AUSTIN (KXAN) — The 2020 election saw one of the highest young voter turnouts, according to Tufts University research. It estimated that about 50% of young people voted in 2020, which is 11 percentage points higher than what they saw in 2016. Will it be the same this year?
The answer is all over the board, with some very eager to vote but many feeling apathetic about this year’s election, according to Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics Project at the University of Texas.
“Polling indicates a younger electorate that is somewhat unenthused about the current election cycle,” he said. The characterization of “young voters” are citizens between the ages 18- to 29-years-old, Tufts University research indicates.
How is this election different from 2020?
We were planning to see the same two candidates as 2020 on the ticket this November, but now there is a change after President Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy on July 21. Vice President Kamala Harris is now the Democratic nominee.
Blank said that there is a growing feeling of uncertainty and fear surrounding this election due to Americans lacking trust.
“It’s not just that Republicans don’t trust Democrats and Democrats don’t trust Republicans, it’s that people can’t feel like they can trust groups and institutions in society that have generally lent stability, like the public schools, like universities, like the news media, like doctors and hospitals.”
Joshua Blank, Research Director of the Texas Politics Project
With young people, there is typically a stereotype surrounding their voting patterns: that most don’t vote in elections. Blank refers to this as a “chicken and egg situation.”
Young people often don’t feel heard by politicians and therefore are less inspired to turn out and vote, whereas politicians don’t focus on young voters because they don’t always participate in the election process, Blank said.
How UT students have participated in elections
UT Austin has been analyzing its students’ voting trends since 2014, according to Texas Votes Program Coordinator Sarah Batson.
The institution is part of a national survey done by the Tish College of Civic Life at Tufts University called NSLVE (National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement). There are more than 1,200 participating schools across the country, according to the Tufts University website.
This survey grabs election data and voting records for participating universities and provides statistics showing how many students vote in elections. NSLVE analyzes a series of demographics such as race/ethnicity, gender, age, majors and voting methods.
The green line is the turnout of students who were “eligible” meaning they were able to participate in the election (an American citizen, aged 18 or older). The blue line is students who registered to vote. The yellow line is students who both registered and turned out to vote.
UT saw its highest student-voter turnout, with 75.8% of all students casting their ballots, during the 2020 election, according to NSLVE’s report.
“In 2014, we saw really, really low numbers, so in the past decade, we’ve seen a really great rebound. Now we’re consistently around 50%, although 2022 was a little bit lower,” Batson said.
UT has been consistently above the median of institutions that are a part of NSLVE, according to the report. Texas A&M and University of Houston are some other Texas schools in the national survey. Texas A&M saw that 59.4% of all eligible students voted in 2020 and UH had 62.8% of its students turn out, according to their surveys.
The national median of the student voting rate was 66%, according to NSLVE.
Young perspective at UT
Going against the stereotype of young voters, 21-year-old Sid Reddy, a UT biology major, said he thinks Gen Z is getting more politically active.
“I think in terms of our generation, we’re starting to come into terms with how much voting impacts us,” he said.
He described this election as “one of the wildest presidential elections, probably in our lifetime.” Reddy said it has been “crazy” because of the recent assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump, and Biden dropping out of the race just a week later.
“It almost feels uncivilized in a way, the most it’s ever been. There’s a lot of animosity,” he said.
Reddy is unsure what voter turnout will look like from young people, but he is hopeful that young people will turn out. Nineteen-year-old Laney Windlan, a civil engineering major at UT, said she has heard people around her talk about participating in the election this year.
“What I’ve experienced this year is that young people are pretty engaged in what’s happening in the election, but I know statistically that’s not always the case, so we’ll see,” she said. She hopes more young people turn out this year.
“I think maybe this year there might be some change, hopefully,” she said when talking about youth participation.
Abigail Marler, a 21-year-old math major at UT, thinks that social media helps young people stay informed with what’s going on in politics. It is a domino effect that if more people are seeing information online about candidates then more people are talking about it, according to Marler.
This might not change the amount of young people actually going out to cast their ballots though, Marler said.
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Voters wait in line to cast their ballots at the Flawn Academic Center on the University of Texas at Austin campus on Tuesday, March 1, 2016 in Austin, Texas. Voters from Vermont to Colorado, Alaska to American Samoa and a host of states in between were heading to polling places and caucus sites on the busiest day of the 2016 primaries. (AP Photo/Tamir Kalifa) -
A line of mostly students wait to vote at a Texas primary election polling site on the University of Texas campus, Tuesday, March 6, 2018, in Austin, Texas. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)
“You have to still be excited about it. You have to go out of your way to go vote on Election Day, but I think it definitely brings more awareness about voting,” she said.
Through her experience at UT, Marler said the school does a good job around elections by having voter registration forms, information about candidates and polling stations. She said that people have come into her classes and given out voter registration forms.
“Every single election, there’s definitely people on Speedway like students, faculty and outside people from the community tabling for candidates,” she said. “You can’t miss it and it makes you naturally think about it.”
Marler does think it will be hard for UT students to top the nearly 76% student voter turnout in 2020 since the country is in a different place — we’re out of a pandemic. This was a main reason why people voted, Marler said, as people were passionate about wanting a change.
Moving forward
The state of Texas requires high schools to have voter registration forms available every year for students eligible to vote elections, according to the Texas Secretary of State website. The law was put into effect in 1983, and is supposed to give registration forms to high school students who are 17 years and 10 months old or older.
The state has not been regulating this law so well, according to reporting done by The Texas Tribune. The report found that some schools were not distributing these forms like the law requires.
The secretary of state’s office, who created the “instructions” of the law, does not track compliance, the Tribune reported. This means that schools that don’t distribute the forms aren’t penalized.
Batson said she thinks the amount of young people interested in politics is growing based on statistics like NSLVE and her own personal experiences working within politics.
“I think what you’re seeing is that younger voters are really thoughtful about politics. They really care about what’s happening in the country. They just need a reason to believe that voting is that best conduit,” Batson said.
Batson, being a part of the young voter demographic as a 23-year-old UT graduate student, encourages her peers to vote even if they feel discouraged.
“I think that it’s actually even more important, when the choices aren’t easy, to make them anyways,” Batson said. “That’s why we vote — not to make easy decisions, but to make hard ones.”