Young voters are a crucial bloc in the Kamala Harris coalition, and a veteran journalist worries about their reaction if Donald Trump were to eke out a narrow Electoral College win despite potentially losing the popular vote.
The former president has lost the popular vote by nearly 7 million in 2020, when he lost the electoral vote 306-232, and nearly 3 million in 2016, when he won 304-227, and the New Yorker's Evan Osnos expressed concern about that dynamic playing out in Trump's favor again as millions of young voters cast their first presidential ballots.
"There is a generation of young people who are looking at this moment and saying, 'Hold on a second, we're doing what you asked of us, we're going to turn out to vote,'" Osnos said, "and if, in fact, they manage to win the popular vote and they don't get the Electoral College, there's going to be a real crisis of legitimacy for American democracy that I think is something we have to prepare for it."
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Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz has backed off his comments from last week saying the Electoral College "needs to go," saying that's not the campaign's official position.
"This is a tough year, but [Harris'] career has been about these accelerated timelines," Osnos said. "You know, she got to Washington, she was elected in 2016, thinking she'd be serving with Hillary Clinton as president. Instead, all of a sudden she's instantly a contender for president in 2019, all of a sudden, she had this accelerated timeline again this year, and what we saw this time was that she was a lot more prepared this time when she was last."
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