Vox:
According to NBC News’s exit polls, the Democratic electorate actually skewed older in Tuesday’s primary compared to past primaries. In 2008 and 2016, 13 and 18 percent of the electorate, respectively, was 65 and older. In 2020, it was 24 percent….
Before Tuesday, voters younger than 30 were not keeping pace with the overall increase in voter turnout. In fact, young voters’ share of the electorate went down in three of the first four states compared with 2016.
On Tuesday night, not a single state saw an increase in young voters’ share of the electorate, according to exit polls conducted by Edison Research and sponsored by several of the television networks.
According to USA Today:
In Alabama, only 7% of the voters were in the 17-29 range compared to 14% in 2016….
In North Carolina, 13% of Tuesday’s electorate were young voters, compared to 16% four years ago…..
In South Carolina, young voters made up 11% of the electorate Tuesday compared to 15% in 2016…..
In Vermont, only 10% of the state’s electorate were under 30 compared to 15%.
And a similar trend was playing out in Texas where 16% of voters were between 17 and 29 compared to 20% in 2016.
www.usatoday.com/...
The media have covered this mainly as an explanation for Sanders’ losses, but what I am most concerned about is what it means for the general election. Based on 2018 voting patterns as well as the fact that Sanders’ base skews overwhelmingly young and Sanders was the frontrunner going into the primary, I thought young voters would be a much bigger proportion of the primary electorate. Why is the opposite happening?
I can think of three possible explanations:
1. Republican efforts to suppress the youth vote were even more vicious and effective than in 2016. Republicans have used the state and local positions they won in 2016 to further increase requirements for proof of residency and possession of driver’s licenses and voter IDs and making it harder for college students to vote, and it’s working as Republicans hoped. This would be horrible for Democrats’ general election chances.
2. Unlike older Democrats who are more likely to have a favorite from previous years and/or may have more time and knowledge with which to evaluate candidates, a lot of young Democrats are so overwhelmed by the large number of Democratic candidates still running that they are tuning out the primary because they don’t have a strong favorite and don’t have time or energy to learn enough about all the candidates to decide on a favorite. This may not necessarily be too bad for Democrats’ chances in the general election, as the choice will be between just Trump and a Democrat then, and most youth will like any Democrat better than Trump, but it makes me nervous because it could mean that a lot of young Democrats are not very energized by any of the current frontrunners.
3. Young Democrats are energized and turning out in higher numbers than in 2016, but older Democrats are even more energized and turning out in even higher numbers, thus dwarfing the youth voter surge. Maybe higher voter turnout meant that a lot of voters had to wait in line, and younger voters were more likely than older voters to get discouraged and walk away from lines without voting. Most of the 2020 Democratic primaries have had a lot more turnout than in 2016, which is reassuring. This explanation wouldn’t necessarily bode poorly for Democrats’ chances in the general election, although it makes me worried about whether older Republicans are even more energized than their Democratic counterparts (there are a lot more old Republicans than there are old Democrats), and whether the even longer lines for general election voting will discourage even more young (mostly Democratic-leaning) voters. We need to get more polling places opened, more vote-by-mail opportunities, and more early voting opportunities set up wherever we can.
I’m very worried about what the relatively low youth primary turnout means for Democrats’ general election chances, because historically, the rate at which young voters turned out for the general election correlated directly with how many wins Democrats got up and down the ballot. Young voters are the most strongly Democratically leaning age group, as well as the age group that has long had the lowest voter turnout, even though youth voted more in 2018 than they did in previous midterm elections. In 2016, only 50% of about 24 million eligible youth, ages 18-29 voted.
What other explanations can you all think of for why youth were a smaller proportion of Democratic primary voters in 2020 than in 2016?