Poll shows Trump won 18-to-24-year-olds in Wisconsin voting, but there’s a caveat

President-elect Donald Trump won Wisconsin by nearly 30,000 votes after losing the state four years ago by some 20,000 votes, but did he really win 18-to-24-year-olds in the state?

There have been a lot of different takes on how Trump took the state over Vice President Kamala Harris, but one in particular caught our eye:

"Trump won 18-24 year olds in Wisconsin," according to a Dec. 1, 2024, X post from Luc J. Gagnon@LakePoliticsYT.  Gagnon, according to his profile, is a "progressive Republican" and "ballot chaser" for Turning Point Action and Republican Party of Milwaukee County.

The claim piqued PolitiFact Wisconsin’s interest because four years earlier, in 2020, in Wisconsin, 14% of all votes cast came from young voters, ages 18 to 29. Of these, 58% supported Joe Biden, while 39% backed Donald Trump, according to the CIRCLE, which also estimated that young people turned out at a higher rate in 2020 than in 2016. 

The impact of that demographic, especially youth of color’s support for Biden, was decisive in races across the country, according to the CIRCLE (the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement), which describes itself as a non-partisan, independent research organization focused on youth civic engagement. 

In his post, Gagnon included a table showing Trump winning 50% of the 18-to-24-year-old vote in Wisconsin, while Harris received 48%. Gagnon did not provide a source for his figures, and attempts to reach him for comment were not successful. However, a quick Google search finds that the figures originate from a Nov. 19, 2024, CNN exit poll.   

Gagnon’s social media post garnered 80.9K views and 2.1K likes on X. Thus, we are attributing the claim to social media for purposes of this fact check.

Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll, noting the figures were from CNN exit polling, pointed out that the post skipped the first age table for Wisconsin voters, which looks at a slightly different demographic: 18-to-29-year-old Wisconsin voters. 

A closer look at that group shows Harris at 49% and Trump at 48%. The post instead goes for the narrower second one, 18-to-24, which indeed had Trump at 50% and Harris at 48%. 

Franklin also pointed out that there is a quite different result from the data provided by AP-Votecast, which is used by Fox News. That data show a strong Harris win among 18-to-29-year-olds — 61% to 38% — but did not provide a breakdown for 18-to-24-year-olds.

"Which of these is ‘right’ is difficult to know," Franklin said in an email. "Exit polls and the AP Votecast, are attempts to capture voter behavior at the moment of the election, but like all polls they are subject to sampling variability and to non-response issues. For small groups of the electorate (9% to 14% in this case in both polls) the potential for both sampling variation and non-response issues is greater than for larger groups." 

In other words, the smaller the group examined, the greater the margin of error.

NORC is a nonprofit research organization at the University of Chicago that conducts a survey used by the Associated Press and Fox News under the brand AP VoteCast, which debuted in 2018. 

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NBC News in explaining how exit polls work, said that since 2003, Edison Research, a firm that specializes in collecting election data, has conducted exit polls on behalf of the National Election Pool. The NEP is a consortium of media networks — ABC, CBS, CNN and NBC News — that pools together resources for one collective vote count and exit poll operation. 

In the coming weeks and months there will be surveys from shortly after the election that are matched to the state voter files to give a measure of people who actually voted in the election, and their survey responses, Franklin said.

Barry C. Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor and director of the university’s Elections Research Center, said there is not sufficiently reliable data to conclude which candidate got more votes among young people — or any other age group — in Wisconsin.

"Exit polls such as the one Gagnon references are the most immediate source for understanding how groups voted in the election, so they are widely used to explore voting patterns," Burden said in an email. "But exit polls are known to have systematic errors, especially for estimating vote choices in subgroups such as 18-24 year olds, who make up a small share of the sample and can be a difficult group to survey. There is also a margin of error to consider, as in any other survey. As a result, it is not reasonable to conclude at this point that Trump won over young voters in Wisconsin."

Burden said more high-quality data analysis will not emerge until early 2025 because it simply takes time to gather data in more scientific surveys or to use official state voter data to estimate how individuals voted.

"At most we can conclude from exit polls that the vote choices of young voters in Wisconsin were probably more evenly divided between the parties than in recent elections," Burden said.

A Wisconsin Public Radio report also noted that Trump made big gains in voting wards around universities, according to data compiled by Marquette University researcher John Johnson. 

For example, WPR said, in four wards around the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, Biden beat Trump by over 1,000 votes in 2020. This year, with over 4,000 votes cast, Harris eked out a mere 77-vote win.

Also, WPR reported, Trump more than doubled his vote count in seven student-populated wards around Marquette University. He diminished Democrats’ winning margin there from 62% to 38%.

A social media post said "Trump won 18-24 year olds in Wisconsin." 

A CNN exit poll does indeed show Trump winning that age group over Harris 50% to 48%.  The CNN poll does show that, but the picture is muddier when you look at other polls, slightly wider groups and consider that the polls themselves have a wide margin of error for what amounts to a small slice of the electorate.

Indeed, that same poll shows a different outcome when the demographic range is widened to ages 18 to 29, which shows Harris over Trump 49% to 48%. And looking at AP Votecast figures quoted by Fox News, Harris won 18-to-29-year-old Wisconsin voters at 61% while Trump received 38% of that demographic. 

Elections experts say exit polls are known to have systematic errors, and more time is needed for high-quality data analysis to determine a better understanding of how Wisconsin’s young people voted in the election. 

Still, those polls are the best information we have at this time and the post quoted the poll accurately. 

For a statement that is partially accurate but leaves out important details or takes things out of context, we rate the post as Half True.