We’ve all heard it before. We’ve maybe even said it. “Young people don’t vote.”
With today’s Millennial Generation, however, you might quote the old Hertz commercial and say, “Not Exactly.”
An astounding 23 million people under 30 voted in last November’s Presidential Election, which represented 50 percent of the turnout. That was slightly lower than 2008 when 52 precent voted, but still well above national election averages.
One of the persons paying attention to the millennial vote in California is Mindy Romero at UC Davis’ California Civic Engagement Project.
Romero agrees that the trend is friendly for increased young voting turnout in future elections, saying, “The youth vote has increased dramatically in the last ten years.”
She also noted that California’s successful online voter registration program last fall resounded very well with the tech-savvy twenty-somethings of the Golden State, since 30% of the near 1 million people who registered online were under 30.
What Romero points out is the need to get more young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to the polls, which is an area of concern.
Does that mean we need to develop new policies in California to improve turnout. Romero thinks that making what we have in place work better is the answer, starting in the classroom.
