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Young voters don't tend to make up as large a slice of the electoral pie in a midterm as they do in a presidential election. But my focus on young voters has not been about immediate electoral impact so much as on the fact that young voters can foreshadow where things are headed.
A decade ago, I was preaching that Republicans needed to wake up because young people were going to pull America leftward on a host of economic and cultural issues. I was sometimes rebuffed with "well, I'm not too worried, they'll get more conservative as they age." Many of those same conservatives are now vocally in a panic about the changes that younger Americans are driving on campuses, in work places, and in our politics.
I've been on the "youth vote" beat long enough that I can no longer credibly be considered a "young voter" anymore. When I first became focused on understanding the politics of my own generation, I was 24 years old. A young Senator from Illinois named Barack Obama was electrifying my once-apathetic peers with his presidential campaign. We hadn't collectively decided that "millennial" would be the name for the generation of most 1980s and 1990s babies. Most people's perceptions of "young voter" were rooted in broad stereotypes. They're on The Twitters and The Facebooks! They're self-absorbed! Their minds are warped by video games! They just want candidates who are "cool"!
As I went to get data on what young voters actually believed, I found myself in a pretty big data desert. Unlike today, where there are studies aplenty on young consumers and so on, things were a bit more bleak a decade and a half ago. Luckily, in that desert was a beautiful oasis: the Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll.
Started at the turn of the millennium by some Harvard students who were frustrated with their peers' lack of interest in public service, the Harvard IOP poll has now built up an incredible back-catalog of data spanning decades. (Go check out some of their early work, featuring cameos from then-students who are now-household names like Pete Buttigieg and Elise Stefanik.)
What's especially exciting about their poll is that, though it is guided by the capable hands of SocialSphere's John Della Volpe, the long-time "adult in the room" managing the survey project, it is student-led in terms of what questions it asks and what subjects it covers. Every semester when their new survey hits my inbox, it feels like Christmas come early. This year is no exception.
Their team has done an extensive write-up of the poll's findings here, and I'd encourage you to take a look, but wanted to flag the things I find the most revealing in all of this.
Young voters' top issues probably aren't what you think. The stereotype of a young voter today is someone who is Very Online and hyper-focused on social justice clashes, inequality, climate change. Harvard's polling does not show these issues popping into the top three. Instead, their top three issues are: strengthening the economy, bringing the country together, and health care. If I asked the same question of a sample of registered voters of all ages, I probably would find a similar top three. Just a reminder that young voters are not always so different from older voters in what they care about - and that the high-profile dustups that happen online or on college campuses involving student activists are not necessarily representative of the median young voter.
Only young Republicans think America is exceptional. I've been sounding this alarm to my friends in foreign policy circles for a while, but of all the issues where young voters and older voters diverge big time, it's this. Only 31 percent of young voters in this Harvard study say that "America is the greatest country in the world." Over half say that there are other countries as great as or greater than the United States. Now, you can say that this question wording leads to a result that isn't that big a deal; after all, New Zealand has great coffee and wine and beaches and sheep and friendly people, you can say New Zealand is really great without it being a dig at America! And if it were just this data point I'd say, sure - but it isn't. This is a pattern I see in survey after survey. Young Republicans and old Republicans are pretty aligned on this issue, but older Democrats and Independents still tend to see America as exceptional while younger Democrats and Independents very much do not. This has ripple effects into things like foreign policy, with younger voters being much less interested in seeing the United States project power and influence abroad. (I've written much more about this here, for the Reagan Institute.)
Young Republicans are also the most freaked out about the state of our democracy. I feel like in elite circles, it is more often those on the left who voice concerns about the state of our democracy. You don't have to watch more than a few minutes of a show like Morning Joe to hear worries about creeping authoritarianism, decline of democratic norms, and so on. And yet in poll after poll, it is Republicans who are the ones reporting the highest level of alarm about "democracy being under attack" (as in this CNN poll here). This holds in the Harvard poll among young people. Less than a quarter of young Republicans think that the U.S. even has a "somewhat functioning democracy" compared to almost half (44%) of young Democrats. Young Republicans are almost three times as likely to say the U.S. is outright failed as a democracy (23%) compared to Democrats (8%). Of course, you can interpret this in a variety of ways - if you believe the 2020 election was stolen, of course you believe our democracy is not functioning as it should! Young Republicans in this poll are also more likely to see extreme consequences of division, with nearly half (46%) believing we are likely to descend into a civil war during their lifetimes (compared to 32% of young Democrats). None of this is particularly good news or bodes well for hoping young people will want to participate in our democracy moving forward.
I'll end on one possibly bright note: recall that unifying the country was the second biggest priority young voters had for their president. When given the choice between elected officials "meeting in the middle - at the expense of my policy priorities" or or pursuing my priorities "at the expense of compromise" by relatively wide margins, young voters choose meeting in the middle. While there's some evidence that active young Republicans and young Democrats are not exactly moderating forces within either party, it is notable that when you survey broadly, compromise and collaboration still have cache with young voters in this question.
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(Cover Photo Credit: Joe Daniel Price/Getty Images)
