John Della Volpe, director of polling for the Harvard Institute of Politics, told me Biden’s slide “is part of the broader disillusionment that Americans and young people are having about the country and the state of politics.” (Della Volpe consulted on Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign.) In fact, Harvard’s spring 2022 poll of 18- to 29-year-olds found that 36 percent of the respondents who disapproved of Biden (56 percent overall) said “ineffectiveness” best explained their disapproval.

As is true of other Americans, the economy seems to be an area where young Americans are particularly unhappy with Biden. In last week’s YouGov/The Economist survey, 34 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds approved of the way Biden was handling jobs and the economy, slightly lower than the 37 percent who approved of his economic performance overall. Similarly, polls released in mid-July by Fox News (of registered voters) and SSRS/CNN (of adults) found that less than 30 percent of American adults under 35 approved of Biden’s work on the economy (28 percent in Fox News, 25 percent in SSRS/CNN), compared with about 30 percent overall. Meanwhile, in Harvard’s spring 2022 poll, 74 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said inflation had affected their personal finances “a lot” or “some,” and inflation has worsened since then. The Fox News and SSRS/CNN polls found that about 1 in 5 of those under 35 approved of Biden’s handling of inflation, compared with 25 percent overall.

Such economic concerns may be particularly acute for young people because they’re just getting their lives off the ground. A survey report on Generation Z, conducted by Della Volpe’s company Social Sphere on behalf of Murmuration, found earlier this year that 35 percent of Americans age 15 to 25 said financial independence was their most or second-most important life aspiration, ahead of other priorities such as having a fulfilling career or being married. “Financial independence was number one — not wealth independence — but literally doing something that millennials couldn’t do, which is leave their parents’ home,” said Della Volpe.