Young People Have Never Been Good at Voting. Will 2020 Be Any Different?
The Crimson checked in with Justin Y. Tseng ’22, the head of the Harvard Public Opinion Project — a student-led group that conducts the Institute of Politics Youth Poll — to answer that question.
Photo by Sara Komatsu
By Jasper G. Goodman, Crimson Staff Writer
Young people today are known for many things. Voting has never been one of them.
Can a presidential election featuring a pair of two men who went to college in the 1960s change that?
Perhaps not in the long term. But an increase in political engagement over the past four years could make them a factor on Nov. 3.
Polling shows that there is no mystery to who the majority of young people will be voting for. An important question remains as to how many of them will turn out, however. And that number may hinge more on who many of them are turning out to vote against.
A Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll released last month showed former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. with a whopping 33 point lead among likely young voters — a 10 point jump from earlier in the summer. (Hillary Clinton held a 28 point lead among likely young voters, with more of them indicating that they would support a third-party candidate in the IOP’s fall 2016 poll.)
But Biden has had his own struggles with young voters in the past. In the Democratic primaries, he struggled to consolidate support among young voters. To help try to solve that problem, he has hired the man who led the IOP’s for 20 years: John Della Volpe.
In every election since 1984, 18- to 29-year-olds have turned out at lower rates than any other age group — by a long shot. So what can be done to change that?
The Crimson talked to Justin Y. Tseng ’22, the head of the Harvard Public Opinion Project, the student-led IOP group that conducts the Youth Poll, to answer that question.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
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The Harvard Crimson: I want to start by asking, why is it that, historically, young people have been so bad at getting to the polls?
Justin Y. Tseng ’22: This is actually one of the key questions that led to HPOP existing in the first place. Through the years, we’ve looked at this question. And every year, it changes. But what we’ve settled on is really a combination of two big reasons, the first of which is access, and the second of which is motivation.
Talking about access first, we’ve seen that there are a lot of barriers to voting that have gone up across the board, across states, not only this year, but in the decades in the past. Young people might actually find it pretty hard to vote. People might not know how to mail in ballots, or register to vote from campuses. So it’s really important that people spend more resources to educate people on how exactly they can vote.
It’s also very important for us to address voter laws that might, in theory, protect democracy, but actually hinder it. In some states, it’s actually harder for college students to register to vote, so if we want to increase student turnout, we have to address those barriers as well.
On the point of motivation, we found that young people tend to vote when they feel that politics and being engaged in politics can have tangible results. There actually are a whole lot of struggles that young people face everyday that we think the government should address, and the question is whether candidates speak to that or not. Are candidates speaking to the issues that we find relevant in our lives, and are they giving us a reason to go out to vote for them?
I think in the past, we’ve seen that a lot of candidates actually haven’t done so well on these two fronts, which is why youth turnout tends to be pretty low.
THC: In 2016, turnout was down from where it was in 2008, the last time an open-seat presidential election was held. What has happened since then, and should we expect that trend to continue in 2020?
JYT: We’ve found, in the last few years, that young people are getting more enthusiastic about participating in politics. And while in the past, this might have been from motivation to vote for a candidate, we find that there’s actually a lot of motivation to participate because of problems that young people see in society. But just looking at enthusiasm, we can see that enthusiasm to vote is definitely up. In 2016, we found that about 49 percent of respondents to our poll said they were definitely planning on voting in the election. This year, we’ve actually seen that increase to 63 percent saying that they will definitely be voting, in our September survey. Now, these numbers won’t reflect the actual turnout, but it does reflect a real increase in enthusiasm to turn out to the polls.
But to really understand why people are more enthusiastic about voting, I think we can look to our past polls. In our spring poll, we saw that young liberals were particularly motivated by President Trump. So I think after a few years of seeing President Trump, young liberals are looking at him, and looking at his lack of response to a lot of issues — such as the environment; this was our spring poll, so COVID was also brought in, but also housing, and mental health — as reasons to participate in politics. In our fall poll, which is coming up, we want to better understand all of this. To do that, we’re going to look at how young people think we can best effect change, and what issues they think the government should do more on.
THC: Your polling has shown that Trump’s numbers are pretty much in the toilet among young people. But young people were hardly lining up to support Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries, either. Does that present a problem for the Biden campaign going forward?
JYT: That’s a very important question — and that’s a question that the Biden campaign has to address if it wants to win big in the fall. I preface with this: There’s an image of our generation that we’re all socialists or Bernie supporters, and that we’re all on the streets marching for communism. But our research suggests that we’re a lot more nuanced than that. There are different blocs of young voters, and there are people who are sympathetic to democratic socialist ideas, but there are certainly a lot of young voters who are more moderate. There may have been a bloc of voters in the primaries that just didn’t find a candidate that suited them — they may not have supported Biden, and they may not have supported Bernie. This kind of returns to our question of motivation. These more moderate young voters might have thought that these candidates weren’t exactly speaking to them, so they weren’t going to turn out.
But what we’re seeing now is, these young voters, even though they might not have had their candidate — a candidate that they supported — in the primaries, they actually do have political opinions on the president, either for or against him. And what we’ve been seeing is a lot of people are not motivated especially for Joe Biden, but they’re motivated to vote against Donald Trump. We see this in our data. In our September survey, we found that Joe Biden led by an astounding 33 percent, which is a lot. This is Obama-McCain level margins, and that was a historic year for youth turnout. People might not be enthusiastic about supporting Biden, but they’re voting anyways, and that signals to us that there is enthusiasm for defeating Trump.
THC: Given that animosity about President Trump, what is next for the Republican Party? Why does Trump repel millennials and Gen Z voters so much, and what can the party do to bring more young people in?
JYT: I think it’s important to start with Trump. Our spring poll suggested that moderates and independents have a more negative view of the whole Republican Party because of him, and young people on the left are more politically motivated just because of the president.
To demonstrate this, we can actually look to a focus group we did last week during the first presidential debate. We did this focus group with college students from all across the country, from community colleges to HBCUs to state schools and to Ivy League schools, and what we found was, once Trump started interrupting Biden, people were very turned off by what they called his “childish behavior.” they called the whole situation bizarre, they criticized his combativeness, and they thought he derailed the discussion. So that’s going on in the minds of a lot of young people. And the Republican Party after Trump needs to think about how they’re going to reverse that image — of them being childish, derailing, and unproductive. Because what we’ve seen now is that this seeps through.
It’s not only about Trump right now. It’s also about issues that young voters really care about, and this is across party lines, too — young conservatives feel this as well. We’ll have a better idea of what approval ratings of various Republican politicians look like in the fall, but our summer poll suggests that Trump might actually be a drag on the whole party. And so the GOP needs to ask itself, post-Trump, how can we reverse this image? How can we address this image that young people care about? And their own voter base, too, has told us that they care about issues like housing and mental health, they’re worried and anxious as well, even though Democrats might be more notable for worrying about these things.
Honestly, a step forward for the Republican Party is to listen to young people — listen to young conservatives, and listen to young moderates, as well, because there’s more young moderates out there than they might think.
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