General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Yes DU trends to an older audience. [View all]SpankMe
(3,164 posts)When my sons were in college I had opportunities to talk to their friends and roommates about voting. I was very disenchanted with how few of them voted regularly, and even more disenchanted with the myriad reasons they had to defend non-voting - as if being a non-voter was an intellectually superior stance and that non-voting was a proven tactic for influencing and signaling their party of choice to "shape up".
As I point out in many of my posts here, 87 million eligible voters did not cast a vote in 2016. A key demographic within that 87 million was young people who couldn't be bothered to vote because "their one vote doesn't change anything" and "Trump is so flawed, he couldn't possibly win...enough people will vote without me that this will take care of itself" and "it's such a hassle to register".
These factors - combined with the apathy of younger people toward issues that don't directly impact them, plus this idea that they'll only cast a vote for a candidate that is 100% in line with their own thinking (anything less is too imperfect a candidate to earn my vote) - keep younger people away from the polls and keeps margins of victory so thin that no winners have a true mandate for change.
If we can somehow get younger voters to the polls in battleground states, a lot of the rancor over elections will go away.
Trump won some battleground states by a only few thousand votes. If we can get 100-120 thousand young voters registered and to the polls in each of these battleground states, we can probably score more decisive victories. 100-120 thousand new younger voters in states where 2-3 million votes total are typically cast should be within our grasp.