SAN DIEGO — The voting rate of young people in their late teens and early 20s has long been the lowest of any age group, and the 2020 presidential election was no exception.
But that was only part of the story.
Turnout jumped to 66% among college students nationwide, just below the 67% registered by voters overall, according to tracking by the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University.
That was an increase of 14 percentage points from 2016, more than double the hike experienced by all voters in the election.
“That students, often younger and first-time voters, turned out at rates commensurate with the general public is nothing short of stunning,” the institute said in a report about the election.
Those results continued a trend that’s been going on for almost a decade. Colleges are paying more attention to voting rates as a measure of civic engagement — a sign that they are fulfilling their mission to help create an informed citizenry.
Campuses in San Diego are part of the effort.
“Sometimes students feel like voting won’t matter, so we try to tell them that it does,” said Catherine Mansour, 20, a junior at the University of San Diego who helps run a non-partisan campaign there called USD Votes.
“Even if they think one opinion isn’t super powerful, they are part of a demographic that doesn’t get heard from enough,” she said. “If they want their concerns taken into consideration, they have to vote.”
Now another election looms, midterms that typically attract fewer voters. Will young people continue to participate?
“I think it will be higher than it was in 2018,” when 40% of students voted in the midterms, said Nancy Thomas, director of the institute at Tufts. “It would be great if they turned out in numbers similar to the 2020 general election, but I don’t want to be unrealistic.”
The institute started in 2013 and now has a database of some 11 million de-identified student records that have been combined with publicly available voting records to compile a picture of what’s happening on campuses.
More than 1,200 colleges participate and in return get detailed reports about how many of their students are showing up at ballot boxes.
Thomas said the project sprang from a concern that colleges weren’t doing enough to fulfill their civic mission, and that the efforts they were pursuing — encouraging students to volunteer, for example, or holding dialogues about cultural or racial differences — weren’t objectively measurable.
In the beginning, it was hard to convince schools to sign up, Thomas said, because they didn’t want to be seen as political. Once they joined, it was hard to get them to believe the voter-turnout numbers that came back.
She remembered one college administrator telling her, “These numbers are so low, they couldn’t possibly be accurate.”
Storm clouds
Last week, the Harvard Youth Poll — a twice-annual national survey of 18- to 29-year-olds — found that interest in elections remains high. Forty% said they “definitely” will vote on Nov. 8, which is on track to match or potentially top the record-setting 2018 midterm turnout among young people.
