For years, I’ve preached the same sermon to political leaders and consultants: The millennials are coming; ignore them at your peril.
But according to a new analysis by the Pew Research Center, it turns out I need to update my message: The millennials have arrived.
The 2018 midterm cycle was a historic election for its midterm turnout: 53%. The last time a midterm election saw turnout that high, millennials didn’t exist yet. Pre-election indicators suggested massive enthusiasm surges and especially pointed to women and young voters.
But Election Day came and went, and while the surge in votes overall was there, the National Election Pool exit polls showed a fairly consistent electoral makeup compared to the 2014 midterm elections, with about 35% of all voters being under the age of 45 in both 2014 and 2018. The story was less about a youth surge than a generalized everyone surge, and speculation about just how high the turnout wave could go in 2020. The exit polls had poured a bit of cold water on the idea that “the kids” were rising up to take hold of the nation’s democratic processes.
The exit polls are imperfect for estimating the demographics of an electorate, but they suffice for the initial “what happened?” coverage in the immediate wake of an election. (They often overestimate the percentage of voters who are in fact young, for instance.) But the even more interesting data set becomes available to political scientists and junkies in the months after, when the U.S. Census Bureau releases the Voting and Registration supplement to the Current Population Survey, providing a rigorous deep dive into just who is voting in America today.
The findings are eye-opening. Turnout rose among all age, gender, education, and racial and ethnic groups measured, but turnout nearly doubled for voters under age 30, the largest increase for any age group. Notably, there was a particularly large surge among young women. In 2014, only 20% of those under age 30 voted; in 2018, it was 33% for young men, and 38 for young women.
Some analysis of this data by the Pew Research Center helpfully breaks the figures out through their generational labels, examining differences by birth year, and finds that, indeed, if you add together Gen X, millennials, and Gen Z, you find 62 million votes cast, outpacing the boomers and their elders. While millennials dramatically lagged in turnout in 2014, they made large strides in 2018. Gen Z, meanwhile, began their first foray into voting with midterm turnout of 30% — not particularly grand, but far better than Gen X or millennials did in their generation’s first midterm cycle.
Given that there’s plenty of established evidence that voting is a habit-forming behavior, that these voters have all participated in a midterm election, a typically lower-participation affair, it’s likely that these voters are largely here to stay as a force to be reckoned with in 2020. Republicans are, as they have been for some time, likely to pay the price at the ballot box as more young Americans participate. And while traditionally both parties’ primaries are more heavily dominated by an older cohort of voters, there’s a chance that the younger voter energy will be particularly pronounced on the Democratic side, and young women, who these days trend very Democratic, will play a larger role in selecting their party’s nominee.
The evidence continues to mount that the bill is going to come due for political leaders, factions, and parties who have ignored young voters for too long. After years of pointing out that the millennials are coming, it is remarkable to finally have the data confirming: They’ve arrived.
