The 2022 Midterm elections won’t have Donald Trump on the ballot….
Will that have young Democreatic voters the party needs BADLY for House elections relax and stay home?
Soaring turnout and big margins among young voters were central to the Democratic victories in the 2018 congressional and 2020 presidential elections. But with many young people expressing disenchantment with President Joe Biden‘s performance, preserving those advantages looms as one of the biggest challenges facing Democrats in the 2022 midterms.
There’s widespread concern among Democrats that turnout for young people this November could fall back from its gains in 2018 toward the meager levels that contributed to the party’s crushing losses in the 2014 and 2010 midterm elections.
“If you accept the status quo with young people, it’s not going to go great,” says Democratic pollster Ben Tulchin. “Turnout is not going to be good.”….
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“We are seeing that younger voters who were voting in some of these elections because of Trump don’t seem to be inspired by Biden, and I think their turnout will fall back to traditional levels,” says GOP consultant John Brabender.
Some structural dynamics may help to sustain youth turnout this fall. Many experts note that the large youth turnout of 2018 and 2020 creates momentum for continued participation, because people who register and vote in one election are more likely to vote in the next. Over the past two elections, Democrats and nonpartisan groups have built a significant organizational infrastructure to engage more young voters, and those efforts are continuing through 2022.
“The elevated youth turnout and the elevated youth registration and participation that we saw from ’16 to ’18 to ’20 is not magic,” says Nsé Ufot, chief executive officer of the New Georgia Project, a non-profit voter registration and mobilization group founded by Stacey Abrams. “It is absolutely a direct result of our investment and our labor and targeting that particular group.”…
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On paper, the increasing electoral influence of the millennial generation and Generation Z could be one of the Democrats’ most significant assets through the 2020s. Each of those generations is much more racially and culturally diverse than older Americans, especially the baby boomers, who are about 80% White and now lean mostly toward the GOP. Nearly half of Generation Z (currently defined as young people born between 1997 and 2012) are kids of color, more than one-third identify as secular without affiliation to any organized religion and a striking one-fifth in a recent Gallup survey identified as LGBTQ. Millennials (generally defined as those born between 1981 and 1996) don’t tilt quite so far toward change but are still far more diverse on each metric than older generations.
Inexorably, the balance of electoral power is shifting toward these younger generations…..
Note….
In the past?
The OLDER the voter?
The MORE likely they would bve to vote….