Growing Voters: A Profile of the Youngest Eligible Voters in 2020

More than 15 million people have turned 18 since the last presidential election, and these youngest eligible voters form a diverse, active, and potentially decisive voting bloc in the 2020 elections. Some cast ballots in 2018, contributing to the highest youth voter turnout we’ve ever seen in a midterm election. Some participated in the youth-led anti-gun violence movement that drove youth engagement in that election even if they were then too young to vote themselves. Some are now leading protests and demonstrations against racial injustice and making it one of the defining issues of the 2020 election cycle.

While a lot of youth voting research (including our own) usually studies young people ages 18-29 or 18-34, it is important to focus on these youngest eligible voters who are new to elections at a time when processes for how to register and cast a ballot are in flux. We have used data from our exclusive pre-election youth poll to take a broader look at the engagement of young people aged 18-21 and whether key civic institutions are supporting “growing voters.” Some of our major findings include:

  • They are interested and politically active. More than three quarters say they’re paying attention to the election and think it will have an impact in their communities. More than four-in-five of them believe in the power of youth to create social change.
  • 28% say they have recently participated in a march or demonstration, but that also differs by race and gender. Young women are much more likely to have protested (36%) than young men (20%).[1] And youth of color are much more likely to have demonstrated than White youth (38% vs. 22%), with young women of color the most likely to do so.
  • Systems are not doing enough to reach youth with accessible information to register and vote during the pandemic. One-third (34%) said they did not know if their state has online voter registration. Just 25% have voted by mail before, and more than a quarter said they wouldn’t know where to get information about mail-in voting.
  • Young people with no college experience are less likely to be contacted by campaigns and parties and less likely to have information on casting an absentee ballot or to know where to get it, which both reflects and potentially perpetuates inequalities in political participation.

Our initial analysis of this polling data can be found here. The first wave of the CIRCLE/Tisch College 2020 Youth Survey was fielded from May 20 to June 18, 2020. The survey covered adults between the ages of 18 and 29 who will be eligible to vote in the United Stated by the 2020 General Election. The sample was drawn from the Gallup Panel, a probability-based panel that is representative of the U.S. adult population, and from the Dynata Panel, a non-probability panel. A total of 2,232 eligible adults completed the survey, which includes oversamples of 18- to 21-year-olds (N=671), Asian American youth (N=306), Black youth (N=473), Latino youth (N=559) and young Republicans (N=373). Of the total completes, 1,019 were from the Gallup Panel and 1,238 were from the Dynata Panel. Unless stated otherwise, ‘youth’ refers to those ages 18- to 29-years old. The margin of error for the poll, taking into account the design effect from weighting, is +/- 4.1 percentage points. Margins of error for racial and ethnic subgroups range from +/-8.1 to 11.0 percentage points.

This post was last modified on November 22, 2024 5:09 pm