The Republican Party, especially under the leadership of The Man Who Lost an Election and Tried To Steal It, has had a somewhat rocky relationship with facts and truth. But they do seem to take facts seriously when it suits them—or, more accurately, when not doing so would harm their political interests. Facts, and their interests, are what drives the Party of Trump’s despicably demagogic and fascistic approach to young voters.
One fact has become increasingly clear to Republicans in the Era of Fuck a L’Orange: Young voters really don’t like them very much, and those voters represent a chunk of the electorate that the Trumpist party ignores at their own peril.
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The numbers don’t lie. The highly respected Democratic data firm Catalist recently released its comprehensive analysis of voter data from the 2022 midterms, when Democrats performed historically well for a party holding the White House. Support from young people was even more decisive in that Democratic success than many of us realized:
Gen Z and Millennial voters had exceptional levels of turnout, with young voters in heavily contested states exceeding their 2018 turnout by 6% among those who were eligible in both elections. Further, 65% of voters between the ages of 18 and 29 supported Democrats, cementing their role as a key part of a winning coalition for the party. While young voters were historically evenly split between the parties, they are increasingly voting for Democrats. Many young voters who showed up in 2018 and 2020 to elect Democrats continued to do the same in 2022.
The chart below shows that millenials (born between 1981 and 1996) and Gen Z (born between 1997 and 2012) represented a greater share of those who voted in 2022 versus 2018, and voted more often for Democrats to boot. More specifically, Team Blue increased its share of voters in 2022 aged 18-29 by a full 3 points over 2020, when Joe Biden beat Trump by a decisive 4.5% margin.
The comparison of 2022 to 2018 is so meaningful because 2018 saw a “blue tsunami,” with Democrats sweeping back into House and Senate majorities. This data shows that young people had become even more Democratic four years after that wave election. Additionally, as Catalist noted: “turnout trends in the most heavily contested races were different than they were in less contested parts of the country. In heavily contested races, turnout among Gen Z and Millennials went up, exceeding 2018’s ‘Blue Wave’ high water mark.”
More broadly, the percentage of young people voting Democratic nationally has increased significantly over the past decade-plus, with that percentage exceeding 60% in four consecutive elections for the first time ever. Each of those elections took place after the twice-impeached disgraced former guy took over the GQP.
As the Catalist report further explained:
Democratic support among young voters is partly due to the diversity of this group, as America becomes more diverse over time. But that is not the whole story. Democratic support was higher among young voters of color, both nationally (78%) and in highly contested races (also 78%). But support among young white voters rose between 2018 (53% national, 52% highly contested races) and 2022 (58% nationally, 57% highly contested races). This 5-6 point support change is notable, indicating a broad base of Democratic support among young voters across the country.
Other data also confirms this trend. Tufts political scientist Brian Schaffner, who has examined the statistics and related research at length, told The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall: “I think it’s a real shift.” He continued: “I don’t think it is just a Trump thing,” it’s also about “issue positions.”
Young voters of every race are solidly Democratic (and, interestingly, the partisan gender gap we have long seen appears to be nonexistent among young voters, at least based on 2022), and the trend lines are moving increasingly in that direction. These facts are good news for America. For Republicans? Not so much. But they explain why, as Dartagnan has detailed at Daily Kos, Republicans have essentially declared war on young voters. Their goal is to make it much harder for young people to vote—in particular those most likely to vote Democratic—as part of a broader war on voting rights that also targets lower-income folks and Americans of color.
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Right-wingers really don’t want college students to vote, and they’ve said the quiet part out loud. The Washington Post described Cleta Mitchell as “a top Republican legal strategist.” Yeah, legal strategy was what she provided Trump while on the call where, in addition to mentioning “Cleta” by name, he ordered Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find him enough votes to flip the state from blue to red in 2020. Sounds more like “illegal” strategy.
Anyway, since then Mitchell has been flapping her gums about college students having it too easy when it comes to voting. The democracy-supporting principle behind that is … what exactly? Anyhoo, she was caught on tape denigrating them harshly: “What are these college campus locations? What is this young people effort that they do? They basically put the polling place next to the student dorm so they just have to roll out of bed, vote, and go back to bed.”
Democratic election attorney Marc Elias made a compelling point to The Washington Post about Mitchell’s slanderous remarks: “Imagine if in every place in this presentation where she references campuses, she talked about African Americans. Or every place she says students, she instead talked about Latinos. There is a subtle but real bigotry that goes on when people target young voters because of their age.”
Not every Republican effort to hinder young people from casting their votes has succeeded, but to cite just one example, in Idaho they did manage earlier this year to ban college IDs as a form of voter identification. The fact that voter registration for those who are 18 and 19 years old increased by a whopping 66% from 2018 to 2022 may have provided some extra motivation to pass that particular law.
Conservatives love to claim that the changes they have proposed to voting and elections are purely principled, not at all partisan, and all about “integrity.” In reality, their efforts have as much integrity as the proceedings brought against Delta House by Messrs. Marmalard and Niedermeyer in “Animal House”—backed by Dean Wormer, who, if real, would doubtlessly have found his way onto G. Gordon Liddy’s staff—but I digress.
Even worse, it’s not only that the Trumpists are trying to stop young people from voting, they also aim to control what schools are teaching so that those young Americans who do get around the barriers are more likely to vote the “right” way.
In red states from Florida to Texas and everywhere in between, the Republican war on young people has taken aim at education in the broadest sense, both in the classroom as well as school and public libraries. Right-wingers want to counter the so-called “liberal indoctrination” they claim lost them a generation or more of young people with actual indoctrination.
While there is a kernel of truth to the conservative claim about left indoctrination, it pales in comparison to actions by the Trumpist side, which are backed by the force of state power. That kernel being, for example, requirements at some institutions that applicants for faculty jobs not only endorse progressive principles on DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) but explain how they have in the past and how they will in the future advance DEI goals. This is a nonstarter for those who, for whatever reason, don’t agree with those principles and goals and which 50% of 1,500 college faculty asked in a recent survey considered to be a violation of academic freedom.
Conservatives want to limit the information students can hear in school (or read about in library books) on racism in America by banning nonexistent K-12 lessons on critical race theory or gender identity/LGBTQ+ issues. Increasingly, we’re seeing more conservative Christians just keep their kids out of school altogether by homeschooling them, in large part in the hope that those kids will stay within their parents’ ideological and religious boundaries, and then continue to spread those “traditional values” when they have their own growing families.
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Here’s just one especially egregious example: Florida Gov. Ron DeSaster signed into law SB 266, which went into effect on July 1. The law literally tells professors at public colleges what they can and cannot teach in required general education courses. The law states that they “may not distort significant historical events or include a curriculum that teaches identity politics … or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” And of course it’s the government that determines what constitutes a distortion. As Brian Leiter, Karl N. Llewellyn professor of jurisprudence and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy, and Human Values at the University of Chicago, put it: “as state-mandated ideological indoctrination goes, this is remarkably brazen.”
To be sure, Democrats can’t get complacent—they still have work to do when it comes to the youth of America if they want 2024 to be another successful election year. But Republicans find themselves in real trouble there as greater numbers of young people learn what’s actually going on. Additionally, more young people are staying liberal as they move into their 30s than in previous eras. Meanwhile, the Party of Trump seems to have given up on trying to persuade them, instead seeing them as an enemy who must be blocked from even casting a ballot in the first place. It hasn’t always been this way.
The 26th Amendment to the Constitution reads: “The right of citizens of the United States, who are 18 years of age or older, to vote, shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any state on account of age.” Did you know that this amendment was ratified faster than any other in our country’s history? Back in 1971, it took barely 100 days for the necessary three-quarters of the states to ratify it after Congress signed off. These included states where Republicans dominated as well as those where Democrats were in charge.
Why did the amendment pass in the first place? Well, as this post at Rock the Vote lays out, it wasn’t because (as Republicans did with redistricting in many states after 2010) one party, sensing an advantage, won a strong enough majority to take unilateral action. Going back to World War II, the push to lower the voting age began in earnest after we lowered the draft age from 21 to 18 in 1942. The phrase “old enough to fight, old enough to vote,” had a certain logic to it. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, a centrist, in his 1954 State of the Union address called for the passage of a constitutional amendment to lower the voting age to 18.
The Vietnam war, in which so many Americans under 21 were drafted, fought, and died, brought a new urgency to the issue. After a 1970 federal law lowered the voting age to 18 for federal, state, and local elections, the Supreme Court struck it down, saying Congress could only address federal contests. Congress swiftly responded with the 26th Amendment. It passed unanimously in the Senate less than four months after the court’s decision. Thirteen days later, the House passed it 401-19. Only seven Democrats and 12 Republicans voted “no.”
In that instance, both parties came together to change the Constitution and expand voting rights because—wait for it—it was the right thing to do. Democrats and Republicans alike believed that getting young people to vote and encouraging them to take greater part in our democracy was good for our country. They both recognized that democratic principles required that those who could be called upon to make the ultimate sacrifice ought to have the same voice in choosing our leaders as every other adult. Fancy that.
Upon the amendment’s passage, Richard Nixon—who certainly did not shrink from partisan behavior or taking political advantage when he could—praised the speed of ratification as evidence of “our Nation’s confidence in its youth and its trust in their responsibility. It also reinforces our young people’s dedication to a system of government whose Constitution permits ordered change.” Compare that sentiment to the aforementioned remarks by Mitchell, the person crafting the Republican attacks on youth voting now. That campaign is motivated solely by a desire for partisan gain to acquire more power for their party with no concern for whether it debases our democracy. Which it does.
On a related note, extending the Voting Rights Act also used to be a bipartisan affair not all that long ago. In 2006 Republicans had the majority in the House and Senate, and George W. Bush was president. A 25-year extension to the act passed the Senate unanimously, and passed the House 390-33.
Unfortunately, the VRA was gutted by the Supreme Court in 2013’s Shelby County v. Holder decision, and further in 2021’s Brnovich v. DNC decision, rendering it largely toothless as a means to fight racial discrimination in the voting and elections process. (A case from June, Allen v. Milligan, saw the court decline to weaken the VRA further, as they ruled it could still be used in some instances for some of its originally intended purpose.)
Since then, Congress could certainly have chosen to craft a revised version reestablishing a robust mechanism to protect voting rights that also addressed the (conservative) court’s (highly partisan bullshit) concerns. However, that would have taken strong support from each side of the aisle, something that hasn’t been forthcoming from one particular side. Where’s the bipartisanship now?
There are lots of ways to win elections. The one most consistent with the basic principle of democracy is that you try to convince more voters to vote for you than for any other candidate. I wish every American politician and party were committed enough to democracy to pursue only that approach, whether we’re talking about young voters or any other group. Given what we know about the Republican Party today, that wish isn’t coming true any time soon.
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Ian Reifowitz is the author of The Tribalization of Politics: How Rush Limbaugh’s Race-Baiting Rhetoric on the Obama Presidency Paved the Way for Trump (Foreword by Markos Moulitsas)
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