“Fewer Younger Americans Plan To Vote in 2024” mourns the headline at the bottom of my TV screen, while Harvard’s John Della Volpe announces the findings of the latest Harvard Youth Poll. A list of “top ten findings” begins with this:
Fewer young Americans plan on voting in 2024; most of the decline comes from young Republican and independent voters.
Relative to this point in the 2020 presidential election cycle, the number of young Americans between 18- and- 29 years old who “definitely” plan on voting for president has decreased from 57% to 49%. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the 2020 turnout for Americans under 30 was 54.1%, with other estimates at 52.5%.
But as I’ve said in this space before, that 54.1% is still the bottom of the voter turnout barrel. According to the Census, voter turnout was highest among those age 65-74 at 76%. I’ve also pointed out how in 2022, 40% of Gen Z voters told the same poll that they intended to vote. The actual turnout was 23%.
It’s still older, more conservative voters who make up the lion’s share of voters. They’re the ones electing officials who won’t vote for gun safety, health care, voting rights, the environment, gender equality and racial justice, and all the other issues that younger voters care about.
Of course young people are unenthusiastic about politics—what have they seen other than a clown show dominated by Donald Trump and his enablers?
But if you go back and look at that top-line finding of the Harvard poll, maybe that’s what it’s reflecting. It’s worth noting that “most of the decline comes from young Republican and independent voters.”
How many of those Republicans are former Trump voters?
And how many of the Independents are Biden voters who don’t yet see a compelling reason to vote for the old white man. I think they will, especially if Trump is the nominee (which, like Chris Christie says, may not look so certain once his trial starts in March, and when he’s a convicted felon going into the Convention).
This new Harvard poll comes on the heels of other surveys that show Biden and Trump tied among young voters, and Trump gaining ground among voters under 30. You’ll often hear cable news pundits say that national polls one year before an election don’t mean anything—right before they panic about the latest national polls. But they know the first part is true and the second part is…well…good for ratings.
The real problem, as the New York Times’ Carl Hulse wrote last month, began when House Republicans like Rep. Eric Cantor rose up against President Barack Obama’s agenda fueled by rage and grievance.
But Republicans saw a glimmer of hope in the energized far-right populist movement that emerged out of a backlash to Mr. Obama — the first Black president — and his party’s aggressive economic and social agenda, which included a federal health care plan. Republicans seized on the Tea Party and associated groups, with their nativist leanings and vehemently anti-establishment impulses, as their ticket back to power.
“We benefited from the anger that was generated against the one-way legislation of the Obama years,” said Eric Cantor, the former House leader from Virginia who became the No. 2 Republican after the 2010 midterm elections catapulted the party back into the majority. “It was my way or the highway.”
Now, anger is all that’s left of the Republican platform.
Hulse quotes Michael Podhorzer, whose
is a deep, deep dive into data and analysis that will make you smarter:“They thought they could control it,” Michael Podhorzer, the former political director of the A.F.L.-C.I.O. who has studied the House’s far-right progression, said of G.O.P. leaders. “But once you agree essentially that Democrats are satanic, there is no room in the party for someone who says we need to compromise with Democrats to accomplish what we need to get done.”
The result, Mr. Podhorzer said, is a Republican majority that his research shows across various data points to be more extreme, more evangelical Christian and less experienced in governing than in the past. Those characteristics have been evident as House Republicans have spent much of the year in chaos.
“It isn’t that they are really clever at how they crash the institution,” Mr. Podhorzer said. “They just don’t know how to drive.”
So let’s give the wheel to young people and voters who believe in democracy.