According to Project Vote’s recent poll, only 79.1 percent of voters under the age of 30 plan to vote in the upcoming midterm elections. In comparison, 94.1 percent of voters over the age of 30 and 99.5 percent of Tea Partiers say that they intend to vote in 2010.
So, why are young people significantly less likely to vote in the upcoming mid-term elections?
Of course, there’s the old cliché that we are apathetic and self-absorbed, that we have no sense of civic duty and can’t be bothered to vote. However, this old cliché just does not match the facts. Record numbers of young people are volunteering their time to their communities. The volunteerism rate of college students is growing more than twice as fast as the volunteerism rate of adults. It seems unlikely that we have enough of a sense of civic duty to spend hours volunteering, but not enough to spend 10 minutes casting a ballot.
Some might argue that we are relatively content with their government, or that college students in particular are insulated from national concerns and economic problems. Yet, youth have strong feelings about the current state of the country. According to the Project Vote poll, 79 percent of youth voters believe that the economy is doing very badly or fairly badly, and almost 60 percent are dissatisfied with the direction of the country as a whole. While these numbers do not express dissatisfaction on the level of the Tea Party, they are rather striking numbers. Furthermore, young people are arguably the group hardest hit by the economic downturn. College students are taking on tens of thousands of dollars in debt and job prospects are looking increasingly dim. Young people have perhaps the most reason to be dissatisfied with their current government and the direction of the economy, yet this dissatisfaction does not appear to translate into higher turnout rates, at least not in the upcoming midterm election.
Maybe the disinterest young people have in voting does not reflect badly on young people at all, but on the media and the candidates themselves. When the national media seems more concerned with whether candidates practiced witchcraft than on what government can do to help students drowning in debt, perhaps a little disinterest in the political process is understandable. If the politicians are disinterested in young people, it should come as no surprise that young people are disinterested in the politicians.
So, help us help you, candidates of 2010. We’ll vote for you when you give us something worth voting for.
Anthony Balady is a legal intern at Project Vote and second-year student at William & Mary Law School. Mr. Balady also serves as vice president of William & Mary’s Election Law Society and editor-in-chief of its election law blog, State of Elections.