While youth continue to vote at lower rates than older Americans, recent election cycles have provided reasons for optimism and shown that candidates and campaigns ignore young people at their peril. Youth were an integral part of President Obama's electorate in both his presidential wins, and 2008 youth voter turnout was one of the highest ever recorded. Young people were influential in the 2016 Democratic nominating contest. In 2018, our most recent estimates show that a record-high 28% of young people voted in the midterms, more than doubling the record-low 13% youth turnout in 2014. Our research has also shown that youth turnout increased in every state for which we have data. Given a record-high youth participation in the 2018 election, the youth vote will likely be decisive again in 2020.

Even more striking is a consequential shift in youth vote choice. In decades past, young people split their votes somewhat evenly between Democrats and Republicans: as recently as 1988, Republican George H.W. Bush won the youth vote on his way to winning the presidency, and as recently as 2002 the national youth vote choice for House candidates was roughly 50-50. However, the last two Democratic presidential candidates won the youth vote by 23 and 18 percentage points respectively. And in 2018, youth supported House Democrats by an extraordinary 35-point margin. This decisive youth vote choice is significant because, if young people participate in large-enough numbers, they can tip an election.

While it's true that young people generally vote at lower levels than older adults, those from older generations voted at similar rates than today's Millennial and Gen Z youth when they were at the same age. Our analysis has found that, for the first presidential election in which a generation's entire 18-24 age cohort was eligible to vote (1972 for Boomers, 1992 for Gen X, 2008 for Millennials), each participated at about a 50% rate. This highlights that lower youth voting rates are not a sign of generational apathy, but of systemic barriers and issues with the culture of political engagement that have plagued young people of various generations for decades.

Read more about: