Larissa Mickelson didn’t vote in the 2016 election, but she won’t repeat that mistake on Tuesday.

The 22-year-old graduate student at Michigan State University regrets that absence from the 2016 presidential election, when Donald Trump’s path to the presidency was helped by a narrow 10,704-vote margin of victory in Michigan.

“I don’t think my vote would have made a difference in (Trump) getting elected, but I would have felt better about myself having voted against him,” she said. “I’m definitely voting this year. I don’t want to have someone get in office and not like their decisions and know that I didn’t vote.”

Gabriella Canu, a 21-year-old student at Oakland University from Shelby Township, voted for Trump in 2016, but isn’t sure whether she’ll head to the polls on Tuesday.

“I think it’s very important to vote, but this time around, gosh, I just don’t know anything about the candidates who are running,” she said. “I’ll probably talk to my parents and do some research on my own because I really do want to vote, but I’ve just got to get on it. If worse comes to worse, I guess I’ll vote for the party that I lean more toward and that’s Republican for the most part.”

The varying responses point to the problem in predicting how younger voters might impact the 2018 midterm elections. Traditionally, voters under the age of 30 are among the least reliable voters in the electorate. In 2016, 51 percent of eligible millennial voters — categorized as those between the ages of 20 to 35 — cast ballots in an election when overall turnout was 61 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. Midterm election turnout historically is much worse than in presidential election years.

But there are some signs that 2018 could be a turning point for younger voter participation.

In the August primary, 143,000 young people ages 18-29 voted, nearly three times the 49,000 who voted in 2014.

So far this year, 58,742 Michigan millennials have requested absentee ballots. In 2014, that number was 28,308, and in 2010, it was 25,717 through Election Day, according to East Lansing-based Practical Political Consulting, which tracks voting trends in Michigan.

NextGen America, a California-based organization that has invested $3.5 million in Michigan, has registered 39,662 young voters in Michigan — 257,857 altogether across 11 states.

The Michigan Secretary of State has taken its mobile offices to campuses across Michigan in recent years. This year, the effort netted 2,100 new voters.

Mark Grebner, of Practical Political Consulting, expects the absentee ballots number to be even higher than where it stands now.

“We’re going to see a few thousand more on top of that 58,000 and that’s just the absentee count,” he said, noting that the state is on track toward a record-breaking turnout of more than 4 million people in an election cycle that typically draws closer to just over 3 million voters.

“As we move from 3 million to 4 million voters, that extra million is going to consist of a lot of young people, because you can’t add a lot of older people,” many of whom are already registered to vote, Grebner added.

NextGen America wants to make sure that those who have registered actually also vote on Tuesday. The group’s organizers have parked themselves at Michigan campuses across the state this past week.

Caroline Wolber, an Oakland University alumni, resident of Pontiac and a field organizer for NextGen, staffed a table outside the Kresge Library at OU last week that was stocked with Halloween candy, cupcakes and stacks of literature about the upcoming election. The group is focused on electing Democratic candidates to office, especially in the key and highly competitive 8th and 11th Congressional Districts.

In addition to NextGen, other organizations also have been active in registering voters across the country. They include the music channel MTV and the nonprofit group National VOTE, which had registered more than 800,000 people by the Sept. 26 "National Register to Vote Day." But Michigan Republicans didn't have an organized effort to register voters this year, said Sarah Anderson, spokeswoman for the Michigan Republican Party.

The reasons for Democratic-heavy voter registration efforts become evident when voting patterns emerge after election results roll in. Young voters traditionally vote for Democrats in higher numbers. In 2016, 50 percent of the eligible young voters cast ballots and 55 percent of them voted for Hillary Clinton while 37 percent voted for Trump, according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Massachusetts, which studies issues surrounding young voters.

As NextGen moved from registration to mobilization, Wolber said the questions have become pretty basic.

“People want to know ‘Where do I vote, how do I register?’ And we occasionally get questions about candidates,” she said. “We let them know what they need to bring to the polls because there’s a lot of concern about what’s happening in Georgia and wondering what to do if they’re told they can’t vote. So we’re having a lot of conversations about provisional ballots.”

In Georgia, Secretary of State Brian Kemp, who is also the GOP candidate for governor, has purged more than 1 million names of inactive voters from the state's voter rolls and has implemented a program that voter registration application signatures identically match driving record files

The challenges for first-time young voters is also a big topic for NextGen. According to Michigan election law, many first-time voters have to vote in person and college students face the dilemma of having to try and get home to cast their ballots because they may not qualify to vote by absentee.

"They're frustrated for the most part. It's really inconvenient and I've talked to a lot of students, who say, 'What do you mean, I have to drive home to vote?' " Wolber said. It's anti-democratic and it's an extra dilemma that blocks students from voting."

KaJuan Johnson, a 24-year-old Auburn Hills resident and OU student, didn’t need the added education. He has voted in every election since he turned 18 and feels even more strongly about Tuesday’s election.

“It’s one of the few avenues we have to express how we want the politics to go,” he said. “I’ve been paying more attention this year because in the past two years, I didn’t like the tax cuts, the attempt to roll back some of the policies like the Affordable Care Act and I don’t like the immigration policies. And then we have the rise in the extremist violence going on right now and that’s pretty eerie.”

He voted pretty much straight Democratic in 2016, did some volunteer work for the congressional campaign of Elissa Slotkin, the Democratic candidate in the 8th Congressional District, and will vote for Democrats again this year.

The exact opposite is true for Dylan Berger, 19, president of the College Republicans at the University of Michigan. He feels the stark political divisions in the country have energized young voters on both sides of the aisle.

“Our voters are fired up because of the president and so many of the fantastic results we’ve seen from him,” he said. “And 100 percent, more than anything this cycle, the Kavanaugh hearings fired us up. The fact that they tried to drag his name through the mud is despicable.”

And while Berger has been out on the Diag at U-M, handing out literature for GOP statewide and congressional candidates, the first ballot he’ll cast will land in his hometown of Roslyn, New York.

He has seen the talking points about the low turnout for young people, “They don’t believe they have a stake. They don’t pay taxes. They don’t serve in the military and they seem too apathetic. But nothing could be further from the truth. We’ve got the most at stake.”

Mike Thelen, 21, of Lansing and a junior at U-M, voted in the last presidential election and will vote again Tuesday, but not for one party exclusively.

“I don’t like just straight-ticket voting. I think everyone should pick and choose the actual people and not just vote for a party,” he said, adding he’s planning to vote for Democrats in the top races, but has Republicans he’ll vote for down the ticket.

One sobering number for this election cycle, however, came in a poll last week from EPIC/MRA, a Lansing-based polling firm used by the Detroit Free Press this election cycle.

Only 50 percent of the 18-34 year-olds ranked themselves as a 100 on the enthusiasm scale and sure to vote. Another 26 percent of the millennials gave themselves an 80 or more. Among the older groups: 66 percent of 35 to 49-year-olds, 77 percent of those 50-64 age group and 84 percent of those 65 and older gave themselves a 100.

“The millennials aren’t nearly as enthusiastic as the older folks,” said Bernie Porn, president of EPIC/MRA. “But Proposal 1 (legalization of marijuana for adult recreational use) might influence some young people who might not otherwise be invested in this election.”

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Indeed, Petrit Hila, 18, an OU student from Warren, mentioned the marijuana proposal as one of the things he’s interested in this election cycle.

“I don’t smoke, so it doesn’t mean that much to me personally, but if it economically benefits us, yeah, I might as well vote for it. We should legalize so it’s not as big of a burden on the prison system,” he said, adding the cost of a higher education is much higher on his agenda. “Tuition is getting really high — it’s $6,500 a semester and more if you live on campus.”

And don’t bother telling Natalie Moore, 19, of Grand Rapids and a sophomore at U-M, that young people aren’t pumped for Tuesday. Even though he’s not on the ballot, Trump is the primary reason she’ll cast a ballot.

“I’m voting against anyone who is supporting him,” she said. “He’s so dangerous, and anyone who is supporting him can’t be elected.”

Contact Kathleen Gray: 313-223-4430, kgray99@freepress.com or on Twitter @michpoligal.