By Felicia Sullivan
In this excerpt from an interview, Felicia exhorts get-out-the-vote strategists to engage young voters with the same respect and consideration that they would have for any other group of voters. Moreover, these strategists would do well to consider the “unconnected” young voter and build on the fact that most voting-age young people are not students.
Editors: Please explore the dynamics of youth voting and let us know how younger voters may perceive their stakes in this election.
Felicia Sullivan: I will rely on my own past work,1 but I will address your questions with a broad brush.
Editors: Thanks, Felicia. Most of the people making decisions about mobilizing voters are not young people or if they are young people, they’re likely to be in their late 20s and early 30s. People who are, say 17 who will likely be voting by the end of the year or, you know, or 18, are not directly involved in shaping campaigns. How has this affected campaigning in general and our efficacy at reaching the youth vote?
Felicia: Certainly campaigns that are not informed by this constituency of voters, just like any constituency that’s been closed out of the voting process, will end up with platforms and talking points that are probably not reflective of what young people are truly thinking about and especially young people who are not college educated are concerned about. I think you know that a large proportion of young people, 18 to 29 are not college educated.2 They don’t ever set foot on a college. I think campaigns and the issues that get talked about are not as informed by the perspectives of especially these young people.
What ends u gp happening is what happens with any group that’s kind of stereotyped – certain kinds of stereotypical talking points end up populating the sphere. Comments like “young people are lazier” or “young people are demanding too much.” It’s commonplace now to hear of Gen Z: “they are really demanding, and you know . . .”
I think in terms of mobilizing young people, the research has shown that the things that work with any voter, work with young people: the more you contact them, the more you message to them, the more you actually reach out to them, the more they go out and vote. I think that those same kinds of tried and true mobilization tactics work with young people.
The problem is that many campaigns are often strapped for cash and they’re trying to look for the most likely voter and young people don’t have a history of voting, especially first-time voters, if they’re kind of in their young 20s or even if they a little older, they still don’t usually have a history of voting. And so they don’t become targets in the same way that likely voters do. The campaigns don’t know what these young people will do and so are not going to spend the time and effort to reach out to them. This is a vicious circle – young people don’t get reached out to and then they don’t vote and therefore don’t become likely voters and so on.
When they are reached out to and especially by people that they trust like people in their community, older adults, peers groups they trust, they will respond and they will take it seriously and they will vote.
Too often the attitude is that young people don’t know enough and so campaign strategists don’t trust them. Of course, this is not a litmus test for any other group in society, i.e., they need to know the issues well in order to vote.
There are a couple of other things that also prevent young people from getting to the polls. Depending on what state you’re in, you know electoral laws and electoral regulations vary. They vary by state. They vary by local municipality and so things like you know, needing to register ahead of time by a lot, needing to have certain kinds of forms of ID, any kind of step. You can show up at a poll on voting day. Sometimes it’s not even clear where you’re supposed to go because it’s not a very centralized place. Then you show up and then you realize you needed to do this pre-step and that you can’t vote today because say 20 days ago you needed to have registered to vote.
There are some solutions that are effective for young people while they’re still connected to institutions. Massachusetts has A sort of preregistration, like getting young people to register while they’re still connected to school, many of them or connected to institutions, things like motor voter. Same-day registration helps – in fact, anything that kind of lowers barriers certainly can help. However, there are limits, for example, something like motor voter won’t help for young people who don’t drive, who don’t go and get a driver’s license, who don’t get official state ID. Certainly depending on the state you’re in, it can be very complicated. For instance, I don’t know if this is still the case, but Texas you needed a government-issued ID.3 Amazingly, if you don’t have a driver’s license, if you don’t have a passport, somehow your state university or school ID doesn’t count, but your hunting and fishing license does! Right?
The Brennan Center does a really great job of tracking the kinds of legislation that make things easier.4 There are barriers that are put in place that that hamper any kind of new voter, but hamper young people especially because they don’t know the process. If you actually do mock elections, do more civic education, schooling about the electoral process, that is, explain the process, then you’re on the right track. Those things work very. Those things work very well for young people, too . Just demystify the process so they
- Don’t feel stupid
- Don’t feel uninformed
- Don’t feel nervous about what they should be doing
- Find online registration a lot more accessible
- Can take advantage of early voting.
Anything that kind of opens up voting access is also likely to benefit young people.
In terms of messaging, it really depends. I think many assume that young people are going to vote progressive. That was not true up until probably the 80s, the youth vote was pretty evenly split between conservatives and liberals. Then it went in a more liberal direction, but I think we’re now coming back even though young people tend to vote more liberal or democratic, but not necessarily so. The idea that all young people are a monolith is not true. They are influenced by, you know, what’s around them. They are most likely to vote, though, in presidential campaigns because there’s a lot of advertising, a lot of messaging, but a lot of focus on those kinds of elections. So getting them out for state votes or for other roles other than president sometimes can be difficult.
Voter guides. More information, more messaging, and getting out why it’s important to vote will always be necessary. Again, the things that work for all voters are particularly important for young people, those who are new to voting or new to the process.
I think that a lot of young voting efforts gets focused on college campuses. Again, however, about 60% of young people are not on college campuses, and those numbers are probably slowly increasing as folks are weighing the pros and cons of higher education and the costs.
The right strategy has to be more than if you’re not gonna reach young people when they’re in high school, at least connected to that, then it starts to become very difficult because where are they? Where are these young people? They’re in all sorts of places, and so I think that’s another difficult sort of thing as well.
Editors: Let’s explore this point more. It speaks to the current work that you’re doing. The bloc of young people who are not college educated and it strikes us that they face a unique sets of issues, especially when it comes to employment and to general survival kinds of questions, could you say a little bit more about that bloc? Of course, they may not be so much as bloc as category.
Felicia: Definitely, yes. There’s a significant chunk of young people who would be classified as “disconnected.” That means that they’re no longer in school. They’re not in jobs. They’re not in other institutions or easy to identify. That doesn’t mean that they’re not out there doing things or connected to things, but that they are. However, they are disconnected from typical civic institutions that we think to leverage.
When you want to think about really mobilizing young people, the best thing is to try to get young people when they’re at that kind of 15-16-year-old range, when many of them are still in school. We start to have increased dropout rates after about 16. So you have to get them engaged at that point and kind of integrated.
After that, I think that it’s difficult to figure out like where they are. Will we have to figure out, like where they’re hanging out? Like, who is talking to them? So certainly social media is part of that. I know in the past, like, you know, young people are a bit dubious about social media, even though they use it a lot. It’s still those personal connections: the people they trust, their friends, their social networks, their families, other adults in their lives.
I think it’s also about equipping families and maybe slightly older young people to talk to the young people in their life or, you know, there’s like, they’re younger cousins or younger siblings. But it’s really institutionally hard to find once young people are out of secondary education.
And if they’re not in the workforce, and even in during the workforce, that’s hard as well, because it’s a very fragmented workforce setting that young people are in.
Unless you have employers who are willing to kind of engage their employees—that’s very rare in voter education—the next place is finding folks who go to post-secondary training, primarily in higher education.
Certainly some subset go into the military, but you’re very unlikely to find that kind of education in the military – even though there’s a high level of civic duty within that population. I think it’s like any kind of marketing and trying to figure out how to reach a particular demographic – you would figure it out, right? And so, I think campaigns have to do that as well.
In Obama’s first run in 2008, I think he did quite well at trying to target young voters and try to leverage like social networks and people who are in networks of young people to leverage their friends and leverage their social networks. It’s very much relational organizing.
- Editors: Sullivan recommends the work of a colleague. See Abby Kiesa at the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement. https://circle.tufts.edu/people/abby-kiesa
- In 2022, the percentage of 25- to 29-year-olds with a bachelor’s degree stood at 40%; about 39% of 18- to 24-year-olds were enrolled in college. See the National Center for Education Statistics. (2023). Educational Attainment of Young Adults. Condition of Education. U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/caa.
- The requirements in Texas favor government-issued IDs. In their absence, other forms of identification, supplemented by a “Reasonable Impediment Declaration” will enable a voter to cast a ballot. However, those other forms of identification are generally more difficult to obtain for younger people. See “Identification Requirements for Voting” VoteTexas.gov. https://www.votetexas.gov/mobile/id-faqs.htm
- “Brennan Center for Justice,” June 12, 2024, https://www.brennancenter.org/