Democratic and progressive groups have been trying to get young people to vote since the Vietnam War. The logic is simple: Young people (usually defined as those between 18 and 30) are more likely to lean left, so boosting their participation in elections should give Democrats an edge.
But that edge has proven elusive—across countries and societies, young people tend to vote at lower rates than their elders, and when the youth turnout has gone up, it’s largely because turnout overall has gone up. Changing the “youth share” of the vote—the percentage of voters who are under 30—is what would actually give young voters, and Democrats, more electoral firepower—and that’s also an extremely difficult task to accomplish.
But that doesn’t mean Democrats should focus less on young people. In 2020 and particularly in the Georgia Senate runoffs last month, the youth vote was decisive. Keeping the under-30s active and engaged will need to be a major part of the Democratic strategy moving forward into 2022.
The places where the youth vote mattered
The gold standard for information on young voters is Tuft University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Its initial analysis of the 2020 electorate found that youth turnout was just about 50%, a big jump from the 42 to 44% of citizens under 30 who voted in 2016.
Part of this turnout bump is no doubt thanks to the efforts of the countless organizers who reached out to young people to make sure that they were registered to vote and had a plan to cast their ballot. But it’s also true that turnout overall surged in 2020 across every state and probably across every demographic; CIRCLE estimates that the youth share of the vote was 17% in 2020, compared to 16% in 2016. Young people were unusually energized and agitated about politics, but so was everyone else, so their higher participation rate was basically a wash, at least on a national level. (The same thing happened in the 2018 midterms, when youth turnout surged but the youth share of the vote remained steady.)
CIRCLE’s state-level data shows how important the youth vote was in certain key places. In Georgia, the youth share of the vote was a whopping 20%, and the margins President Joe Biden ran up among young people, especially young people of color, were decisive. In Arizona, for instance, 315,000 people under 30 cast ballots for Biden compared to 189,000 who voted for Donald Trump, a 126,000-vote margin among that demographic in a state Biden won by just 21,000. In Georgia, Biden’s youth vote margin was 188,000 and his margin of victory was just 7,000; in Pennsylvania, Biden got 154,000 more youth votes and won the state by 34,000. Flip those states, and Trump is still in the White House.
Young Black voters gave Democrats the Senate
The youth vote isn’t a monolith. Though people under 30 tend to favor Democrats, in the Georgia Senate runoff elections, a majority of young white voters broke for the Republican candidates, according to CIRCLE. But that was offset by young Black voters, who favored the Democrats by a 91-9% margin (Biden carried this demographic in the state by a similar margin).
Young Black voters were also more likely than their white counterparts to have been contacted by a Democratic-aligned group by a 46-13 margin, which reflects Democrats’ successful push to mobilize Black voters of all ages in Georgia. Stacey Abrams’s New Georgia Project is the most prominent of the organizations involved in this outreach project, but there were and are many others, like the Georgia Coalition for the Peoples’ Agenda. Partly as a result of these efforts, 56,000 Georgians registered to vote for the first time in the run-up to the Senate elections, and more than half of these new registrants were under 35. Even more tellingly, 20% of young voters in the runoff—and 25% of young Black voters—didn’t vote in the general election.
How do you reach young voters?
Georgia is an example of youth outreach having an effect, but Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign is a case study in the difficulty of mobilizing young voters. More than any other primary candidate, Sanders made outreach to youth a central part of his campaign, and argued that his unique ability to inspire young people to vote would allow him to defeat Trump in the general election. That argument turned out to be a moot point: When young voters didn’t turn out for him on Super Tuesday (at least, not outside of California), Sanders’s presidential bid was effectively over.
Young people aren’t reliable voters not because they are apathetic about politics or don’t pay attention—the mass protests over the killing of George Floyd last summer and the many youth-led climate organizations that have appeared in recent years show how committed many young people are. But young people have not acquired the habit of voting like older people, making them prone to forgetting to register or cast a ballot; they also frequently move and may neglect to fill out the paperwork to change their address. This also means they are less likely to be included in voter file data, making them harder to contact. Republican state legislatures have compounded these difficulties with measures like closing campus voting locations and disallowing college-issued IDs for voter identification.
In the long term, Democrats could probably boost youth turnout by removing barriers to voting that affect everyone. But in the short term, the challenge is simply to connect with young people. In Georgia, organizers tried everything from poetry readings to outreach on Tinder. Social media posts from celebrities and influencers that young people admire represent one way to reach the youth; another tactic is to recruit young volunteers and ask them to message their friends directly.
Young people are also organizing themselves; many groups have been founded by and for the young and focused on issues from climate change to racial equity. The Democratic Party or deep-pocketed donors could invest in these groups, not only to build them up for their own sake, but to take advantage of their get-out-the-vote potential.
There’s not much of a chance that the youth vote will spike in a way that transforms American politics—if Sanders couldn’t bring about such a revolution, it’s not likely any candidate can. But Democrats need to work hard to get young people to vote, and to make infrequent young voters into habitual voters—if these people lose interest in politics after the turbulent but dramatic Trump era, 2022 will be a disaster.
