Stay informed with FP’s news and analysis as the United States prepares to vote.
Soon after U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump finished their contentious debate on Sept. 10, the Democrats received some more good news: Singer and songwriter Taylor Swift had posted a photograph of herself and her cat on Instagram along with a caption endorsing the Harris-Walz ticket. While most celebrity endorsements don’t stir too much excitement, the convergence of a singer with a huge fan base among young women and a campaign that revolves around questions of reproductive rights has the potential to make an impact. As she left her celebratory post-debate party on Tuesday night, Harris exited to Swift’s 2019 hit, “The Man.”
In an election where the victor will be decided on the margins, a sharp uptick of voters between the ages of 18 and 21 could easily prove critical. By 2 p.m. the day after the debate, more than 337,000 people had visited the custom URL that Swift posted to register to vote. Democrats are hoping that the boost of energy—and hope—that has surrounded Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, since the Democratic ticket formed will motivate them to cast their ballot, especially in swing states.
Despite the endorsement, the challenge for Democrats remains that the age group that Swift is likely to excite has historically turned out in low numbers. Young people often decide that they won’t vote at all—too busy with college classes, new jobs, or disillusioned with the choice. According to one study published in October 2020, the United States had fallen to fifth from the bottom of 24 nations analyzed in terms of voter participation amongst 18- to 29-year-olds. Generally, the percentage of older citizens voting has been 20 to 30 percentage points above the percentage of younger Americans, according to political scientists.
To be sure, there have been important exceptions to this trend. In fact, shortly after the release of the 2020 study, high levels of youth voting helped Joe Biden to secure the presidency. One analysis that year found that 50 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 29 had voted in the presidential election—an increase of 11 points since 2016.
The youngest American adults were only granted the right to vote with the 26th Amendment in 1971. Responding to the reasons why they have failed to fully exercise that right is essential to the project of strengthening the nation’s democracy. And for the political party that takes this problem seriously, young people could also be a key to expanding its coalition.
Before 1971, an American citizen who reached the age of 18 did not have the federal right to vote. Most states had set the voting age at 21. (Georgia was one of the exceptions; since 1943, the southern state had lowered the voting age to 18.) But this meant that young men could be drafted into the Army but lacked the capacity to help decide who would make decisions about when to go to war and when to maintain the peace.
Throughout U.S. history, elected officials from different political parties pointed to this contradiction and called for reform. In his 1954 State of the Union address, President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican and former military leader—that is, certainly not a paragon of radicalism—told Congress that “[f]or years our citizens between the ages of 18 and 21 have, in time of peril, been summoned to fight for America. They should participate in the political process that produces this fateful summons. I urge Congress to propose to the States a constitutional amendment permitting citizens to vote when they reach the age of 18.”
In response to the president’s remarks, several legislators introduced constitutional amendments to lower the voting age. But those amendments never made much headway, as legislative opponents—including Mississippi Sen. James Eastland, who chaired the Judiciary Committee—were not in favor of any federal intervention in voting, which of course threatened the system of racial apartheid that existed in the Deep South.
As was the case with so many issues, the turmoil of the 1960s transformed the debate. The Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), founded in 1960 at the University of Michigan, was initially inspired by the drive for participatory democracy. Voting, the founders of SDS argued in their first official statement, was the key to social justice: “The vote, if used strategically by the great mass of now-unregistered Negroes theoretically eligible to vote, will be a decisive factor in changing the quality of Southern leadership from low demagoguery to decent statesmanship.”
Their sentiment only became stronger as the decade progressed. Young white Americans were inspired by Black Americans’ struggle for the right to vote, a movement which they participated in. Many risked life and limb by traveling to Mississippi in the summer of 1964 to register Black voters and protest the restrictions that had been put into place during Jim Crow. Everyone watched in horror as Alabama law enforcement officials viciously assaulted nonviolent voting rights protesters, including Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee leader John Lewis, on March 7, 1965, now known as Bloody Sunday. They celebrated when Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which ensured that the federal government would protect the right to vote.
The mobilization against the war in Vietnam also encouraged younger Americans to ramp up the demand to lower the voting age to 18. With friends and family returning from Southeast Asia in body bags, it became increasingly impossible to tolerate to bifurcated rules of citizenship. By the end of the decade, mainstream political organizations that had been involved in the civil rights mobilization joined to push to legalize a lower voting age.
The youth voting rights movement found strong Senate support by the end of the 1960s. Seeking to use the 14th Amendment as a basis for federal action, Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy and Senate Majority Leader Mike Mansfield added an amendment to the Voting Rights Act in 1970.
“Obviously,” Sen. Kennedy said at the time, “the maturity of 18- to 21-year-olds varies from person to person, just as it varies for all age groups in our population. However … as a class, I believe they possess the requisite maturity, judgment, and stability for responsible exercise of the franchise. They deserve the right to vote and the stake in society it represents.”
After a Supreme Court decision, Oregon v. Mitchell, challenged the power of the federal government to regulate state and local elections, Indiana Sen. Birch Bayh, a handsome young senator with presidential ambitions, and West Virginia Democratic Sen. Jennings Randolph moved a constitutional amendment through Congress in 1971 to lower the voting age to 18.
With stunning speed, 38 states ratified to 26th Amendment within 100 days. Randolph—who had famously asked during World War II, “Who will say they are old enough to use bullets, but too young to use ballots?”—proclaimed that the amendment was a major victory for the cause of suffrage.
While the amendment endured, the young voters often didn’t make use of the newfound right. Some of the blame fell on young people themselves. Too often, just as with Americans of other demographic cohorts, 18- to 21-year-olds took the right for granted. Turnout for the cohort between 18 and 29 fell from a high of 55.4 percent in 1972 to about 44 percent in 2016.
But it has been and remains a mistake to place all the blame on the young Americans. In her seminal work on the history of the 26th Amendment, Rutgers Law professor Yael Bromberg argued, “the public discourse too often dismisses young voters as disengaged and apathetic to political realities, discrediting their important (and powerful) role in our democracy. We are unaccustomed to thinking of youth access to the ballot within a voting rights framework, and our courts have followed suit, failing to create a robust Twenty-Sixth Amendment jurisprudence that protects access to the ballot free of age discrimination.”
Indeed, by the late 1970s, neither Democrats nor Republicans prioritized the young vote. There was an ongoing cycle of disincentives. Because older voters tend to vote more frequently and in higher numbers—and because the nation’s population was aging—elected officials tended to emphasize policy issues, such as Social Security or home ownership, that were of interest to retirees or middle aged people with families. Feeling ignored, younger people lost confidence that the parties cared.
Since 1971, younger people also came of age in an era shaped by a conservative movement that disparaged government, casting aside civil servants as lazy and ineffective while championing private markets. They heard President Ronald Reagan dismiss government as “the problem” and acted accordingly.
And Congress has failed to make voting easier, which continues to impact Americans of all ages. Efforts to ease the process have only enjoyed limited success. While there have been some positive developments, such as the motor voter law in 1993 and liberalized absentee voting rules due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, others have languished. Reformers keep pushing for reforms such as a national Election Day or investments in more high-tech polling stations, including in high schools and colleges, without as much success.
Young people might vote less than their elders, but America as whole doesn’t attract enough people to the Ballot Box. It is an intergenerational problem. Voting rates for the entire have been much higher in other countries, including in 2020 where they reached rates upward of 80 to 90 percent. While former president Donald Trump and the GOP have focused on imposing tougher restrictions to stop discredited claims of fraud, the real problem in the United States is that not enough people vote.
Importantly, there have also been structural factors at work. Social scientists have argued that developing good voting habits takes time, which is part of why younger voters participate less than their elders in many countries. Moreover, the opportunity costs for younger voters are often higher. It is difficult to take time off new jobs, or to travel to their designated polling places when they are living temporarily away from home. Young people also find alternative outlets for participating in politics, such as social movements and demonstrations.
Confronting both these barriers and a “gerontocracy” of political leaders, the younger voters remain unreliable on Election Day.
Today there is some evidence that Democrats are listening. The energy and polling burst that the Harris-Walz ticket has enjoyed at some level has been attributed to the excitement that younger voters finally feel about the ticket. Indeed, it is telling that Governor Walz’s popularity took off through TikTok and other social media. Now Swifties might add to the buzz.
Importantly, both parties have good reason to participate in this effort. It has been difficult to predict which way the youth vote will go. In 1972, Democrats thought that the new voters would favor the Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. George McGovern, who opposed the war in Vietnam. But incumbent President Richard Nixon made a concerted effort to appeal to them. The president hired Ken Reitz, a 30-year-old, to help with the 50-state effort. Nixon, who was certainly not cool, received the vote of almost half of first-time voters in this age bracket.
Over the long run, elected officials will need to address some of the structural disincentives that diminish the number of young people voting, which would help to boost democratic participation. We also have to keep lowering the barriers for all generations to exercise this treasured democratic right.
Of course, Democrats are hoping that this time, history moves in their direction. If the vibes of 2024 translate into higher rates of youth voting, and Taylor Swift helps to accelerate the momentum, the 26th Amendment might help produce the election of the first Black and South Asian woman to become president, confirming that new generations can imagine a different United States, freed from the barriers that have constrained the country.