Although we may not believe that a lack of progress on health care reform would be the only determining factor to keep young voters out of the polls in this year’s mid-term elections, our friend Jesse Singal makes an excellent point about the impact the Millennial generation has at the polls, our overwhelming support for health care reform, and how its failure could exacerbate youth voter apathy:
Here’s something that should make David Axelrod nervous: there are probably more Yankees fans in Massachusetts than there are young people who voted in the Massachusetts Senate special election, which cost the Democrats their filibuster-proof supermajority. Just 15 percent of eligible voters under age 30 participated. The numbers were similarly dismal during two other Republican electoral victories from last fall. In the Virginia and New Jersey gubernatorial races, just 17 and 19 percent of potential young voters participated, respectively.
This wasn’t just a fluke trifecta of uninspiring elections. It is, rather, part of a nationwide trend toward apathy among Americans under 30. Harvard’s Institute of Politics (IOP), which regularly polls young people on political issues, found last fall that just 24 percent of 18 to 29-year-olds said that they were “politically engaged or politically active,” a 19-point drop from a year earlier. This could mean trouble down the road for a Democratic Party that may have begun taking the youth vote for granted. Young voters, after all, turned out in record numbers for the 2008 election, and if they hadn’t, Obama might not be in the White House. But if Democrats don’t pass health-care reform, youth turnout may plummet.