Are we really asking why young people didn’t vote in the midterms?
Okay, fine. Let’s talk.
But if we’re going to talk, can we start by saying that non-presidential youth voter turnout ISN’T DOWN — that it’s been essentially stable since the 1990s? Every cycle youth voter turnout is more or less the same, and every cycle it’s treated as a new Betrayal of the Nation.
And can we also note that while election-week demographic estimates of voting are always crude, the one analysis that we do have at this point says that youth turnout is actually up slightly since the 2010 midterm?
So the question “Why didn’t young people vote?” is already several kinds of stupid.
It gets worse.
We know that Voter ID laws disproportionately disenfranchise young voters. (AS THEY ARE INTENDED TO.) And we know that Voter ID laws are getting uglier and more widespread. So if youth turnout is stable or rising, as it is, that’s actually pretty clear evidence of increased youth interest in electoral politics.
And while yes, young people do tend to vote less frequently than older people, that’s been true since before I was born, and I’m not that young anymore. Anyone alive today who’s whining about youth voter turnout is themselves part of a generation that didn’t turn out to vote in huge numbers when they were young.
The lesson here, as always, is simple: Shut up, old whiners.
Ready to move on? Okay. Let’s look at the exit polls. They show that youth were the ONLY age cohort who went majority Democratic this week.
Again: Shut up, old whiners. Middle-aged people went GOP by eight points. Stop complaining about your kids not canceling out your friends’ votes, jerks.
And the Democrats’ problem this week wasn’t a bunch of tight losses, anyway. It was a bunch of unexpectedly decisive GOP wins. A bump in youth voting doesn’t fix that. There were a few races, like the North Carolina Senate, where a shockingly huge youth turnout might have flipped the result, but not many. In Texas, for instance, under-30 voters split evenly between Davis and Abbot. That’s better for the Dems than what their elders did, but adding more 50-50 voters to a lopsided race doesn’t change the results.
Democrats got shellacked yesterday, and they would have been shellacked worse if young people hadn’t showed up to vote Dem. Youth didn’t lose this election for the Democrats — they saved it from being an even bigger disaster.
And while we’re on THAT subject, can we talk about the fact that we’re in the middle of about ten different political catastrophes for American youth right now? And the fact that the Democratic Party isn’t making any kind of a serious push on any of them?
Public higher education is being dismantled in this country. Young black men are being shot by cops with impunity. Youth unemployment is through the roof, and the jobs that do exist mostly suck. And on and on and on.
Show me the Democratic candidate who made the case for tuition cuts in this election. Show me the Democratic office-holders who are serious about reining in cops. About jobs programs. Show me the candidates who are fighting for young people, giving young people a reason to vote, a reason to be passionate about electoral politics. They don’t exist.
Democratic candidates and elected officials constantly crap on youth. And despite that incontrovertible fact, young people remain a core base constituency for the Democratic Party.
Why aren’t young people voting? THEY ARE. But how long do you think you can trick them into continuing without giving them anything back?
You want to increase youth voting? Cool. Pay attention to youth voters. Give them some wins on the legislative level. And take youth voter registration seriously — when people are registered, they tend to vote, and first-time voters have inertia working against them.
And here’s another thing we could do: Reduce the voting age to 16, like they’ve done in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Nicaragua, and Scotland.
Today in America, young people tend to start voting (or not) right as they’re moving — to college, to work, away from home. That’s a roadblock to registration, and to voting, and it’s one of the (many) reasons I support a 16-year-old voting age.
Get folks registered before they move out of their parents’ house. Get them voting. Get them in the system. People who vote stay voters. People who don’t vote stay non-voters. It’s easier to get people to start at 16 than at 18. So let’s do it. And let’s stop whining.
Lemon out.
This post is a lightly edited version of a Twitter rant from last night.
studentactivism.net 
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November 6, 2014 at 11:15 am
Sebastian Johnson
Reblogged this on unfettered equality and commented:
Wondering where all the young voters were on Tuesday? Check out Angus Johnston’s take:
November 6, 2014 at 11:47 am
ktkeith
Those are all good points, but I’m not sure they answer the basic complaint. It may be true that youth vote turnout has been stable over multiple election cycles, but the complaint isn’t that the youth vote is dropping, it’s that that vote is simply too small, and disproportionately so, especially given the danger to youth interests and their general political alignment. It’s certainly frustrating that older voters favor the GOP, but it’s more frustrating – in a certain way – that young voters favor progressive policies and don’t bother to vote. When you say “THEY ARE” (turning out to vote,) that’s not true, compared to other age groups. It may be true compared *to themselves four years ago*, but that’s not the point.
It seems especially frustrating because that potential vote bloc looks so tempting – it’s just sitting there like fruit out of reach; you don’t have to win over the youth vote, they already support the right things, and all they would have to do is just show up at the goddam polls. Intuitively (though apparently not in actuality) it’s easier to get someone who already supports you to vote than it would be to change the minds of people who are against you (and whose votes are largely driven by ignorance and fear), so the fact that that already-persuaded bloc exists and just doesn’t cast a ballot is infuriating.
Also, you point out that there are barriers to recruiting new young voters – but you also point out that the turnout rate is higher for older age groups. That means those young non-voters do become voters at some point in their lives. So the idea that they should become voters *now*, when it would make the most difference, is still a natural one.
Finally, you’re right that the Democrats have given youth (or, anybody, really) little reason for confidence in them. But letting the GOP walk away with the election can only be worse. That seems so obvious, and that increasing the youth vote even to the same percentage as in other age groups would make a tangible difference (even if not in every race) also seems clear, it’s hard not to regret what could have been if those who actually wanted it would simply make their preference known.
November 6, 2014 at 12:07 pm
Angus Johnston
KTK, I think a lot of this boils down to the simple fact that voting is a habit. If you’re in the habit of voting, you tend to keep doing it. If you’re in the habit of not voting, you tend not to.
Voter turnout of people under 18 is 0% every election, by law, so every under-20 voter in a federal election is a first-time voter, every time. Unless we lower the voting age, that fact will always be a barrier to youth turnout. There are ways to fix it, and I talked about a few, but it’s a structural impediment, not a personal failing (as it’s so often portrayed).
And by the way, it’s not just under-30s who vote less frequently than their elders. Thirty-year-olds vote less than forty-year-olds. Forty-year-olds vote less than fifty-year-olds. And fifty-year-olds vote less than sixty-year-olds. (Voting rates plateau at about 60, and start to drop at about 75 or 80.)
But somehow we don’t ever seem to get around to shaming 45-year-olds for not turning up as often as 55-year-olds. Why is that?
November 6, 2014 at 1:55 pm
tjpfau
Nope. I am not going to whine about it at all. I’m 65 and pretty well set no matter who wins. I got mine while D’s were in power. I’d like to see the same for today’s younger people.
If young people and their organizers think a 12% turnout is adequate, that’s their business. It was 18% when Obama was elected and it carried that election.
But maybe that was “special.”
Like I said, I’m old. I’ll likely be dead before it matters in fundamental ways.
You?
November 6, 2014 at 2:00 pm
Angus Johnston
TJ, youth voter turnout wasn’t 12% this year. It was 12% of the electorate, which is a completely different thing.
But if your takeaway from this piece is that I don’t think more young people should vote, I suspect you stopped reading about three paragraphs in.
November 7, 2014 at 5:09 am
JeseC
Of course, the counter-balance to lowering the voting age is that I would not have wanted myself at 16 voting. Not because of my maturity level, but because the information I had access to about politics was carefully controlled in a way that ensured I had certain political views.
November 7, 2014 at 7:57 am
Angus Johnston
Jese, the research I’ve seen suggests that teens whose parents force their political views on their kids tend to rebel and reject those views — but generally not until college. That suggests that in order to guard against the kind of influence you fear, we’d want to set the voting age higher than 18.
Of course, the lower the voting age, the more opportunities to vote kids’ under their parents’ influence will get, so the effect you’re describing would likely be felt in election results to some extent. I’m not sure how powerful it would be, though. (I’ve seen one study that found that about 30% of teens describe their political views as substantially different from their parents’, which strikes me as a healthy number.) I also suspect that giving under-18s the vote would encourage them to take a greater interest in politics, and foster greater political independence from their parents, but that’s just a guess.
More broadly, though, and setting aside the practical benefits I discussed in the post, I guess I just believe that 16-year-olds have the cognitive capacity to be making these decisions, and that if they can, they should. Forty-nine states let teens drive before their seventeenth birthday, and all fifty charge kids as adults in the legal system by then. I’m happy to let them vote.
November 7, 2014 at 9:38 am
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