The US presidential election is on a knife edge. The polls are predicting 50/50 races in several states, including Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina and Nevada.
The results in these states are likely to be crucial in deciding whether it is the Democratic nominee, Kamala Harris, or her Republican rival, Donald Trump, who will be sitting in the White House come January 2025. The youth vote will play a key role in determining victory in such a tight race.
Younger voters in the US have leaned heavily towards the Democratic party in recent presidential elections. But this is a relatively new phenomenon. In 2000, young Americans aged 18 to 30 voted for George Bush and Al Gore at an almost identical rate to the general population, favouring Democrat Gore by 48% to 47%.
The swell in youth support for the Democrats only began with Barack Obama in 2008, when he defeated John McCain by two to one in this demographic (66% to 32%). This was followed by a slightly smaller – albeit still substantial – margin of victory for Obama over Mitt Romney (60% to 37%) in 2012. The current US president, Joe Biden, enjoyed a similar advantage over Trump among young voters in 2020 (61% to 36%).
Youth support for the Democrats has proved to be particularly strong among young women, and Latino and black voters who are opposed to the illiberalism of Trump’s Republican party. Polls suggest that Biden secured an estimated 67%, 69% and 89% of the vote respectively from these groups four years ago.
Young women also drove a surge in youth participation in the 2022 midterms in reaction to a Supreme Court ruling that now allows states to deny women the right to abortion. This contributed to results that were much better than expected for the Democrats in Congress.
Youth turnout in the US is low by international standards. But in the 2020 presidential election – a highly polarised race between Biden and Trump – a record half of young Americans turned out to vote. This compared to around two-thirds of the registered electorate, which was itself the highest rate of turnout for over a century.
On the surface, Harris’s presidential bid might have been expected to boost youth support and participation further. She is a woman of mixed heritage with socially progressive views, who is generally seen as likeable and is the antithesis of Trump.
And younger voters do, indeed, prefer Harris to Trump, but by an unconvincing margin, compared with support for previous Democratic candidates. In a recent opinion poll conducted by YouGov and the Economist, 55% of young people stated that they would vote for Harris compared to 39% for Trump.
This speaks of a broader disillusionment with electoral politics among young Americans. There is some disaffection over the Biden administration’s lack of action over issues such as climate change, gun control and the war in Gaza.
But, most importantly in this election, there is a sense that neither party has attended to the economic hardships that have left young Americans feeling that they are unlikely to be better off than their parents’ generation.
After being buffeted by high inflation, today’s young people (gen Z) are spending over 30% more on housing, almost 50% more on health insurance, and twice as much on car insurance than millennials.
The 2016 presidential race showed that young people in the US are much more supportive of Bernie Sanders’ more radical version of the Democratic party than has been offered by Clinton, Biden and Harris – the more centrists candidates who have made it through to become the Democratic candidate in the past three elections. In the 2016 primaries, more young Americans voted for Sanders than for Clinton and Trump put together.
Increasing youth turnout
The lack of enthusiasm for establishment Democratic party candidates means that efforts to bring out the youth vote are of central importance. This is particularly true in the key states Harris needs to win to become president.
In the 2020 election, voter registration drives among young people played a key role in Democratic wins in incredibly tight state races. In Georgia, for example, it is widely accepted that the large increase in youth turnout flipped the state for Biden in a race that came down to just 12,000 votes.
Last month, I spent time in Philadelphia, a city at the heart of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is the most important swing state in the US, with 19 of the country’s 538 electoral college votes. When I was there, I spoke to young people and a leader of PA Youth Vote, a bipartisan initiative set up to improve youth voter registration and turnout in the state.
PA Youth Vote had a clear understanding that, to increase youth turnout, they need to focus on making young people aware of how politics and voting matters for their everyday lives, and how they can have an impact on the issues they care about in their local areas by engaging with local officials and the democratic process.
The aim of the initiative is to meet “the youth where they are, going to their schools, their neighbourhoods and their spaces” to give young people a positive reason to go out and vote.
The Harris campaign – and US politics in general – can learn a lot from these grassroots movements. Their efforts to make politics matter for young Americans have the potential to increase youth participation.
The success of these bipartisan efforts to bring out the youth vote will undoubtedly be critical to the presidential race, given the preference of young people for Harris over Trump. But it is critical for American democracy that politicians engage with young people on the issues they care about, such as education, crime, policing and poverty, all the time – and not just when asking for votes.
On returning to the airport on the way back from Pennsylvania, I was speaking to the young African-American man who was driving my taxi. He believed that Trump was a racist, but also that neither party would do anything for him and his community. In his view, there was no point in voting, even in a key marginal state.
This highlights the lack of proper discussion in the presidential race about how persistent economic inequalities are undermining American democracy in a very material sense for individual young people.
James Sloam does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.
