[image_credit]REUTERS/Julio-Cesar Chavez[/image_credit][image_caption]A voter marks his ballot during early voting in Minneapolis last year.[/image_caption]
According to a study of exit polling numbers from the 2020 election by the Roper Center, analyzed by John Della Volpe of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics, Gen Z voters have reliably favored Democrats in all recent presidential election years, and that advantage surged in 2020, when voters aged 18-29 voted for the Democratic Biden-Harris ticket by a whopping 60-36 percent – the second-best margin for the Democrats among younger voters over at least the last six election cycles. (Barack Obama did even better in 2008.)
And those Gen Z-ers who helped Biden win will be eligible to vote for a long time, although there’s no guarantee that they will remain loyal to the Democrats. That’s the rub, or at least one of the rubs. As I mentioned, the youngest demographic has been carried by the Democrats in every election since 2000 (although not by 24 percentage points), but obviously many voters turn into Republicans as they age or Republicans wouldn’t have won three of the past five presidential races.
But, back on the bright side for the Dems, the young demographic has shown a strong rise in turnout over those past five presidential elections, from a low of 33 percent among the under-30 eligible voters in 1996, to a big, if not completely steady rise to 53 percent in 2020.
Della Volpe listed five events that moved younger voters into the Democratic camp, at least in the most recent election: The millennial-led Occupy Wall Street movement against inequality; Donald Trump on the ticket the past two cycles; the Parkland, Fla., high school shooting tied to feelings about gun control; the George Floyd killing (and the iPhone recording of it by 17-year-old Gen Z-er); and teen-ager Greta Thunberg’s influence through the climate movement.
Looking at history, it would be a surprise if each new cohort of the youngest eligible voters keep participating at an increasing rate.
But the graph of rising participation by 18-29-year olds and their solid if variable blue lean should scare the beeswax out of Republicans looking ahead, as should the full writeup by Axios of the Roper Center poll numbers described above and accompanying graph by Axios, both of which are viewable here.
I was a reliable democrat voter until I was 30 when Ronaldo Maximus showed me the error of my ways when I saw a video of his “a time for choosing” speech. (I didn’t see it when he actually delivered it in 1964.) Sometimes it depends on the candidate that affects a young person’s thinking. Look at all the young, traditionally dependable blue collar democrat voters who supported Trump.
Winston Churchill: “If you are not a liberal at twenty, you have no heart. If you are not a conservative at forty, you have no brain.”
Sorry to break it to you, Dennis, but Winston Churchill never said that. https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/quotes/quotes-falsely-attributed/
Well, he could have. And we’d still all be nodding our heads, regardless.
Let’s see…. he was the second cousin to Gluteus Maximus?
Recommended viewing: ‘The Life of Brian’.
“from a low of 33 percent among the under-30 eligible voters in 1996, to a big, if not completely steady rise to 53 percent in 2020.”
This is huge, and along with easy access to information and the wide-open, vigorous and highly contentious political environment, more evidence we may be in democracy’s golden age.
More like brass.
And the 2022 election hasn’t been held yet.
It’ll be a doozy.
I’d like to think so, and it does seem true that access to information and an engaged populace ought to produce something that at least looks like a golden age. Alas, that expansion of both the informational and voter pool is spoiled by repeated efforts in several states to limit access to polling places, restrict voting hours and methods, and otherwise put into place a variety of hoops through which voters will have to jump to take part in the next election. I’m expecting a poll tax proposal soon to mark an official return to the days of Jim Crow. The irony of these restrictions coming from Republicans this century instead of Democrats, as was the case in the last century, should not go unappreciated.
These laws are almost entirely a return to pre-Covid standards. And since these laws were never criticized before, the controversy seems to me to be fraudulent. Finally, we have courts raring to go, so no one’s access, ability, what-have-you to vote will be affected.
Since your premise is fatally false, so is your conclusion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-56650565
My “premise” isn’t fatally false, false, or even a premise.
Coupling this with the recent Gallup post, I can’t help but wonder about the sample makeup of that survey.
It will take some time, but the patterns of red v blue we talk about as though they’re set in stone actually fluctuate. The Trump and Biden presidencies will be the last of the boomers, thank god.
Republicans are well aware of this. That’s why they’re suppressing the vote and changing laws to allow the overturning of elections.
So let me think on this a second: You have no right to life if some gun totin crazy feels threatened, think that women should have the government control there bodily functions, the education system should be allowed to place you into financial servitude for more or less the rest of your life, corporations should be able to freely pollute your air land and water, as well as more or less destroy the planet. Obstruction is better than cooperation to govern the country, ” We the people of the United States in order to form a more perfect union”, should not be taken literally but the 2nd Amendment should! Decisions decisions!
Well, the error here is that Repubs have “won three of the last five elections”. They have indeed won the woeful and senseless electoral college three out the past five elections, but they actually won only ONE of the past five elections in the “democratic” sense of the word, the 2004 election.
The Repubs are well aware they are not doing that well with younger voters, and they are well aware that the ever-more radical base of their party (and “conservative” movement) could never agree to endorse positions that younger Americans favor. So that means the “conservative” movement and its party must jettison any commitment whatever to popular democracy, which is precisely what it is are doing.
So Repubs are rabidly engaging in partisan gerrymandering in every state they control, having been given a free pass to do so by the Trump Supreme Court. This means that the voters of a state (like WI) cannot eject their Repub legislative majority even if most voters want to. Repubs have altered voting laws to limit early voting, and make absentee balloting more difficult, thus reducing turnout in urban areas, so that we go back to the days of 20 years ago when one basically had to show up on election day, after having previously registered months earlier. That way they can keep their favorite tactics of burdensome pre-registration and unequal time in voting lines alive. Indeed, they are open to anything that reduces turnout and makes voting more troublesome. Repubs do not even make a pretense that these procedures will do anything other than reduce turnout; rather, they falsely assert that voting must be made more cumbersome to reduce (non-existent, non-meaningful) “vote fraud”.
Their strategy is that making voting more complicated and difficult will likely deter many younger voters, who are less familiar with all these utterly unnecessary restrictions. In the longer term, the question is to what degree will younger Americans see that their country is not really a “democracy” in any meaningful sense of the word, and that one party (and one party alone) is committed to entrenching anti-democratic mechanisms and procedures to maintain its power.