photo by: Chad Lawhorn/Journal-World

John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Harvard Institute of Politics, is pictured at the Dole Institute of Politics on Thursday, Sept. 12, 2024.

John Della Volpe is widely regarded as the nation’s leading expert on complicated polling numbers related to Gen Z — America’s youngest voting-age generation that includes teenagers and the slightly-under-30 crowd.

But Della Volpe, director of polling at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University, sometimes uses a simpler story to highlight an often overlooked aspect of Gen Z. Della Volpe has a friend who has a Gen Z son who already has attended the funerals of five close friends. The father, Della Volpe’s friend, is 60 years old. He’s yet to have a close friend die.

“I say that no generation since the Greatest Generation (which lived through World War II) has gone through more trauma, more quickly than Gen Z,” Della Volpe told the Journal-World as part of a University of Kansas visit on Thursday.

Gen Z had its education massively disrupted by the pandemic, and many lived through family finances that quickly eroded during the Great Recession. Della Volpe, though, said not to forget that the generation has been heavily impacted by the opioid crisis and the mental health challenges it has helped spur.

One of the more remarkable findings his nationally watched polls about Gen Z produce is, that despite it all, the generation hasn’t thrown in the towel. Far from it.

Della Volpe said older generations are often surprised to learn that Gen Z is the best generation when it comes to voting and civic engagement as young people. In other words, as 18- to 20-somethings, they are voting at higher levels than Gen X or the Boomers did when they were 18- to 20-somethings.

The data says one retort Gen Z has to grumpier older generations: We care more than you did at our age.

Anybody interested in the upcoming presidential election should be interested in how much Gen Z currently cares, and what they care about, Della Volpe said.

“If not for Gen Z, Donald Trump would be president today,” Della Volpe said, quoting numbers from the 2020 election that showed the under-30 vote was decisive.

In fact, that under 30-vote may be one of the most accurate predictors of presidential elections. Over the last 25 years, Della Volpe said there is a “pretty clear pattern” that has emerged: When Democrats win 60% or more of the 18- to 29-year old vote, they win. When Democrats win less than 60% of that young vote, they lose. Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, twice, hit the 60% or better mark. Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton all fell short of that mark and lost.

As for Kamala Harris?

“Harris is doing significantly better than Biden did,” Della Volpe said. “The numbers I’ve been looking at she improved on that metric by more than 10 points, yet she is not where she needs to be with the younger vote to feel confident.”

Della Volpe said Harris still has time and good will with the group to make big gains. But he also noted another trend that is clear in the data.

“Donald Trump and younger men, 18 to 24 years old, have a little bit of a bromance going right now,” he said.

Della Volpe said reliable polls show that 25- to 29-year-old men are leaning about 13 points toward Democrats, while 18- to 24-year-old men are leaning about 3 points toward Republicans.

Della Volpe’s hypothesis on the reason for the split between young men of slightly different ages is that today’s 18- to 24-year-olds first became exposed to Trump when they were in middle school — Trump’s days as a reality television star — and were largely in high school during his term as president. They weren’t paying attention as much to the political arguments of the day as their slightly older brethren who were in college during the Trump administration.

Della Volpe said he thinks some of today’s 25- to 29-year-olds formed an impression of Trump as a “villain” during his administration as they were watching or engaging in the debates surrounding Trump regarding race and other polarizing issues. At the same time, though, today’s 18- to 24-year-old,s Della Volpe argues, were viewing Trump through more of a cultural lens than a political one.

“A 10- to 12-year-old (at that time) might look at him as an anti-hero. He’s not afraid to speak up. It is him against the machine,” Della Volpe said.

Where that leaves us today is … a close election. Della Volpe wasn’t making any predictions about an ultimate winner, but he is confident the Gen Z vote will be decisive.

“I just don’t know which way,” he said.

Della Volpe is visiting KU and other college campuses in an attempt to find out. Over the years, he’s been to KU on four different occasions — after developing a professional relationship with Lawrence legislator and longtime KU leader Barbara Ballard — to speak to students and gain their insights.

Della Volpe was speaking to a broad cross sections of students Thursday evening at a private event at the Dole Institute of Politics, where Ballard has been a longtime associate director.

“As a pollster, I think the value of our work is really based upon the kind of questions we ask,” Della Volpe said. “The only way I can continue to ask relevant questions is to do things like this.”

As for broader observations about the upcoming presidential election, Della Volpe said Harris’ rise in the polls has been remarkable, and he’s not convinced it has permanently stalled. He said early post-debate polling leads him to believe the Democratic nominee will get another bounce.

While Della Volpe cautions about reading too much into the generic national polls since the presidential election is determined on a state-by-state outcome, he said the national polls can still be instructive. He estimated Harris was maybe up by 3 percentage points if you looked at broad averages of polls.

“If she can get the national lead up to 5 to 7 points, that has to make you feel pretty good if you are Harris,” he said.