The youth vote is the great white whale of progressive politics. Each election cycle, we hear rumblings of a generational shift that will change the face of the electorate.
Polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight before the 2020 election showed that 78% of young people said they planned to vote in 2020.
But according to the Census, voter turnout that year was lowest among those ages 18-24, at 51.4%.
Before the 2022 election, 40% of Gen Z voters told Harvard’s Institute of Politics that they intended to vote.
The actual turnout was 23%, according to CIRCLE, the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University.
That’s an improvement—one of the highest youth voter turnouts in a midterm election since the voting age was lowered to 18—but older, more conservative voters still 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.
What needs to change in order to upset this apple cart? First and foremost, young people have to believe that politics can make a difference in their lives—today.
I’m a consultant to a national grassroots advocacy organization, and in one of our morning communications calls a colleague in her 20s admitted that the focus I was advocating on elections and politics left her a little cold. Her generation, she said, had pretty much given up on politics. Sure, she’ll vote, but she doesn’t have much faith that it will make a difference.
If you don’t believe that politics is a means to achieve policy solutions, I wondered, what is? That’s a hard question to answer.
We know that young people will march on state Capitols to demand action on gun violence, but will they follow, support, and turn out for candidates who’ll vote that way?
The fact is that without politics and elections, we don’t get the change we need.
Harvard’s John Della Volpe says Gen Z are values-based voters motivated by threats to their basic rights—clean air and water, feeling safe in school, reproductive rights. They’re not going to respond to partisan messages—party politics mostly turns them off.
They want to stop the attacks on those who are more vulnerable themselves, specifically members of the LGBTQ community. And they worry abourt the daily threats to democracy and the rise of autocracy.
On Election Night last year, Della Volpe tweeted “One thing I know already. If not for voters under 30…tonight WOULD have been a Red Wave.”
Exit polls showed voters ages 18-29 supporting Democrats by 28 points, an even wider margin than the 13-point advantage Republicans enjoy among voters 65 and older.
So, no Red Wave--but where was the gen Z revolution?
, the former political director of the AFL-CIO, says that in order to understand new voters, we need to look at how they were introduced to politics. Read his article in the Washington Monthly:
“Everyone understands the lasting partisan impact inspirational leaders like Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, and Obama had on those who came of age during their presidencies. This generation, though, is coming of age when everybody around them, plus the popular culture, loathes Trump.
“Especially in blue states and purple states where MAGA candidates dominate uncompetitive GOP primaries, there isn’t a reasonable Republican to be found. To these young voters, Trump is the Republican Party, and they oppose it.
His conclusion:
“There’s no reason to assume Democrats must focus on winning back Trump-leaning voters or even “non-college” or “working-class” voters more broadly. Instead, Democrats simply need to maintain the support of those who have already rejected MAGA and continue to turn them out, along with mobilizing new voters who understand the stakes of defeating MAGA.”
But
warns that after a 16-point shift in a positive direction among young voters’ feelings about the efficacy of politics between 2016 and 2018 (leading to increased turnout in the midterms by 17 points), since 2018, youth’s feelings about politics have shifted 27 points in the opposite direction.Partisan appeals fall on deaf ears with young voters, who have a more transactional than ideological perspective. They want action on gun violence, the environment, social issues, abortion, and it’s not enough for Democrats to say they’re the party that supports a progressive agenda.
To close the gap between younger voters’ intentions to vote and their actual turnout, Democrats can clearly show how, with Joe Biden in the White House, a strong House majority and 60 votes (or close enough) in the Senate, we can pass bills in a week the Republicans have been holding up for decades.
But better messaging behind a traditional get-out-the-vote effort may not be enough. The key to this election not even be in the hands of the voters—today’s voters, that is.
If the problem has been that too few registered voters believe politics matters, let’s register a new generation open to the possibility that it can.
Let’s talk to them about why voting is important, and find common ground based on their most deeply held values and beliefs.
Instead of blanketing a zip code with voter registration forms, tap into the universe of people who may not be registered to vote, but still have values that motivate them to take actions.
New ways of using voter and consumer data make it possible to practically genetically engineer a new electorate, based not on partisan leanings but what people really care about.
For example, want to defeat a Republican Congressman in a district Joe Biden carried?We know that not only abortion, but now, also contraception will be on the ballot in this election, (Have you seen this video? NSFW).
Identify the voters you want to register—for example, women under 35, while selecting out Evangelicals and gun owners. Deliver a pro-choice message tied to what’s at stake in this election, and make a compelling case for voting.
One of the reasons people feel alienated from politics is their feeing that politics has given up on them. They don’t have a stake in what goes on in Congress—but they should.
Unregistered voters are the secret key to the next election. Too many campaigns give up on them—smart ones will bring them in.