Where Did You Get This Number? by Anthony Salvanto

Author:Anthony Salvanto
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Next Generation

Why haven’t more young people voted in recent elections?

The Census reported that the 2016 turnout rate for people under thirty, while historically good for younger people, was still more than 24 percentage points lower than for people over sixty-five. Younger people, in particular, report being more skeptical that they have a voice in the process to begin with: in 2018 we surveyed a large sample of young adults under age twenty-four, and half of them felt that people their age had not much or no say at all in the political process; only one-third of adults over sixty-five felt the same. (Most young adults did feel their generation had an influence in popular culture.)

Yet there was a broader optimism, too: nine out of ten people under age thirty felt like their generation could change the world—or already was changing it. We found that more of them thought they could do that through supporting causes, rather than candidates. The Harvard Institute of Politics’ long-running study of young voters led by pollster John Della Volpe finds them increasingly detached from the parties and the two-party system, and often favoring community service over campaigns as a means of involvement.

People vote when they think they have a stake in the outcome or in a community. If they live in one place for a long time, the chances that they vote might go up, because they either feel more connected to it or have time to see how politics affects things there. There have been years when the CBS News poll would ask how long have you lived at your current address with this idea in mind. If you own property, buy a home, or pay more property taxes, you’re buying a stake in a place, too, and also now have more financial, material interest in things that are touched by public policy.

Younger people tend to be more mobile, with relatively fewer such attachments and less property, and that makes it harder to keep registration current, to say nothing of the fact that they just may have other things on their minds.

In our 2018 study, we asked people if they felt like part of a community, and nearly three-fourths of Americans who said they felt like they did also reported having voted in a recent presidential election or midterm; most said in fact that they “always” voted. Of those who said they did not feel like part of a community, only one-third reported always voting.

We also discovered, though, that it may matter less today whether that communal connection is physical or digital. Those who said the community they belonged to was “online” were just as likely to have voted as those who felt they were in physical communities like neighborhoods or towns.

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