In Defense of the Millennial Voter
Signs indicate that America’s newest generation of voters may become a tremendous political force.
People who vote often shame non-voters. Young people are the perennial targets of this ire. The snarky civic chorus relentlessly lambastes millennials for their seemingly poor voting record, assigning to them incurable character flaws as explanation.
“Millennials do not see voting as a duty,” says The Economist, “and therefore do not feel morally obliged to do it.” And in The Atlantic: “There’s a huge, inescapable problem with the viability of Millennial politics today: Young people just don’t vote.”
Millennials, in turn, are mostly unruffled by this commentary—they beat on, boats against the bitchy Boomer current. Perhaps they sense that this criticism might be misinformed, that it’s recycled by each new crop of older folks who are convinced the nation will end with their successors.
Is the perception that today’s American youth are uniquely terrible voters actually true?
To find out, I looked at voter turnout data in every presidential election since 1964 from the most complete set of voting data available, the U.S. Census. The data are separated into four age brackets: 18–24, 25–44, 45–64, and 65+. In 1968 and 1964, the youngest age brackets are composed only of people 21 to 24 years old; 1972 was the first year that 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds could vote, after the Supreme Court ratified the 14th Amendment in March of that year.
This illustrates what we know to be true—that young people vote at the lowest rates, and gradually improve as they get older. This pattern holds for every generation included in this data. What doesn’t remain constant, however, is the rate by which turnout rates improve as a generation ages.
The chart below demonstrates the average voter turnout within a generation in a given election year. This is based on widely accepted generational timelines: Greatest (b. 1901–1924), Silent (b. 1925–1942), Boomers (b. 1943–1964), Generation X (b. 1965–1979), and Millennials (b. 1980–2000). For example, in 1984 the Silent Generation spanned the 25–44 and 45–64 age groups, so their turnout rate is logged as 64.1% — an average of 58.4% turnout among 25–44s and 69.8% among 45–64s that year. In 1988, they fell solely into the 45–64 group.
Yes, Millennials and Gen X’ers had a rough start—they voted at 32.3% and 40.8% in 2000 and 1984 respectively, the first years that the oldest among them were eligible. But they’ve showed up at the polls in increasingly large numbers much faster than any generation before them did. Millennials added 18 percentage points to their turnout rate between their first and fifth elections⎯Boomers only added 4 percentage points between their first and fifth. When the relative turnout increase between elections so far among Gen X’ers and Millennials is extrapolated to future elections, as it is in the chart below, the trend lines show that both groups are projected to vote at unprecedented rates for the rest of their lives.
There’s also the possibility that millennials will surpass this prediction. The rising anti-Trump tide might disrupt past trends; in the UK, 66.4% of young people voted in the first Post-Brexit election—a 23.4 percentage point increase from the 2015 general election.
Is the increase in millennial election turnout the chicken or the egg? Like I mentioned earlier, the first election that the oldest millennials were eligible to vote in was in 2000. Only 32.3% of 18–24s turned up that year to choose between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The ramifications of the results of that election—chiefly, a naively waged war—will arguably continue to resonate for centuries, and could reasonably have lit a fire underneath young feet. Alternatively, as millennials come of age and develop a generational ethos, their rising numbers (i.e. friends and role models who are voting too) are beginning to manifest in what may someday be the story of the meteoric rise of their civic engagement.
Whatever the explanation might be, the fact is that the comparative progress of today’s youngest members of the electorate is repeatedly buried in flat turnout-rate analyses that seek to prove preconceived notions of millennials’ collective apathy.
Although the demographics look promising, every election is someone’s first—and there are organizations that are trying to speed up the millennial march to the ballot box. In this week’s Other Washington podcast, we talked with former Washington Bus executive director Toby Crittenden about how the Bus recruits young voters. I can vouch firsthand for their efforts—the Bus registered me to vote at a music festival in Eastern Washington when I was in high school. Thanks, Bus.
Data from the United States Census, Historical Reporting Voting Rates: ‘Table A-1. Reported Voting and Registration by Race, Hispanic Origin, Sex, and Age Groups: November 1964 to 2016’.
