The Fire of a New Generation
Railing against expectations, young people voted in record numbers—and it’s just the beginning.
By Tim Fernholz
November 5, 2008
President-elect Barack Obama at the 2006 Campus Progress National ConferenceIn the months leading up to last night’s historic election, one question cropped up: Do progressive causes and candidates depend on young people too much? Do youth voters actually understand the issues that are at stake? Will they turn out?
Last night we learned the answer: Young people are substantially engaged in the political process.
Progressive candidates and causes made youth voter outreach and registration a key part of their work in the last year—more so than in any previous election cycle—which led to a small increase in overall youth participation and a huge increase in progressive support among those young voters. The Millennial generation has come home, and its home is on the left.
On Election Day, young people ages 18 to 29 made up 18 percent of the entire electorate, a one point increase from 2004, according to exit poll data from the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). That’s a solid contribution, especially when you consider that youth make up about 21 percent of all registered voters. Some pundits will no doubt continue scoffing at the youth vote because there was no huge explosion in electoral share, but this misses the point: In keeping with the trend of recent years, youth voter participation—the percentage of all young people who voted—is somewhere between 49.3 and 54.5 percent, an increase over youth turnout in 2004 and the largest since 1972.
Political scientist Andrew Gelman displays it best in a graph on his blog that compares the voting patterns of young people in 2000, 2004, and 2008. The youth vote of today shows a markedly different story than the previous two cycles, leaning strongly progressive. This year, young voters favored Barack Obama with 66 percent of their vote, compared to about 52 percent of the electorate-at-large. They voted no on Proposition 8, California’s gay marriage ban, by 63 percent, according to CNN, the only age group with a majority opposing the discriminatory measure. The same thing occurred with Arizona’s gay marriage ban, with 52 percent of young people opposing it. In South Dakota, young voters were the most likely to vote against a ballot initiative banning abortion.
Political scientists believe that first-time voting and political socialization tends to set a generation’s ideological preferences in a permanent way, an observation that led veteran congressional observer Norm Ornstein to argue that securing the youth vote is tantamount to securing power for the next generation. The data backs this up: Conservatives won the youth vote every year from 1980 to 1992, and in 2000, it helped them build electoral majorities. This year, it looks like progressives have started to build the foundation of their own majority.
No doubt some, especially on the conservative side, will argue that the progressive youth movement is nothing without Barack Obama, whose "celebrity" candidacy excited young voters who might not have otherwise participated. But that flawed analysis ignores that youth participation has been on the rise in the last several election cycles, before Obama even entered the national scene. It ignores the grassroots organizing among young people that existed before and parallel to the Obama campaign: groups like Young People For, the League of Young Voters, the Hip Hop Caucus, Rock the Vote, and, yes, Campus Progress, among many others. And this conception of celebrity-addled youth, which buys into the worst negative stereotyping about young people, also ignores the intentions of these groups to train young people to organize for themselves. Such a call to service will likely outlast this election season and follow this generation through the years.
This doesn’t mean that progressives can take youth for granted; if anything, we learned that the youth vote requires as much outreach as any other constituency. But contrary to those who would scoff at youth turnout, it’s just as valuable an investment—and perhaps even more so in the long run. To keep the ball moving forward, the newly-elected progressive government will have to deliver returns on issues important to young people, like climate change, health care, higher education, and the economy. If young people hold their elected officials accountable, they may see successes that parallel the 2006 College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which cut interest rates in half and sought to increase the amount Pell grants award.
Young people made their mark during this election, lining up in college towns and big cities by the millions to fulfill their civic duty and make their voices heard. These same young people can and must help to increase the awareness and engagement of their peers who didn’t make it to the polls. But other generations can rest a little easier knowing that next generation is already stepping up to the plate.
Tim Fernholz is a writing fellow at The American Prospect and graduated from Georgetown University this spring.
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What’s next for this new generation? What are they going to do now that Obama is president? Are they going to stay active or tune out?
— Curious - Nov 10, 09:01 PM - #