Research shows that young people are losing faith in American democracy and the voting process, meaning their turnout this election day may be lower than other age groups. But, local election officials say there’s reason for optimism.
A historical trend
An AP-NORC poll from August found that people under the age of 30 are more disengaged with politics compared to older people (around ⅓ for younger people and less than 20% for those who are older), and are less likely to find key issues important. All of this means that when elections come around, candidates and political parties must rely on older generations to send in their ballots.
“Younger adults tend to be the least connected and those with the lowest levels of turnout compared to older adults,” said Syracuse University political science professor Grant Reeher. “That’s pretty much true in our modern political history.”
Onondaga County’s Democratic Elections Commissioner Dustin Czarny echoed this message.
“Young people have always participated at a lower rate,” Czarny said. “My generation when we were young, the generation before me when they were young, so on and so forth.”
An investment for the future
The same research shows that as younger people grow older, they become more invested in politics.
“People in the younger generation, when they age up, will become more connected to the political process in different ways,” Reeher said. “That’s what political scientists would call a more secular phenomenon than something that is all at once and energizes people.”
But as Onondaga County’s Republican Elections Commissioner Kevin Ryan notes, this secular phenomenon is counterintuitive to young people building a future society they want to live in.
“I’ve only got a few decades left before I pass the great divide,” Ryan said. “If you’re a young voter, you’re talking about the future of the society that you’re going to be living in. What world do you want for yourself and your kids?”
Disagreeing with the research
Despite the polls and data revealing that young people have much less of an interest in voting compared to older generations, both Czarny and Ryan say they have found young people to be very engaged in their recent political experience.
“One of the reasons why President Trump was so successful in his 2024 campaign was because he was able to mobilize the young voters,” Ryan said.
Research done by the Pew Research Center shows that President Trump’s voters during the 2024 campaign were much more diverse in every category compared to his 2020 and 2016 runs, including in age.
“Democracy is not broken,” said Czarny. “Every year we have races that are so close that we have to hand count the ballots to make sure we have the right winner. That only happens when democracy is working.”
Czarny also went on to say that while there will be elections in which the candidate a person votes for will not win, that doesn’t mean the voting process is broken or unreliable.
“This means that your view is not reflected in the majority of the public,” Czarny added. “But it’s the only way you can communicate your needs to your government.”