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It is jarring to hear American kids talk about politics and see the country’s often angry political debate filtered through young people.
When a child is asked for one word to describe former President Donald Trump and comes up with “pure evil,” it suggests a level of division that might surprise the average American.
Researchers found that Democrat-supporting kids drove polarization in a new study for CNN, and the children were more likely to say they wouldn’t be friends with someone who supports Trump. Kids in red states, on the other hand, were more likely to repeat misinformation.
The findings are the result of more than 40 hours of interviews commissioned by CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360” to talk politics with 80 elementary schoolers in Arizona, a 2024 battleground state; New Jersey, a blue state; and Texas, a red state.
With their parents’ OK, researchers got the kids’ unfiltered thoughts about the presidential candidates and the election.
CNN is not identifying the students or the schools visited, and this is not a representative public opinion poll, but rather a set of interviews designed to gauge polarization in children.
For this project, Asheley Landrum, an associate professor, child development expert and media psychologist at Arizona State University, worked with Stanford University political science professor Shanto Iyengar, who has already studied polarization in American teens. Landrum asked the elementary schoolers a series of questions, using photographs and visual prompts, to understand how the children feel about the political system.
The questions about the presidential candidates included prompts asking which one would keep them safer, which is more honest and which is more likely to do bad things.
The interviews were first conducted in the spring, when President Joe Biden was running for reelection and the kids were in fourth grade. Most of the same children took part in follow-up interviews in the fall in New Jersey and Texas, after Vice President Kamala Harris had stepped in to be the Democratic nominee and the kids had started fifth grade.
Most of the children in the fall interviews, nearly two-thirds, supported Harris. There was an even split in Texas, a major improvement for Democrats in the red state compared with when Biden was in the race. Nationwide polls of likely voters suggest a much tighter race for the White House and a lead for Trump in Texas.
Democrat-leaning kids drove polarization
In September, according to an analysis prepared by Landrum, when kids were asked how much they liked Harris or Trump on a five-point scale, the Democrat-leaning and blue-state kids were more likely to say they really liked Harris and really disliked Trump. Republican-leaning and red-state kids liked Trump but were neutral or even positive about Harris.
When Landrum asked for one word to describe a candidate, the results for Trump ranged from positive – such as from one kid in May: “Go America!” – to extremely negative. There were criticisms of Harris too. “Liar” was one child’s one word to describe her.
Back in May, “three Biden-leaning kids spontaneously brought up Hitler when talking about Donald Trump,” according to Landrum’s analysis.
More negative feelings about Trump among Democrat-leaning kids
In May, when the race was between Biden and Trump, kids were asked to select an emoji that corresponded with their feelings about a candidate. Only a quarter of the Trump-leaning kids selected an emoji signifying that Biden makes them feel nervous or worried, but more than half of the Biden-leaning kids selected that emoji when asked about Trump. That imbalance grew when interviews were repeated in September and the kids were asked about Trump and Harris.
Iyengar was surprised by this overall finding of the study.
“Among adults, the usual result is that Republicans are the more hostile toward Democrats than vice versa,” he said. “It suggests something about the cast of characters in this race, i.e., Kamala Harris is relatively unknown and therefore people do not have … a lot of extreme views, either positive or negative, towards her.”
Trump, on the other hand, “is an established trigger,” Iyengar said, and blue-state kids “have assimilated what their parents are telling them, and they’re pretty hostile to him.”
There were also many positive responses, such as the girl who selected the happy emoji for Biden because the president supports women’s rights and said, “And I’m a woman.”
Trump-leaning kids acknowledged the former president’s shortcomings with some interesting justifications. One boy argued that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson were both slave owners, “a really bad thing, but they still had two terms.”
“So I think, even though Trump has done bad stuff, he still deserves to run for president,” the boy said.
That same boy, in September, also expressed the difficulty of choosing between Harris and Trump when, presented with photos of the two candidates, he was asked which is more likely to do bad things.
“Convicted felon against a liar,” he said. “Who do I pick?” He ultimately decided that Trump, the convicted felon, is more likely to do bad things but it’s OK for a felon to be president.
Kids think the country is ready for a woman of color to be president
Even a majority of kids who support Trump agreed Harris would be a “sort of” good president. The red-state kids were more supportive of Harris in September than they were of Biden in May.
Most kids – about two-thirds, including a majority in the red state – said it would be a good thing to have a woman as president, although a few worried that other people might not support a woman.
There was only one kid, a girl in Texas, who said she didn’t think a woman should be president. “Girls are a little bit dramatic sometimes,” she said in response to a question about which candidate is more selfish, and also noted that “only boys have been president before, and that they would be more stronger.” But that was an outlier response.
Most kids in the study, more than 80% overall, in both the red and blue states said the country is ready for its president to be a woman of color.
“It would be good for us to have a Black woman as president for the first time in history, but my vote’s kind of still on Trump,” said one girl.
Would you go to a Trump or Harris supporter’s house?
In both May and September, Landrum showed kids pictures of two houses, one with a Trump sign and one with a Biden or Harris sign, and asked if they or their parents would be comfortable visiting. Most, Landrum notes, were open to visiting the house associated with either political party. But she adds that a higher percentage of Democrat-leaning kids – a third of them in September – were unwilling to visit the homes of children whose families support Trump. Few of the Trump-leaning kids said they would be unwilling to visit a Democrat-backing house.
One kid in May whose family supports Biden said he imagined there would be an argument if they all visited a Trump house. “Maybe like a food fight or something,” he guessed.
Another boy went in a different direction with food analogies, arguing that people who like pizza can hang out with people who like burgers. “You can still be friends.”
A girl came to the same conclusion, but with a different comparison: “I like Taylor Swift, and they like Olivia Rodrigo, but we’re still friends,” she said.
A Taylor Swift effect
In September, Landrum asked if Swift’s endorsement of Harris would have an impact on the election, and nearly all of the New Jersey kids said it would, compared with a little more than half of the Texas kids.
“The Swifties will follow her lead,” said one boy.
But when she broke the responses down by gender, Landrum found that more than 90% of the male participants thought Swift would impact the election compared with less than two-thirds of females.
Trump’s legal problems, Biden’s age
Questions about Biden’s age and fitness ultimately drove him from the presidential race. In the May interviews, most kids did not specifically cite age as a reason to oppose either candidate. About a third mentioned age in other contexts, and most of these suggested that being “old” was a weakness.
A boy in Texas was convinced Biden had dementia.
“He might not say he does, but he’s forgetting a lot of stuff,” the boy said in May.
Trump-leaning participants did not see his legal issues as reasons to not support him. The majority of those who brought up Trump’s legal problems were from the blue state, although the May interviews were conducted shortly after his conviction in a New York courtroom of falsifying business records. Interviews in Arizona and Texas were conducted earlier.
“I wouldn’t like someone who like committed crimes to be my president. I wouldn’t feel that safe,” said a girl in New Jersey.
A larger portion, more than half, did not seem to know why Trump faced legal issues, either in the New York case or in the other three cases where he is accused of trying to overthrow the 2020 election and mishandling classified documents.
Plenty of misinformation
Multiple children repeated falsehoods about the candidates, and most of them were aimed at Trump, according to Landrum, although she found that more of the kids in the red state said something that could be viewed as misinformation. In September, she asked the kids in a follow-up question where they had heard a particular claim, and it frequently came from their parents.
One positive piece of misinformation geared at Trump is that he gives much of his wealth to the US military, something that is not true.
A blue-state kid was frustrated that Trump has supported people who spread misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines, including that they could make metal stick to a person’s body, which is false. And there’s no evidence that Trump supported anyone who made that claim.
Another girl said she had heard of Harris that “some people say that she believes in another God.” Harris is Baptist, and her husband is Jewish.
The researchers found that for both blue-state and red-state kids, their parents/family and TV news were top information sources, but red-states kids also relied heavily on YouTube and TikTok.
More of the red-state kids had smartphones, whereas more of the blue-state kids had tablets.
Misinformation can come from anywhere, as one kid showed when he described the presidential debate between Trump and Harris.
“Probably the million-dollar thing Trump said was, ‘The illegal immigrants are coming to eat our pets,’” he said, repeating a false statement that Trump made about Haitian immigrants.
Read the full summary of this project, “Kids on Politics,” from its authors:
View this interactive content on CNN.comEditor’s Note: Shortly after the publication of this story, CNN was made aware that one of the authors of the study, Asheley Landrum, made small donations in support of the Harris campaign starting in July. CNN stands by the reporting in this story and the results of the study.