As projections from the 2022 midterms continue to trickle in, it’s abundantly clear that Democrats should be thanking the young voters who helped deliver decisive wins on the left, preventing a red wave in Republicans’ favor.
Young voters turned out in a major way.
by Rachel Janfaza, Teen Vogue
An initial look at youth voting patterns shared by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts (CIRCLE) shows that young Americans ages 18-29 overwhelmingly backed Democrats for the U.S. House of Representatives. CIRCLE’s analysis of the Edison Research National Election Pool exit poll found that 63% of young Americans voted for a Democratic candidate for the U.S. House, while 35% of young Americans backed Republican candidates.
With the threat of a national abortion ban on the horizon to far-right candidates promoting climate change denial and threatening to reject election results, according to organizers, there was an overwhelming understanding this cycle of “the stakes of the moment,” said Sunrise Movement’s 25-year-old national spokesperson Ellen Sciales. A mixture of fear and hope, Sciales said, allowed young people to buck speculation that without former president Donald Trump officially on the ballot, they wouldn’t show up.
“It’s never been just about Trump for us. It’s about stopping the climate crisis, protecting our reproductive freedoms, and ending gun violence in our classrooms,” said Sciales, who spent the past 10 days organizing young voters in Wisconsin.
Americans ages 18-29 were the only age cohort to support Democrats for the U.S. House by such a large margin. Voters ages 30-44 split their votes more evenly, 51% for Democrats and 47% for Republicans, according to CIRCLE’s report.
The strongest support for Democrats came from youth of color – 89% of Black youth and 67% of Latino youth voted for a Democratic candidate – CIRCLE said. Young white voters were more evenly split across party lines with 58% supporting Democrats and 40% backing Republicans.
“Young people show up when we see that our future is on the line. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, we showed up. After former president Donald Trump’s dangerous policies and inaction on the pandemic, we showed up. On Tuesday, we again showed up because we are infuriated by the far-right attacks on our future,” said Jack Lobel, 18-year-old spokesperson for Voters of Tomorrow, a Gen Z-led youth voter engagement and education organization with chapters in more than 20 states.
In addition to their on-the-ground work, Voters of Tomorrow hosted text and phone banks to turn out young voters, and 40,000 people engaged recently with the group’s online voting hub, the group said.
From John Fetterman’s victory over Mehmet Oz in Pennsylvania and incumbent senator Maggie Hassan’s success in New Hampshire to incumbent governors Gretchen Whitmer and Tony Evers’s wins in Michigan and Wisconsin, Gen Z and younger millennial support of Democratic candidates appeared to be crucial in fending off Republican victories in key states.
CIRCLE’s state-by-state analysis shows that young Americans backed Democrats by wide margins in the Pennsylvania Senate race (70% to 28%), New Hampshire Senate race (74% to 23%), Michigan governor’s race (62% to 36%), and Wisconsin governor’s race (70% to 30%).
The same analysis shows that young Americans strongly supported Democrats in other key races, including those that have yet to be called in the Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada Senate races.
While President Biden and the Democratic majority in DC have made historic climate investments, canceled a significant chunk of student loan debt, pardoned federal marijuana offenses, led negotiations on the first bipartisan gun safety bill in 30 years, and pushed back against the destruction of abortion access over the past two years, Republicans have floated a national abortion ban, denied the climate crisis, passed bills restricting voting rights, and played down or outright supported the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021.
“I’m old enough to remember when people would say there’s no difference between Republicans and Democrats. There’s a very clear distinction today,” said Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, the 40-year-old president and executive director of NextGen America, which worked to mobilize young voters mainly in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin during this cycle. NextGen, along with the progressive PAC MoveOn and Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, hosted youth-vote rallies in Nevada, Texas, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania in the lead-up to Election Day.
“It’s very clear that the position of the Republican Party has really been overtaken by MAGA. Extremist Republicans don’t have very much in common with the vast majority of young people and the vision they want for their country,” Tzintzún Ramirez said.
That sentiment was echoed by Teddy Landis, a veteran youth-vote organizer who spent more than a month this fall in Wisconsin. “Governor Evers and the Democratic candidates ran on policies that were common sense to young people like raising the minimum wage, fighting climate change, protecting reproductive rights, and fully funding our state universities. Republicans ran on the extreme opposites,” he said.
For his part, Peter Matarweh, a 21-year-old organizer with Un-PAC, a nonpartisan, youth-led group focused on voting rights, said that in conversations on campus at the University of Michigan there was an emphasis on preserving young Americans’ rights. “I personally have seen the issues of rights — whether they are voting rights, reproductive rights, speech rights, etc. — and health care and education costs as the most important to young voters like myself,” Matarweh said.
Looking at the margins in key races across the country, some of which are still too close to call, expert youth-vote organizers stressed the need for continued youth-vote investments. “Young voters are obviously now the bedrock of the Democratic Party and the only people who can consistently be counted on by Democrats. That’s something that was not accepted 10 to 15 years ago when I started doing this stuff, and now it’s got to be blatantly obvious to the Democratic Party,” said longtime youth-vote evangelist and the former executive director of NextGen America, Ben Wessel. “Every dollar you spend on trying to turn out young voters is a dollar spent netting votes for your candidates,” he said.
“Gen Z is coming in hot as they enter the electorate, matching millennials for [support of] Democrats. But the thing that’s different is they’re turning out at twice the rate that millennials ever did when they were young. So that’s the winning coalition,” he added. “Millennials have faith in transitional leaders, people like Barack Obama,” Wessel continued. “Gen Z has faith in themselves and are going to continue to keep self-organizing regardless of what leaders the Democratic Party throws in their faces.”
