Recent moves by President Joe Biden to pressure TikTok over its Chinese ownership and approve oil drilling in an untapped area of Alaska are testing the loyalty of young voters, a group that’s largely been in his corner.
Youth turnout surged in the three elections since Donald Trump was elected president in 2016, helping Biden eke out victories in swing states in 2020, pick up a Democratic Senate seat in the 2022 election and stem potential losses in the House.But the 80-year-old president has never been the favorite candidate of young liberals itching for a new generation of American leadership.
Western governments are growing increasingly worried that TikTok’s owner, Beijing-based ByteDance, might give browsing history or other data about users to China’s government or promote propaganda and disinformation. The U.S. and other nations have banned TikTok from government-owned devices, as have several states.
Biden administration officials insist that political concerns aren’t weighing into the national security review underway, but they’re also not blind to it.Both political parties have reoriented around staking out tougher economic and security positions on China’s rise, and Biden has come under increasing pressure from GOP lawmakers to take action against TikTok.
Lawmakers grilled TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew for nearly six hours Thursday over data security and harmful content. They responded skeptically during a tense House committee hearing to his assurances that the app prioritizes user safety and should not be banned due to its Chinese connections. “It’s not really Biden’s issue,” said Ginny Xu, a 20-year-old chemical engineering student from Goodyear, Arizona. “It’s more of a bipartisan thing — ‘safety’ from China.”
The 2018 and 2020 midterms brought the highest levels of youth turnout of the past three decades, according to the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University, which studies young voters.Biden won 63% of voters age 18 to 24, compared with 34% for Trump, according to AP VoteCast, an expansive survey of the electorate.
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