Will Young People Make Their Voices Heard?
By Byard Duncan
October 6th, 2010
Suzanne Robertson, a fourth-year conservation and resource studies
major at University of CaliforniaBerkeley, began marching. She
passed key landmarks of student activism on her campus: The metal
archway where young men and women staged anti-conscription rallies in
the 1940s and Sproul Plaza, which was held hostage by 800 anti-war
student demonstrators in 1965. Before the day was over, Robertson
would listen to impassioned speeches, take a police baton to the
stomach and witness local law enforcement officials break her
friend's hand. It could have been 1968, the heyday of student activism.
Instead it was March 4, 2010, and more than 1,000 students, teachers,
and organizers were walking alongside Robertson in protest of
California's decision to drastically slash its funding for state
schoolsand the UC system debated (and ultimately decided) to hike
tuition by an astonishing 32 percent. Their march from the university
to Oakland's Frank Ogawa Plaza featured many of the same
characteristics that made Berkeley a locus of activism decades ago:
Fiery lectures, chants, and clashes with police. The university's
unabashedly political student body had, once again, raised its
collective voice.
But will young people do so again in November? As midterm elections
approach and youth voter turnouts remain among the lowest of all
demographic groups, key questions remain unanswered about the extent
to which young peoplein Berkeley as well as across the countrywill
affect the political balance of power in the United States. Given
that 2010 marks the 40th anniversary of 18-year-olds gaining the
right to vote, it's worth taking a look at the history and logistics
behind youth enfranchisementas well as its future implications.
Robertson, for her part, plans to cast a ballot this November. "I
feel like engagement in the political process as young as possible is
good because it counters systematic disenfranchisement," she says.
Midterms, she added, are "where a lot of the really big change tends
to happen, because it's so under the radar."
To get an idea of why Robertson's decision to vote is an important
one, it's essential to understand the history behind it. Indeed, the
process by which young people became enfranchised was a long,
frustrating, and often perplexing one.
A 30-year battle for the right to vote
It began on November 13, 1942, when President Franklin Delano
Roosevelt lowered the draft age to 18. His move immediately sparked a
response from a group of senators who believed that being "old enough
to fight" ought to mean "old enough to vote." Harley Kilgore
(D-W.V.), who spearheaded their effort, argued that since nearly 90
percent of the roughly 7,000,000 Americans between the ages of 18 and
21 were already contributing to World War II in one way or another,
it only made sense to include them in the political process.
But despite the fact that the idea won support from both parties, as
well as from First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Kilgore's bill eventually
died. The magnitude of World War II, coupled with a lack of political
momentum, kept the status quo intact.
At a national level, the issue was not considered seriously again
until more than 10 years later, when Dwight Eisenhower became the
first president to publicly address it. "I hope that the States will
cooperate with the Congress in adopting uniform standards in their
voting laws that will make it possible for our citizens in the armed
forces overseas to vote," he said in his 1954 State of the Union address.
Eisenhower's words got the political gears cranking again, but they
were not enough to shape meaningful legislation: In a response to the
president's requests, then-Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Robert
Langer drafted a new resolution to incorporate 18 year olds into the
rolls. Despite a fair amount of support, the effort failed once
again. Only 34 Senators voted "yea;" 24 voted against, and a whopping
37 abstained.
Meanwhile, as policymakers struggled at the federal level to craft
more inclusive voting laws, a few states began to take matters into
their own hands. By 1943, Georgia had lowered its voting age to 18;
Kentucky did the same in a state referendum in 1955. And when Alaska
and Hawaii entered the union in 1959, they set their voting ages at
19 and 20, respectively.
Additionally, public support for the cause was growing. According to
a series of Gallup Polls taken between 1939 and 1967, the amount of
Americans who believed 18-year olds should be allowed to vote grew
steadilyfrom 17 percent to 64 percent in just 24 years. This was due
in no small part to wars in Korea and Vietnam, which, with their
enlistment of thousands of young men, had highlighted for many a
fundamental legal hypocrisy. By 1968, President John F. Kennedy was
urging Americans to "extend the right to vote to more than 10 million
citizens unjustly denied that right."
Things finally began falling into place in 1970, when the Senate
attached an amendment lowering the voting age to a bill that extended
the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Though Oregon and Texas both opposed
such a tactic, the Supreme Court eventually ruled in Oregon v.
Mitchell that the federal government had acted within its bounds when
legislating voting age for national elections. On June 22, 1970,
President Richard Nixon signed a bill that granted approximately 11
million young people across America the right to vote.
But even after jumping that hurdle, it wasn't quite over yet. The
federal government had set the voting age for national elections, but
some states were still constitutionally bound to maintain their own
restrictions for local elections. In practice, this custom of
creating "separate rolls" was immensely burdensomenot to mention
"morally indefensible and patently illogical," according to one
Constitutional Amendments Subcommittee report. The solution was to
pass a constitutional amendment that would override discrepancies in
state and federal law and put all youth voters on the same page. The
26th Amendment, which was ratified with breathtaking speed by all the
states after it passed through both Houses, did just that. The
amendment was ratified on July 5, 1971, just 100 days after its
initial proposal. (By comparison, the 27th amendment, which
restricted Congress from any pay raises going into effect until after
elections, took 74,003 daysmore than 202 yearsto be ratified.)
Initial youth voter turnout huge, then equally huge dropoff
If polling data is any indication, freshly enfranchised Americans
were eager to use their newfound political power. According to
statistics from the Center for Information & Research on Civic
Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), the 1972 elections brought the
highest amount (55 percent) of 18- to 29-year-old voters to the polls
in American history. Forty-four percent of voters 18 to 20 turned
out. Of these, a majority voted for Nixon, who won in a 49-state
landslide. Although Nixon's conservative views on many issues, and
his continued prosecution of the Vietnam War, were unattractive to
many young people, he had acted to expedite their right to vote and
promised to end the draft.
"[Young people] were especially in the political debate because
college campuses were engulfed with protests and also because the war
involved the draft of them," says Peter Levine, CIRCLE's director.
"The other thing is that they had just been enfranchised and there
had been a big hoopla about their being allowed to vote for the first time."
Still, youth involvement did not exactly shape up to be a
game-changing development in sequential elections. In the years
following enfranchisement, young people voted at consistently lower
rates than their older peers in presidential elections. While 60 to
70 percent of citizens 25 and older voted in presidential elections
between 1972 and 2004, only about 50 percent of youths (ages 18 to
24) did so in the same period. This number hit an all time-low in
2000, when just 36 percent of young voters showed up at the polls.
Midterms were even worse. While at least 50 percent of citizens 30
and older voted for congressman and senators between 1974 and 2006,
only about 27 percent of 18 to 29 year olds did the same. In both
1998 and 2002, youth numbers hovered just above 20 percent.
Turnouts like these produced what Levine calls "a vicious cycle" of
political neglect. Because younger voters had initially turned out in
such low numbers, campaign strategists began to view them as
insignificanta cluster of expendables amid other, more serious
demographics. This, in turn, stoked feelings of hopelessness and led
to even lower turnout rates.
"It has been quite common for political consultants to actually leave
young people off of contact lists," Levine says. "They had so written
off young people that they were basically leaving votes on the table."
The right to vote, it seemed, did not necessarily denote a motivation to do so.
Voting this November
That started to change in 2006. Citizens between the ages of 18 and
29, largely galvanized by what they perceived to be a disastrous six
years under George W. Bush, began to turn out with increased force.
Between 2002 and 2006, their numbers at the polls edged up three percent.
As Bush's presidency wore on, this trend continued. By the conclusion
of 2008's presidential election, an impressive 51 percent of
Millenials had voted, favoring Barack Obama over John McCain by a 2
to 1 margin.
According to Maegan Carberry, a spokesperson for Rock the Vote, this
renewed vigor was due to a combination of factors, including rigorous
campaigning in battleground states and the use of new social media platforms.
"People knew that it was important to speak out on issues," Carberry
says. "The issues were directly connected to their lives because a
lot of people worked very hard on making that connection for them on
the ground and in field work."
This fall, issues like joblessness and health care will take center
stage among young voters, who have been disproportionately affected
by the country's economic downturn. According to data from the Bureau
of Labor Statistics, unemployment among people aged 18 to 24 reached
an all-time high in July, with 18.6 million young people reported as
out of work. An estimated 6.9 million jobs geared toward younger
workers disappeared due to the recession, and jobless rates for young
men, African Americans, and Asian people all spiked during the recession.
That's to say nothing of the 29.3 percent of Americans between 19 and
29 who have no health insurance. According to Carberry, youth
participation in November will be an indication of how fed up young
voters are with these challenges.
"This generation is going to be judged based on whether or not it
continues to participate," she says. "They got a lot of credit and
recognition in 2008 for being active, and people are wondering if
we're going to continue to do that."
While young voters leaned strongly progressive in 2008, recent
evidence suggests a possible shift this year. A February study from
the Pew Research Center, for example, found that Democrats' advantage
among young voters had slipped from 62 to 54 percent, while
Republicans in the same age bracket increased their party loyalty by
10 percent (from 30 to 40). And despite the fact that a majority of
young voters classify themselves as "progressive," another Harvard
University poll found that 41 percent of young Republicans are
planning to vote, compared with only 35 percent of Democrats.
Meanwhile, however, support for the Tea Party among young voters has
dropped off drastically in recent months. Between March and July, the
percentage of 18 to 29 year olds who held a positive view of the
movement plummeted from 43 percent to 27 percent.
According to Levine, this November's outcome is a question of
turnout. "If young progressives sit [the election] out, it will be
very harmful to Democrats," he says. "If young conservatives happen
to get mobilized, it will help Republicans. And, if by any chance
young progressives do turn out, it could save the Democrats' bacon."
The big question: Can young people do it again?
Forty years after 18-year-olds gained the right to vote (and 35 years
after its campus erupted into anti-war demonstrations), Berkeley
looks relatively quiet; there's little to suggest a potentially
enormous political shift approaching. Students jog and mingle through
the tall pine trees and laze around on the quad. Robertson, hunched
over a computer, talks about the challenges of being a politically
engaged student.
"We're in a far less stable place in our life," she says. "For me,
I've just got to pass my classes and figure out where I'm going to
live and make sure I can afford food. Those are the things that
definitely prevent me from votingprevent me from being informed."
In November, Robertson will participate in another political
demonstration, this one involving millions of her peers. Though no
one can say for sure what the outcome will be, its significance is
undeniableboth from a political and historical perspective.
"Being politically aware and being politically active and feeling
like your vote makes a differenceI think it's very important for the
cohesiveness of our communities and just self-determination in
general," she says.
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