William Upski Wimsatt: Youth Vote Did it for Dems
News: Under-30s are not apathetic. But they're not stupid either.
November 16, 2006
|
|
The secret weapon in last Tuesday's historic election was a constituency Democrats barely bothered to recognize: young people.
Continuing a trend begun in 2004, this year's election may have produced the highest youth mid-term turnout ever. Early estimates suggest that 10 million voters under the age of 30 made up 13% of the electorate. They helped Democrats in close elections sweep into office in 25 states.
We know because our organization, the League of Young Voters, turned out 150,000 young voters who made the difference in races in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, California, and Florida. We were just one of dozens of independent, under-the-radar, youth-led efforts to inspire and turn out young voters.
Young people are progressive on issues such as abortion, gay marriage, and immigration. Most think the country is on the wrong track, and oppose the war. They vote Democratic by a 2 to 1 margin. So why are young people overlooked by political campaigners and pundits? The answer is what we call the myth of youth apathy.
Since the 80s, pundits have decried youths' supposed disengagement from politics. In 1971, when the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18, there was hope that young people might infuse the electorate with a new idealism. Millions voted the following year.
Then Watergate happened, and youth voting interest slowly went the way of faith in "good government," an idea finally crushed during the Reagan/Bush I years. Soon the media was fixated on youth apathy. What will it take, they asked, to get young people to take politics as seriously as they take their videogames and their hip-hop?
But as youth voter turnout rates dropped, non-electoral political activity soared. The UCLA Freshman Survey and Harvard's Institute of Politics have documented rising levels of voluntarism and activism. College students are now three times more likely to have participated in protests than their Boomer counterparts in the 60s. One in four young Latinos marched in a demonstration in the last year.
We think young people have never been apathetic. They have been skeptical. And there are a lot of perfectly rational reasons for post-Boomers to feel that way.
When Baby Boomers came of age, government was seen as a potential force for positive change. The Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, and the 26th Amendment were examples of good government in action. But since 1972, government has done a lot more to young people than for young people.
We grew up in an era in which trust in government was eroded, and social programs gutted. Hurricane Katrina provided the latest reminder of the three-decade-long abandonment of American inner cities. Post-Boomer youth—especially urban youth of color—are seen as public enemies, and zero tolerance policies criminalize and contain them.
Now our peers return home from Iraq and Afghanistan disfigured, broken, or dead. When President Bush and Congress balloons the federal deficit for war spending while slashing student financial aid, why shouldn't we feel cynical?
In 2004, the mainstream media pinned John Kerry's failed presidential bid on youth apathy. Although there were many reasons Kerry lost, low youth voter turnout was not one of them. Four million new voters between 18 and 29 hit the polls in the biggest youth surge since 1972. Over half were African American or Hispanic. The 2004 election marked a demographic watershed, but because of the myth of youth apathy, the moment was largely lost on the media.
In Ohio, young people instigated the 2004 protests that led to Congressional hearings on voter disenfranchisement. This year, after knocking on 50,000 doors in that battleground state, we are organizing a major precinct-level effort to ensure that people who had been handed provisional ballots at their polling places—predominantly young, poor, or of color—had their votes properly counted.
These are not signs of apathy. They are signs of change and renewal. At a time when idealism is no longer expected of young people, young people are voting in increasingly significant numbers, inspired by their peers and their hopes. To newly elected officials, the question to ask is: what will it take to justify young people's continuing faith in electoral politics?
William Upski Wimsatt is the Executive Director of the League of Young Voters.
