The 2024 presidential election is five days away.  

Presidential candidates Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are running in a deeply divided nation, and both candidates are using the final days to break out of the neck-and-neck polling and pick up the last remaining undecided voters.  

College-aged voters are vital in this election: 42 million Gen Z citizens are eligible to vote on Nov. 5.   

At Tulane University, the results are much clearer than in the rest of the nation — most students are voting for Harris, according to a recent poll conducted by The Hullabaloo.  

Results of The Hullabaloo poll 

The poll received 415 responses to questions ranging from where students are registered to vote, how likely they are to vote, who they plan to vote for and what issues are most important to them.   

According to the survey, the Tulane student body is majority left-leaning.  

85% of Tulane students plan on voting for Harris and 13% plan on voting for Trump. 1% do not plan on voting.  

66% are registered Democrats, 26% are independents and 9% are Republicans.  

Other elite universities such as the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University and Princeton University see similar results in their election surveys.  

 

Young liberal students see high stakes 

“I got very energized when Biden exited the race and allowed room for our younger generation to take their place in the national conversation,” president of Tulane College Democrats Lindsey Tanenholz said.   

Tanenholz named a lot of specific policies and ideas of Harris that excite her, including health care reform, reproductive rights and improving the housing market. 

In The Hullabaloo poll, student respondents had the option to write issues that they consider the most important in the 2024 election. Some of the most common words were “rights,” “policy,” “climate,” “democracy” and “abortion.” 

Enthusiasm among college voters is in question for the upcoming election. In the midterm elections of 2022, only 31.3% of college students voted, down from 40% in the 2018 midterms. While midterm election turnout is often substantially lower than in presidential elections, this decline still represents an overall downward shift in college voter turnout. 

However, 66% of college students voted in 2020. The 2024 election could show this high turnout to be a fluke or the start of an upward trend for presidential election student turnout.  

Other members of Tulane College Democrats concurred with Tanenholz on the importance of voting for Harris in Tuesday’s election.  

“Everyone knows there’s so much on the line, especially being young, and at least for me, being a woman,” sophomore and executive board member Wendi Segal said.  

Tanenholz and Segal represent an increasing number of young liberal women. According to a September Gallup poll, 40% of women between the ages of 18 and 29 identify as liberal, 8 percentage points higher than in 2016.   

A major contributor to this upward shift is abortion: 60% of these women believe “abortion should be legal in any/most circumstances,” which is 18% higher than in 2016. 

Other positions that young women have a more liberal stance on now than in 2016 include gun control and climate change. 

“[The] fate of whether millions of people have health care in our country or whether they get thrown off under Donald Trump, whether or not women have freedom of their own bodies… whether the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes…whether or not we invest in preventing climate change or whether we just continue to get hit with it,” sophomore and executive board member Nathan Jones said. “It’s all on the line for 2024 and it comes down to us.” 

College-aged men have been a more contentious voter bloc in this election cycle than college-aged women. 

According to an NBC poll published last Thursday, 42% of Gen-Z men say they will vote for Harris and 40% say they will vote for Trump. 35% of these men said inflation and cost of living are their top-priority issues.  

 

The potential silent Trump voter 

Despite The Hullabaloo survey suggesting Tulane students’ overwhelming support for Harris, Andrew Ward, associate professor of political science, believes the low percentage of Trump voters, 13%, is not an accurate representation of the student body.  

“I was very surprised by how many people self-reported as being Trump supporters. I happen to know a lot of people, specifically of the white male variety, specifically housed in certain majors, including but not limited to business, where they are avowedly pro-Trump,” Ward said.  

Ward believes that because being Republican or pro-Trump are not the dominant viewpoints at Tulane, many may have been reluctant to report these opinions on the survey.  

“Some students [have expressed that] they do not feel comfortable expressing their right of center views outside of very niche groups. And multiple students have told me that they don’t feel comfortable participating in class discussion if their opinions are more traditional, more conservative, etc,” Ward said. “But I can tell you for sure, there are more than 13% of undergraduates at Tulane who are supporting Trump.” 

Junior Noah Bassirat said he aligns with certain Trump policies.  

“I don’t think my views are too crazy, and I think as long as you can back up what you’re saying, you shouldn’t be scared to say anything,” Bassirat said. 

Ward attributes the reluctance of Republican voters to identify themselves on campus to an increase of divisiveness and acrimony in politics across the nation.  

“I would say 20 years ago, when I first arrived here, you had very open discussions of people across the political spectrum. You had people who were very vocal supporters of George W. Bush and very vocal supporters of John Kerry. And people were engaging with each other on an intellectual level, as opposed to what we hear from Trump [supporters],” Ward said.  

Bassirat said that parts of his identity lead him to agree with certain policies from the Trump administration. 

“I’m an observant Jew. I’m pretty Persian. My father escaped Iran,” Bassirat said. “My beliefs make me to be a very strong Zionist because of the Torah [and] because of the way I grew up.” 

Bassirat’s views on abortion are more similar to those on the right. While he believes that in vitro fertilization should be protected, his opinions on non-life-threatening abortions differ.  

“You could say if you’re afraid of not being able to get an abortion, then, I don’t know, don’t have sex. It’s an action and reaction […] if you don’t want to get a zero on your test, then like, study for it,” Bassirat said.   

Bassirat agrees with Trump’s stance on abortion and thinks that abortion legislation should be left up to the states.  

“If you don’t like the legislation in that state then just go to a different state that doesn’t have that legislation. There’s always the opportunity for that,” Bassirat said.  

 

Key moments in the election cycle 

54% of voters in a YouGov poll said that Harris “won” the Sept. 10 presidential debate against Trump. But how impactful was the debate in swaying minds of young voters? 

Brian Brox, professor of political science and director of Tulane’s Program in U.S. Public Policy, observed that the debate did not noticeably sway his students’ political stances. He said their perceptions of who “won” the debate largely aligned with their existing political leanings. Based on class discussions he led, Brox gathered that many of his political science students thought the candidates tended to avoid certain questions and lacked some detail in their responses.  

“I don’t think anyone’s heart or mind was changed,” Tanenholz said.  

According to Brox, both political campaigns are making use of social media to appeal to the younger demographic. In particular, “the Harris campaign is doing active outreach to younger voters.” 

“There’s clearly a youth vote that was less enthusiastic about Biden who is now much more engaged with the Harris candidacy, so she’s just finding them where they are,” Brox said.   

The overturning of Roe v. Wade in the 2022 Dobbs decision is also a major issue among young voters, particularly women. 

Since the Dobbs decision, the U.S. Supreme Court’s approval ratings have plummeted to historic lows. Trump appointed three justices during his time in office and took credit for the Dobbs decision publicly. 

“We have a court that is very much dominated by Republican appointees who are realizing some of those legal policy goals in their decision making,” Nancy Maveety, chair of the Department of Political Science, said. “I think there is the sense from some Republican candidates, including the candidate at the top of their ticket, Donald Trump, that this is potentially a losing issue for Republicans.” 

 

Rosemary Mulvey contributed to the reporting of this story.