The Myth of the Youth Vote Saviors

The youth vote did not "save" democracy in 2020 as many seem to think, and they probably won't save it in 2024.

There’s no question that the youth vote—those aged 18-29— turned out in big numbers in 2020 compared to 2016. This is an indisputable fact.

But how this affected the 2020 election is very disputable. In fact, it seems that a myth has taken hold that suggests that young people “saved” democracy in 2020 by heavily favoring Biden and stopping Trump in his tracks. But this is not an obvious fact when you really look at the numbers. And actually, it can be argued that Democracy survived despite the youth vote, not because of it.

In a recent post for his Substack publication Steady, the Dan Rather made the following statements:

The youth vote saved this country in 2020

In the last presidential election, 50 percent — yes, half — of Americans aged 18-29 cast ballots. That’s a huge increase from 2016, when only 39 percent voted. The youth of this country quite literally saved us from four more years of Trump.  

I’m not singling out Rather for any reason, and I don’t have an agenda about him. I highly respect him and am thankful for what he adds to the country’s conversations on politics and newsworthy events. It just so happens that he recently highlighted something that is considered common knowledge, but is actually murky at best.

I set out to take a closer look at and analyze the votes from the 2016 and 2020 election to see overall trends, with a focus on whether or not the youth vote was truly that important for “democracy”. Below is a breakdown and analysis of the youth vote, its relevance to the most recent two elections, and how we might gain insights into the upcoming election. For this analysis I used two main sources: Census voter data and Pew Research election polling.

Turnout and Motivation

First, we should establish the fact that the youth voter turnout did increase significantly from 2016 to 2020. I have seen numbers comparable to Rather’s youth turnout figures of 50% vs. 39% in 2020 and 2016, respectively. He didn’t cite his source, but I believe it to be exit polls from the election. The Census data I’m using is a bit different, but shows similar effects.

According to the Census data, in 2020 the 18-29 voter bloc turned out at a 54% rate, whereas in 2016 it was 46%, for a pretty hefty 8-point increase. I used the citizen population data, instead of overall population data, since only citizens can vote. This might account for some of the turnout discrepancy from the numbers in Rather’s article.

To see if the idea of increased youth activity was solid in and of itself, and/or significant compared to other age groups, I compiled the following data:

• Reliability - # of votes / # of registered voters. A measure of how reliable a registered voter is with their vote. Addresses how likely are they to follow through with a vote after registering.

• Tendency - # of registered voters / citizen population. Basically, this is registration rate, a measure of the tendency one is to vote. This addresses a factor of motivation and/or enthusiasm among voters.

• Propensity - # of votes / citizen population. Essentially, this is another form of “turnout”. Measures the actual vote rate of the population group.

Here’s the results:

There are a few noteworthy results here:

1. All the measures of voting and election-related activity increase as voters get older. Interestingly, voters 55 and older voted extremely reliably in 2020, at a whopping 95% rate if they were registered. Basically, if they were registered, they voted.

2. All the measures of voting and election-related activity increased from 2016 to 2020 across age all groups. Basically, everyone was more motivated/enthusiastic in the 2020 election vs the 2016 election.

3. The youth vote had the largest increase in rate of voting and election-related activity from 2016 to 2020. Their turnout rate went up by 8 points, with the other age groups in the 4-6 range; also, their tendency to vote (rate of getting registered) and voting reliability (voting if registered) both also outpaced the other age groups— 4 pts vs 1-3 pts and 8 pts vs 4-5 pts, respectively.

So far, nothing too shocking here. It’s been understood that 2020 was a high-turnout election with increased motivation and enthusiasm among the overall electorate. In addition, as reported and assumed, the youth vote was the most enthused, motivated, and energized voting age bloc.

The effect of the youth vote

This is where things get interesting and the “youth savior” idea becomes suspect. Take a look at the following chart, courtesy of Pew Research. This is one of the most cited and respected data sources for the breakdown of recent electorate demographics.

(NOTE: I’ll be ignoring the 2018 breakdown, since it’s not a presidential election)

This chart verifies that 18–29-year-olds tend very strongly to vote for the Democratic candidate. Biden won them by a huge 24-point margin in 2020. But this was 6 points less than the 30-point margin that Clinton won them by in 2016, which means Biden lost ground with the youth vote. Therefore, Trump must have gained ground with the youth vote from 2016 to 2020.

Combining the age share breakdown from Pew and the absolute voting numbers from the Census Bureau, we get some interesting insights about this.

This chart shows the vote gain across election cycles for Clinton/Biden and Trump. The gains are similar, but there is a wider gap for Trump from 2016 to 2020. Trump’s increase among the youth vote was a bit larger than it was for Biden, roughly 3 million to 2.5 million, a 500k net vote loss for Biden. This resulted in a winning youth vote margin of 6 million for Biden in 2020 vs 6.5 million for Clinton in 2016, an 8% reduction.

Now, I understand that a voting group that is voting for a candidate by a 24-point margin seems like it’s a solid voting bloc that one can ride to victory. It’s true that the more that this group votes, the more net votes they’re adding on to its favored candidate, so the more they voted, the more Biden would have benefitted.

But I’m addressing the idea attributing the status of “savior” to youth voters regarding preserving Democracy, which I think is misguided. If they were true Democracy saviors, wouldn’t they be trending more towards Democracy? Wouldn’t they have gone from the 30-point margin in 2016 to a higher margin in 2020? Instead, even after everything Trump had done during his term in office they trended towards Trump and away from Democracy.

The fact is that, according to the data, Trump actually gained net votes from youth voters from 2016 to 2020. More youths indeed voted, but this actually benefitted Trump more than it did Biden. Based on this fact, if youth voters are Democracy’s saviors, then I honestly fear for Democracy.

Why is the youth vote trending towards Trump?

Exactly why the youth vote is trending toward Trump is a tough question to answer, and is not really the point of this article, but I’d still like to address this question and offer an explanation.

First, consider that even though the youth vote share margin was lower for Biden in 2020 vs. Clinton in 2016 (24 vs. 30), the overall share of the youth vote was actually higher for Biden in 2020 than Clinton in 2016, 59% vs 58%, a gain of 1 point.

Then how can it be that Trump gained more net votes?

Well, Trump’s overall youth vote share went up by a lot more, from 28% to 35%, a 7-point gain. This means that there must have been a sizeable share of youth voters that didn’t vote for either candidate in 2016 that did in 2020. This is the key to the “why”, in my opinion.

In 2016 the total share of the youth vote that voted for Clinton or Trump was 58% plus 28%, or 86%. By definition, this means that 14% of the youth vote went to someone else in 2016. In 2020, the youth vote share voting for Biden or Trump was 59% plus 35%, for a total of 94%. Therefore, only 6% of the youth vote went to someone else in 2020. For some reason, youths decided to vote for the main two-party candidates at a much higher rate in 2020 than they did in 2016.

My take is that this is probably because there was a discernable lack of viable 3rd-party candidates available in 2020 vs 2016. Whether this was due to effects from the Covid pandemic or something else is hard to say definitively, but the third-party presence in 2020 just wasn’t as strong as it was in 2016.

It has been largely documented that younger voters tend to feel negatively about the two major parties, political parties in general, and tend to be more willing than other age groups to vote for third party candidates.

Since Trump’s share of the youth vote increased significantly, this suggests there’s something about Trump that satisfied them for the same reasons that a 3rd-party candidate would satisfy them. On a primal level, it does make some sense. Trump is the next best thing to a third-party candidate. He is into norm-busting, disrupting the system, challenging institutions, etc. These are the same kinds of things that a 3rd party candidate would do. And if young people had concerns about this backfiring, they likely believed the risk was worth it, and if things didn’t work out like they hoped, they would have time to right the ship.

In effect, Trump was somewhat of a surrogate third-party candidate in 2020, and benefitted from this among youth voters. As, effectively, the third-party candidate, Trump “sucked up” most of the excess energy the youth voters exhibited in 2020, which resulted in neutering their potential power for Biden.

Then How did Biden win the 2020 Election so Decisively?

But Biden won the Electoral College decisively and increased his popular vote margin over Clinton’s by about 4 million. How did he do this?

He gained ground among older voters, especially the 65 and older group. According to the Pew chart above, he narrowed Trump’s margin from 9 points to 4 points. This is a 5-point swing, which countered the 6-point swing that went against him among the 18-29-year-olds. This is especially important, because if one wants to gain votes, then the 65+ voter crowd is where one does it, as they are the largest and most reliable pool of voters available.

In fact, Biden more than simply countered the 6-point youth vote swing. Since the total number of voters in the oldest age group is significantly higher than in the youngest age group, a similar percentage point swing equates to a significantly higher total number of votes. A 6-point swing among 18-29-year-olds meant 1.5 million votes in 2020, but a 5-point swing among 65+ year olds meant 2 million, so Biden actually had a net gain in votes across these age groups with a smaller percentage point gain in the share of the older group.

Below is a chart of vote totals of 65+ voters for the Democratic candidate and Trump from 2016 to 2020, similar to the one shown above for 18-29-year-olds. The effect is the opposite as in the chart above for the youth vote. The gain from 2016 to 2020 is significantly larger for Biden than it was for Trump, 4.5 million and 3 million, respectively, a net gain of 1.5 million votes for Biden between elections.

So when we combine the vote differences between the two ends of the age spectrum, Biden gained 1 million votes in 2020 (500k loss with 18-29-year-olds and 1.5 mil gain with 65 and older voters), which was entirely due to the oldest voting age bloc.

The fact is, it was the older voters that trended toward Biden, and thus democracy, in 2020. They are the main reason that Biden won handily. The true saviors of democracy in 2020 were therefore the elders of our nation.

What this means for 2024

Take a quick look at the below charts, from a CBS News poll in a couple weeks ago. There’s nothing too groundbreaking or remarkable about the results, they just reinforce what is historically been true: that youths don’t engage in elections nearly as much as older people do.

Now, if 66% of 18-29-year-olds actually voted, that would generally be a good thing for Democrats. They are likely to still maintain a fairly large margin among young people, so the more they vote, the better it is for Democrats.

However, if the youth vote trend described above continues along the trendline, and the share of youth votes for Biden diminishes further, it will take more turnout to make up the net difference between him and Trump. This would mean an uphill battle that needs to be overcome, not a rising tide to ride to victory. In fact, recent polling suggests the youth vote trendline will, indeed, continue.

John Della Volpe is one of the most respected experts of youth voters and conducts high-quality youth voter polls periodically. His most recent poll in April showed a 19-point margin of likely youth voters in favor of Biden. If this margin holds in the 2024 election, this would be a 5-point shift away from Biden’s 2020 share of the youth vote margin of 24 points. Which means a further shift along the trendline, away from Democracy in 2024.

And as in my previous point about Trump “sucking up” the excess youth energy, the same thing may happen in 2024.

On the other hand, there does seem to be one or more viable third-party candidates in this election. It remains to be seen how this will play out over the next few months, as the third-party viability may disintegrate over time. But RFK Jr. has been polling in double-digits and has a shot to be on many states’ ballots. As do Cornell West and Jill Stein, who consistently get 3-5% in polls.

Without the need to use Trump as a third-party surrogate, the energy of the youth vote may dissipate among these candidates instead of going to Trump. Conversely to conventional wisdom, Trump may be the one who is harmed the most by the presence of these third-party candidates due to their potential effect of the youth vote. If it plays out like it did in 2016, the overall vote share of youth voters may go back down to those levels, which means that Trump may lose the net gain he experienced in 2020’s youth vote.

On the other hand, the elder vote may continue to trend towards Biden. Polling has been all over the place here recently, but it’s worth noting that many of the recent polls that show Trump gaining significant ground among youth voters also show Biden gaining ground among older voters. With all the hype about how Democrats need to be careful because Trump is doing better with youths, Blacks, and Hispanics, it needs to be recognized that in order for these polls to be essentially tied, Biden would surely have to be performing better among other demographics, such as older voters and whites.

If the 65+ vote trends similarly towards Biden, then he will once again more than make up for any trend away from him among youth voters. And since older voters tend to vote for third party candidates less, the presence of more viable such candidates would have a negligible result in this age group. His margin among this group is likely to help increase his total overall margin, which should secure another solid win.

And why wouldn’t the older voters trend toward Biden? He is one of them, after all. And with all the ageism on display recently by the media in the critical analyses of Biden’s campaign, it seems like many of them might take that personally and motivate them to vote for Biden.

Also, older voters tend to vote for the status quo and respect institutions more than younger voters. In a flip from decades of political history, the Democrats are now the stable, institutional, and law and order party, promising stability and calm. It stands to reason this would appeal more to older voters in this election cycle after 4 years of Trump, and what we now know from Trump’s behavior in the aftermath of his 2020 loss and beyond.

Population Trends

It’s worth considering what the voting population could look like in the upcoming election to see if or how population variables in these age groups might affect the outcome.

Keeping the focus on the age extremes in the 2024 voting population, the likely result will be less or equal numbers of youths voting and more older people voting, assuming similar turnout in 2024. The turnout assumption is a big variable, as it seems more likely than not that turnout will be less in 2024 compared to 2020, given recent polls suggesting less enthusiasm this time around and the low approval ratings of both candidates. But just for the sake of simplicity, let’s assume turnout will be the same.

According to Census data the population for new people of voting age (14-17 years old in 2020) will go up by roughly 17.2 million. The number of people aging out of the 18–29-year-old age group in 2024 will be roughly 18 million. Pardon the following macabre nature of the analysis I’m about to do (it is important, I promise!), but according to the CDC, the death rate among this young age group is very low, about .2%. Factoring this in, the 18-29 voting age population in 2024 will therefore decrease by almost 900,000 people. Therefore, there will be a significantly smaller pool of people in this voting age bloc.

In the older age group of 65 years and older, the newly added members of this group will be roughly 16 mil in 2024. You can’t “age out” of this group, you can only “die out”, so the death rate is essential to examine here. The death rate of this age group is roughly 23%, according to the CDC, which results in a net population increase of roughly 55k from 2020.

So the pool of youth voters will go down by almost 1 million people, while the pool of older voters will be essentially unchanged, and probably a bit higher than it was in 2020. This, of course, is a big deal for the one that gains more share of the older vote. If the pool of voters expands among the most populous and most reliable group of voters, then gaining in this group is a best-scenario outcome.

Conversely, if the pool of voters shrinks among the least populous and least reliable group of voters, then gaining in that group, while somewhat beneficial, will not have near the payoff of increasing share among other larger and more reliable voting groups. In this sense, youth voters will have diminished power in 2024, compared to 2020, and even 2016. This is just another mark against them when considering labelling them “saviors of Democracy”.

Conclusion

If the age group voting share trends continue, and Trump gains more share among youth voters while Biden gains more share among older voters, Biden will clearly be the beneficiary in 2024, just like he was in 2020. It seems reasonable that this trend would continue, as there’s been some polling evidence of this lately, including in the all-important battleground states. Also, as older voters observe a barrage of ageism and attacks on institutions that were once held in high esteem during their lifetimes, they may become more wary of electing someone like Trump.

Conversely, younger voters again may see Trump as a third-party surrogate—an exciting, norm-busting protest vote that is worth the risk, as they have time to correct against it within their lifetimes if deemed necessary.

In this sense, the youth vote did not “save” Democracy in 2020, and again will not “save” democracy in 2024; the older voters will, and therefore can rightly be called the “Saviors of Democracy”. Unless there is a reversal of these shifts, in which case the youths of the country can claim their rights to that label, our elders will be our democratic warriors in 2024.

As the older voters go, so goes Democracy.