IOP’s polling suggests that, among young voters, support for the much-hyped blue wave is high. Sixty-six percent of the likely voters surveyed preferred Democrats to win Congress, more than twice the share who preferred that Republicans maintain control (37 percent of those polled live in the South and 21 percent in the Midwest). “If there is a blue wave in America, it will be, I think, started by young people and work all the way up,” said Della Volpe, though he noted that the margin between support for a Democrat-controlled Congress and support for a Republican-controlled Congress has narrowed by seven points among likely voters since IOP’s spring poll.

Austin Carr, a 22-year-old graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, knows firsthand how much more politically engaged some young voters have become. Over the past year, he said, he’s gone “from complaining on social media to actively calling my senators and having tough discussions with my friends and family.”

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The driving force, for him, has been the threat posed by climate change, a concern shared by many in his cohort . “If we don’t take care of global warming now, my kids might die,” he said. “If they don’t die, then their kids for sure will.”

Young people’s political identities seem to be shifting, too, affecting how they define themselves and what they consider to be politically possible. The Harvard pollsters asked those they surveyed to indicate their views on several policies that make up the basis of the democratic-socialist movement. More than 50 percent supported a federal jobs guarantee, single-payer health care, and free tuition at public universities, policies championed by the likes of the Democratic congressional candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Among the likely voters, support for these three policies was even higher, jumping above 60 percent. “People vote with what they feel like will affect themselves,” Jones said. Teddy Landis, another Harvard student involved in the poll, noted that IOP’s spring poll found that “tangibility does matter to young people when they think about politics.”

The fall poll found that among all the young people surveyed, 39 percent supported democratic socialism. However, among likely voters, that support jumped to 53 percent, a five-point lead over support for capitalism. “We have been seeing a longer-term shift toward a more progressive politics among young Americans,” Della Volpe said. “Even on issues where young people aren’t necessarily progressive, they’re becoming more progressive.”