 47% to 46%. This is a far cry from the 2020 election, when Biden won voters under thirty 60% to 36%, and represents a ten-point shift toward Trump among young voters.
It is true that a significant share of former Biden voters are contemplating a third-party vote in the next election, but there is also strong evidence to support a shift toward Trump. The USA Today numbers show around 20% of young people and minorities respectively say they plan to vote third-party, but other polls show Trump gaining around ten percentage-points or more with each group, indicating that Biden’s losses are not exclusively third-party votes.

Manzanita Miller is an associate analyst at Americans for Limited Government Foundation.