Five Facts on Young Voters
In an upcoming election where the two likely major party candidates will be the oldest on record, more young voters are expressing their dissatisfaction with the choices on offer and are weighing supporting third-party candidates.
Here are Five Facts about the young voters who may shake up the 2024 presidential race:
- Younger voters tend to have weaker partisan identifications compared to older generations.
A recent Pew survey found that younger Americans are more likely to hold negative views of both major parties than older Americans. This trend is particularly strong among voters under 30, a group primarily composed of Gen Z (those born between 1997 and 2012), where more than a third view both parties negatively. Twenty-nine percent, meanwhile, said neither party represented them well.
- Today’s young voters are more engaged than previous generations were when they were young.
Today’s youth vote is the most mobilized in history. In the 2020 presidential election, 50 percent of voters under 30 cast a ballot, believed to be one of the highest rates of turnout since the voting age was lowered to 18.
- Young Americans are more optimistic about American democracy than older generations.
Polling from Tufts University found that 71 percent of voters ages 18-29 believe that the 2020 election was legitimate, the highest percentage of any age group. And while they note voters of all ages believe our democracy is threatened, the 35 percent of young voters who believe it is “very” or “somewhat” secure is the highest of any age group, too.
- In 1992, Ross Perot, a third-party candidate, won 22 percent of the 18–29-year-old vote, his strongest performance among any demographic group.
Perot, who that year mounted the most serious third-party challenge in decades, won the support of many young voters who cited a desire to shake up the political system after twelve years of Republican presidential administrations but also opposed to voting for Democrat Bill Clinton.
- In the 2024 presidential election, 40.8 million members of Gen Z will be eligible to vote.
This includes 8.3 million newly eligible voters who were too young to have voted in the 2022 midterms, which saw the second-highest turnout for a midterm election among youth voters in recent history.
