Bernie Sanders wants to lead a revolution. Will young people help?
Exit polls indicate that the youth vote that Sanders has relied on won’t give him the boost his supporters expected. Despite his slew of millennial celebrity endorsements, including singer Ariana Grande, rapper Cardi B, and, recently, actress Kirsten Dunst, Sanders may not be able to galvanize his young supporters to the voting booth.
#SuperTuesday Exit Poll (NBC): Voters By Age
18-29: 13%
30-44: 23%
45-64: 35%
65+: 29% pic.twitter.com/KcfXMysTzZ— Polling USA (@USA_Polling) March 3, 2020
Breaking news: young people still don’t vote. In NBC News exit poll, 13 percent of voters were between 18-29
— Shannon Pettypiece (@spettypi) March 3, 2020
People aged 18-29 were the least active demographic in an NBC News poll, which included 12 of the 14 Super Tuesday states. Just 13% of voters were from the younger demographic.
Sanders is by far the most popular candidate with young voters, and this has been true for some time. Back when Beto O’Rourke was still in the race, 31% of 18- to 29-year-olds said they favored Sanders, with 20% preferring Joe Biden. More recently, Sanders won 56% of Democratic voters under age 45 in Nevada, with the largest percentage of youth support in Iowa and New Hampshire as well.
Biden and Sanders’s support has a HUGE age divide. https://t.co/tO1X4P75Jb pic.twitter.com/1rwSj50nBt
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) March 3, 2020
The only problem? Young people are much less likely to vote. And if the exit polls are at all indicative, this trend isn’t reversing for the 2020 primaries.
Last year, Sanders said that “the key to this election is can we get millions of young people who have never voted before into the political process, many working people who understand that Trump is a fraud, can we get them voting?”
While Sanders cleaned up in two of the first few caucuses, particularly with youth voters, polling from the 14 Super Tuesday states indicates the Biden isn’t giving up so easily. Sanders may have the celebrity endorsements and the revolutionary rhetoric, but it may not be enough to move young voters from their Twitter accounts to the voting booth.
