It’s the summer before midterm elections, and the political forecast is already promising heavy showers of skepticism about young voters.
The seasonal downpour is especially important this year because, for the first time, 18-35-year-old “millennials”—and their even younger counterparts, “generation z”—will be America’s single largest voting block with power to swing the result if they actually turn out to cast a ballot. The perennial question is, will they?
I hosted a discussion this week for Free Speech TV that gave me every reason to think the answer might be yes. Energy and enthusiasm are up; whether it’s guns or debts or jobs or just that racist, sexist Trump, there’s certainly no shortage of motivation.
28-year-old Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, an organizer for Bernie in the Bronx, said, “People like me aren’t supposed to run for Congress”; but she’s just the sort who gets people excited. She’s mounting a 100% volunteer, no corporate money drive to trigger the first primary in her district in fourteen years, and if her guts and gusto translate into signatures, she’ll do it.
Young people are running, and voters seem engaged. 56% of millennials polled by CNN this month said they were likely to cast a ballot. In California, 100,000 16-17-year-olds have already preregistered.
Still, as the skeptics never tire of saying, only about half of all eligible young voters actually voted in 2016, and young people traditionally lag even further behind their elders in non-presidential elections. Two months after the massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, youth registration was actually down in the Tallahassee epicenter of the protests.
Personally, I’m always impressed not by how few, but by how many young people manage to cast a ballot given how vigorously others try to stop them. As Parkland School shooting survivor David Hogg tweeted recently, if the selective service can register 18-year-olds automatically for war, there’s no real reason the state boards of elections couldn’t do likewise for democracy.
Instead, as the young tend to favor Democrats, GOP lawmakers are doing everything they can to stop them voting at all, such as curbing opportunities for registration and early voting, reducing polling places, and requiring photo IDs with a current address. Exposing voter suppression should be priority number one for journalists, but it’s so much easier to throw shade than light.
You can watch our special on the Millennial vote this month on Free Speech TV and Manhattan Neighborhood Network, and you can see or listen to my interview with Maurice Mitchell, the new National Director of the Working Families Party on the Laura Flanders Show at www.lauraflanders.org.