One of the big takeaways from Super Tuesday is that, while turnout overall was higher than 2016, youth turnout was lower and this hit Bernie hard.
If Bernie had managed to turn out young people in the numbers he promised, then this would have been a blowout race for him and he would have solidified his role as the front runner and been well on his way to locking in the nomination.
My question is, as someone who isn’t too familiar with the inner workings of his campaign, there are two equally plausible explaination to me for this:
Bernie is great at soaring rhetoric but is weak on the nuts and bolts tactical organizing required to mount an effective GOTV scheme.
An irresistible force met an immovable object and there’s simply no degree of political circumstance that can motivate the youth to actually turn out and vote.
I’ve seen both being put forth in discussions but mostly as wild guesses with little empirical backing supporting them. Can anyone else shed light on how the above factors and others played into the youth turnout for Super Tuesday?
The youth in our household (youth = ages 18 - 23) voted, but only because we got on them like it was homework. We didn’t tell them whom to vote for, but we did sit them down in front of the interwebs to research their choice. Once they got into even that superficial process they showed some interest and made a choice, filled out the ballot, etc. Colorado is a early/mail in state so there’s really no excuse to not do it apart from inertia.
The reason the kids were disinterested at first is because politics and pretty much any official establishment to them is a “hurricane of fuckin’ lies” they’d rather not grace with their attention. They don’t naturally understand that the roar of the storm is made up of many millions of tiny voices just like theirs, and they really don’t have a concept of just how different opinions can get. None of it makes sense, and none of it seems to want to make sense, so they prefer to just do their daily good deeds and hope that’s enough to make the world a better place.
All the soaring rhetoric and energy in the world fall on deaf ears until potential voters see how they fit in to the election process, and the world that election process hopes to build. In that regard, politicians consistently and uniformly fail to reach young adults who are still prioritizing their lives and pondering how abstract and ungratifying (in the short term) things like voting fits into their worldview. They just see a big mess of ugliness they’d rather not feed.
Bernie was very popular among my daughter and her friends, but only Sophia bothered to actually vote (of those eligible to do so). And Sophia only went because I insisted.
Its young people’s fault, but its built into the nature of the system. Young people just don’t vote as much as older people because they don’t have the life experience to understand that civics is important.
In presidential elections, youth turnout is generally in the 30-40% range while middle aged people are around 50-60%, and seniors are in the 60-70% range.
However, the youth voters of 1986 are the elderly voters of 2018.
This does worry me. Youth voter turnout is the main reason the democrats won so big in 2018.
No matter who is on the democratic ballot, if youth turnout isn’t up in 2020 its going to be an uphill battle.
But yeah, for the first time in a long time we had a mainstream candidate talking about their issues and they had the numbers to move the needle. Sorry kids, you lost your griping privileges.
I don’t know what Bernie could have done differently to get the youth vote to turn out. If he couldn’t do it, I don’t believe it’s possible. If there is a secret formula for doing so, whoever discovers it will have a huge advantage. I personally voted in every election and primary since turning 18, but that is far from typical.
Maybe it’s generational for the liberal leaning young people. I grew up with Reagan and Bush Sr. being the face of the system. That means I don’t have youthful memories of being disappointed in a Democratic president. On the other hand, the youngest voters today’s think of Obama as “the man” and thus may be less likely to be engaged in supporting his fellow Democrats.
All the young people in our office voted in the primary, because it was mailed to their house. We are in Colorado. The people in our Texas office largely didn’t vote at all in the young category. They all had to work and by the time they got off (5:15 PM) the lines were down the block, according to the teleconference call we just had. It was the Houston area.
Take a look at the drop in the youth vote from 1992-1996 and 2008-2012. Clinton and Obama were the two most youth-appealing Presidents in my lifetime, and even they couldn’t maintain passion.
It’s always young people and I was no exception when I was young. Enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily translate into concrete action and surges in the youth vote tend to be brief and taken in isolation, modest. I’ve been seeing people chatter about engaging the youth vote my entire life and it never pans out the way boosters hope. It’s not insignificant of course and it should never be ignored. Every little bit helps.
It’s partly the young of course but it’s also Bernie in that he is obviously very old himself and isn’t entirely comfortable with woke identity politics. Someone like AOC would probably do a better job of attracting young voters though she would be weak with the rest of the population which ultimately matters more.
Young people don’t vote because they’re still idealistic enough to hope for a genuinely good candidate. When you get older, you’re more willing to settle for “least awful.”
I think you’re on to something. I think it’s mainly becaue to young people, a lot of the issues are abstract- politicians talking about capital gains taxes might as well be two people reciting lines from Aristophanes in the original Greek, because few young people have investments enough to even have capital gains in the first place. Same for a lot of other issues.
So it seems to me that what fires up the young are more abstract issues- inequality, environmental issues, etc… and the few that are pertinent, like student loans.
How you actually translate that into increased participation, I don’t know. I’ve voted in every general election that I’ve been aware of since I was 18, but didn’t start voting in primaries until I got to about 40, as I rarely had any particular affinity for either party, nor did I want to end up on their lists.
Young people tend to be apathetic about politics and no matter how much talk of “revolution” happens I just think not enough are that motivated or true enough believers to vote. Most people young and old don’t consume political grievance and just go about their daily lives. I suspect a portion of the population couldn’t name the Vice President and that included old voters.
I suspect there are events that could motivate very high youth turnout, but apparently this didn’t qualify. A piece of this may be that voting isn’t always and everywhere trivially easy – for some it’s essentially an all day chore, or several hours at least. But that’s only a piece.
