Youth voting rates have consistently been increasing – the youth will swamp elderly turnout rates in the 2024 election

It is also the sort of threat that comes up regularly in every even-numbered year of late, as organizations focused on increasing turnout among younger voters insist on touting their own power. That insistence overlaps with the sense of frustration younger Americans feel about being boxed out of positions of power by older people (something about which I’ve written a book). There’s a demand for framing young people as determinative in elections and plenty of organizations willing to leverage that demand. But are they actually determinative? Have youth voting patterns changed in either turnout or in partisanship? It is the case that turnout among voters under 30 has increased in the past few cycles. Estimates from the University of Florida’s Michael McDonald show that 2020 and 2018 each saw unusually high turnout among those youngest voters. We often point to 2008 as an election in which young people played a significant role, but turnout among young voters in 2020 was higher than in the election that brought Barack Obama to power.

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There’s a catch: Obama also enjoyed a wider margin of support among those voters than Biden did in 2020, according to exit polls. Younger voters made up slightly more of the votes Obama received than they did Biden’s. Though of course, Biden’s race was closer than Obama’s, making that support more crucial. Even with those increases in turnout among younger voters, that age group still consistently makes up less of the electorate. You can see voters under 30 in purple below, well below the percentages of the electorate that other age groups constitute. You can also see that the 60-and-up group, in gray, soared in the past few election cycles.

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There’s an easy explanation for why: the baby boom. The surge in births that began in the mid-1940s first caused a bump in the percentage of the electorate ages 30 to 44 (blue) and then ages 45 to 59 (green). Next year, every member of the baby boom generation will be 60 and older, meaning the percentage of the electorate in that age group will probably also increase. Another way of looking at the patterns in turnout is to consider how much of the electorate is made up of voters born in each recent decade. In 2022, Census Bureau data suggests that it was people born in the 1960s — some of them boomers — who were the most represented in the electorate. But their kids, those born in the 1970s, are catching up. Those born in the 1980s and 1990s trail.

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In part, this is because older Americans consistently vote more. There are a lot of reasons for this. Voting is a habit, for example, meaning that people build a pattern of voting into their lives. More important, though, is that voting is easier with a job that has regular hours or for retirees, and it’s easier when you don’t move often, so you don’t have to re-register or locate your new polling place. Voting correlates to homeownership and income, which overlap with age. This is where the pressure on Biden and other Democrats comes into play. Both parties are mostly made up of people ages 50 and up, but the Democratic Party has a greater percentage of members below that age. As I wrote Monday, young people are much more likely than older ones to belong to no party at all. But when they do, they’re usually Democrats. So if youth turnout is down, it is more likely to hurt Democrats — and more likely to hurt the reelection bid of an incumbent Democratic president. This affords leverage for groups that claim to be able to control youth turnout like it’s a spigot — which, of course, it isn’t. Since the election of Obama (and Biden, let’s not forget!) in 2008, there’s been a great deal of attention paid to the trajectory of those young Obama voters. That year was the first year that people born in 1990 could vote; most of the young people who cast ballots were born in the 1980s. The question that has lingered is whether they would continue to vote heavily Democratic as the years passed. Whether, that is, they’d still mirror their younger voting habits though they are no longer that young. This is hard to measure. The American National Election Studies survey, conducted at the time of each presidential election, allows us to track voting preferences by year of birth over time (albeit with a lot of variability). If we take the cumulative preferences for the Democratic presidential candidates of people born in each decade, and compare those preferences with the national level of support for the Democrat (among votes for the two major parties), we can estimate how Americans born in each decade have voted in elections from 1952 to 2020. (We eliminated values with too few respondents.) Dots above the centerline on the charts below show that people born in that decade (identified above the graph) were more supportive of the Democrat than the country overall in the indicated election. Dots below the centerline were less supportive. [Graph Omitted] Since these are relative to national Democratic two-party support, it’s worth noting that this figure was above 50 percent in seven of the last eight presidential contests. (Because of third-party votes, it has often been below 50 percent relative to all votes cast.) So some of the dots that fall below the centerline represent voting that gave a majority of the two-party vote to Democrats anyway. There aren’t a lot of obvious patterns. People born in the 1970s have trended less Democratic relative to the national vote. So have people born in the 1980s, with the peak relative to the national margin occurring in 2004 rather than 2008. (The data for 2020 use a different weighting, but you can see that younger respondents trend more Democratic, as you’d expect.) People born in the 1960s have jumped around more. If the long-term pattern is that once-young voters grow less supportive of Democrats over time (which isn’t explicitly obvious above), it increases the importance for Democrats of now-young voters. That’s why recent polling (including from CNN) showing that young people are split between Biden and Trump is so remarkable. According to an analysis from Pew Research Center, between 14 and 17 percent of votes cast for Democratic congressional or presidential candidates since 2016 came from voters under the age of 30. They also made up between 25 and 33 percent of those who didn’t vote at all. Twice as many Biden votes in 2020 came from voters aged 65 and over but half as many of them stayed home. If you need gains at the margins, as Biden and other Democrats do, the mostly-Democratic-voting-when-they-vote young voter pool is the place to find them. If you can turn them out. This is the leverage that groups focused on youth engagement have over Democratic candidates. They probably have significantly less sway over who turns out and how they vote than broader trends, but it takes steely confidence for a Democratic president to simply wave away that threat.