A decline of 5 points in millennial voter preferences can have big consequences. Although Hillary Clinton won the 18-29 year-old vote handedly, her victory margin among the youth was 5 points less than President Obama’s in 2012, and the turnout of millennials as a share of the electorate was down.
Millennial apathy hurt Democrats in key states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Arizona, where the share of young voters declined by between 10 and 20 points. But on the national level, millennials helped power Clinton to win the popular vote.
The Electoral College is back in the spotlight for the second time in the new millennium as the winner of the popular vote lost the presidency. Critics have pointed out that the system underrepresents the residents of populous states, minorities, and states in deep shades of blue or red. Because the population of millennials heavily overlaps with those populations, they are also likely to be underrepresented.
Even though the youngest generation of California voters, who make up about 30 percent of California’s population, punched below their weight in 2016, they still provided Clinton with 1.3 million votes. But those votes were essentially meaningless (all things being equal), since Clinton won the state by 2.7 million votes. They could have all stayed home, and Clinton still would have won decisively.
The problem of wasted votes exists when the results are so decisive in a jurisdiction that a huge number of votes are unnecessary in deciding the outcome. To be clear, this isn’t a justification for anyone with a preference to stay home; you never know when your vote will matter, especially in an era when polls don’t always capture the outcome, as we saw this year. But it is a topic that warrants consideration for those interested in representative voting systems.
In a state where one candidate wins decisively, both the excess votes for the winner and the votes for the loser will impact the popular vote but not the ultimate results of the Electoral College. North Dakota, while not a large population, did contribute a huge number of votes per capita to Trump’s popular vote total, with 62.3 percent of its voters picking Trump, but every extra vote above Clinton’s 28 percent didn’t do anything to affect the electoral vote sway. If you add North Dakota to other Republican states in the West with large numbers of millennials, like Alaska, Kansas, Idaho, Oklahoma, Nebraska, and Utah, there are a lot of wasted votes.
The top 20 states with the most millennials have bigger election blowouts on average. According to 2012 Census information analyzed by Governing.com, Washington, D.C., which voted 90.5 percent for Clinton, is the top location for millennials as a percentage of its population, followed by Utah, a Republican lock for years. Included among the top 20 are Louisiana (#7), Mississippi (#10), New York (#19), and a slew of above-mentioned Western states, which were also amongst the top 20 places with the largest margins by the winning candidate of their state.
In the 20 states (and D.C.) with the highest per capita population of millennials, the winner of the election averaged 54 percent of the vote in 2016, an especially high take in a year when the winner didn’t get to 50 percent in many states. (Eliminating D.C. from the sample, the result is 52.3 percent.)
Even 2016 was a bit of an outlier, as residents of Utah, the non-D.C. state with the most millennials per capita, voted in much lower numbers for the Republican candidate than usual. In 2012, the winning candidate in those millennial-rich places won 60.4 percent of the votes on average, or 58.8 when eliminating the District of Columbia. D.C. produced the highest total for the winner in both years, and Oklahoma was among the top 5 in both years.
By contrast, the Midwestern swing states that ultimately decided who won the most electoral votes are among the states with the least millennials. Pennsylvania, Ohio, Wisconsin, and Michigan rank #43, #40, #39, and #36, respectively, in terms of millennials as a percentage of population.
