Mark Bauerlein: Why are we making such a fuss about the youth vote?
Every four years, we undergo a national citizenship ritual. Not the election, but the now-36-year-old question: Will the youth vote turn out? Since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1972, voting rates for 18-to-24-year-olds have slid downward, leading many to find them a lost cause.
We got an increase in 2004, as Circle reported here, although other stories such as this disputed the rise in youth vote much exceeding the rise in voting in 2004 in all the other age groups. This report, too, finds that only 24 percent of eligible voters age 18 to 29 exercised their right in the 2006 elections.
Still, before every election journalists write about the youth vote as if it were a special indicator. In Salon last week, for instance, a story headlined “Young voters are stoked,” and lots of stories such as this one appear in college towns. Just this morning The Chronicle ran a piece on student/voters down the road from me at Spelman College.
Why? Why do journalists and researchers pay so much attention to what turns out to be a small, relatively inconsequential (most of the time) group? In the Salon article, a political scientist is quoted at length, gushing that “young voters are paying attention. They’re online. They’re blogging. They’re talking about the election. They’re pumped.” But later on in the article, author Katharine Mieszkowski writes, “A tripling of young voters’ participation [in the recent Florida primary] did not even bring them up to the same level of participation that the old fogies had back in 2000.” The rate for under-30-year-olds went from 4 percent to 13 percent, while the rate for 30 and up went from 14 percent to 33 percent.
So why make young voters a special story? Why recount tales of this or that bright and idealistic 20-year-old when the majority of their peers can’t care much less about what happens in November?