Is Biden in trouble with young voters? Some in Florida are concerned.

Cat Margaux, the vice president of the University of South Florida College Democrats, is getting worried.

As the 21-year-old senior drums up support for President Joe Biden ahead of his 2024 reelection contest, they see their peers less interested in voting than they were four years ago. The war in Gaza has eroded support for Biden among young progressives, Margaux said — as has abortion rights getting rolled back on the president’s watch.

“I’m concerned that people are giving up,” Margaux said. “I don’t want people to give up.”

It may not be an exaggeration to say that voters like Margaux delivered Biden the presidency in 2020. In a contest decided by just tens of thousands of votes across key swing states, Biden won the 18-to-29 age group by 24 points nationally in 2020, according to the Pew Research Center. Young voters turned out at a rate 11 percentage points higher than in 2016, according to Tufts University researchers. Biden may be the oldest-ever president, but his strongest demographic was 18-29.

With seven months until Election Day, there are signs Biden is in trouble with young voters. Some in the demographic say he’s too old to get results. Some are dissatisfied with Biden’s policies. And some, Biden supporters fear, are simply unmotivated to vote.

A March USA Today/Suffolk University survey of 233 registered voters found that Biden’s 2024 opponent, Donald Trump, was winning the 18-to-34 demographic by six points. That would be a catastrophe for Biden.

Tyler Tone, 25, the president of the USF College Democrats in Tampa, is worried about the enthusiasm issue. Young voters perceive Biden’s approach to be compromise-first, and that can be frustrating to those who want sweeping change — and fast, Tone said.

“His age is kind of like a symbol for all sorts of other things that drive down enthusiasm,” Tone said.

There’s also the issue of perspective. Some of this year’s first-time voters were 9 when Trump first declared his candidacy in 2015. Biden’s arguments that Trump presents a unique threat to democracy might not motivate voters who don’t know any other political reality, Tone said.

Ethan Vaubel, the president of the College Republicans at USF, said plenty of young voters chose Biden in 2020 because they saw him as the “lesser of two evils.” After seeing his record in office for four years, some of those voters will be less reluctant to vote for Trump, Vaubel said.

A poll released in November by Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement of more than 2,000 U.S. citizens aged 18-34 found reasons for Biden to be optimistic about the youth vote. Nearly three in five of those surveyed told researchers they were “extremely likely” to vote in 2024. Of those voters, 51% said they’d back the Democratic candidate, 30% said they’d back a Republican and 16% are undecided.

On many of the issues that resonate with young voters, Biden is clearly preferable to Trump, his supporters say.

For example, abortion ranked as the top priority among young voters during the 2022 midterm elections, according to Tufts researchers. The vast majority of young voters believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, the researchers found. Biden has emphasized the issue on the campaign trail so far, bashing Republicans during events for restricting access to the procedure. Trump appointed three of the five Supreme Court justices who decided federal abortion protections should go away.

But there are reasons for Democrats to be concerned. The top issue for young voters in 2024 was inflation/affordability, according to the Tufts University researchers. Although inflation has come down to less than half of its 2021 peak, Republicans routinely hammer Biden on his economic record.

Nikki Fried, the chairperson of the Florida Democratic Party, said her party could be better at making young voters excited about what she called Democratic wins: an improving economy, billions in student debt forgiveness, movement toward legalizing marijuana.

“As Democrats, we are humble and to our detriment, don’t go around bragging about all the accomplishments,” Fried said. “We’re not always great communicators.”

Fried noted that the party has set up a youth council to help the Democrats take the temperature of this all-important demographic. The party plans to make a renewed effort to organize on college campuses this year.

Alexa Matos, 19, the president of the University of South Florida-St. Petersburg College Democrats, will be part of that organizing effort. She met Biden in person once before at an event at the University of Tampa. He’s quick on his feet in person, and funny, she said.

“He’s like your cool grandpa,” Matos said.

During a get-together at a campus library in early March, Matos and about a dozen college Democrats crowded in front of a TV to watch Biden deliver his State of the Union address.

It was a big moment for Biden. Days before the speech, the New York Times released a survey showing that a majority of his own supporters from 2020 think he’s too old to be effective. Some Republicans previewing the speech called it Biden’s “State of Confusion.” He went into the night needing to show the American public that he was still with it.

Matos and the other young Democrats made a game of the evening.

On a custom-made bingo board, the group wrote terms like “Biden winks ;)” and “‘My fellow Americans.’” They spent the evening checking off squares.

One of the squares was “youth vote.”

Biden never mentioned it.

Correction: An earlier version version of this story misidentified Cat Margaux. They use the pronouns they/them.