The crux of this project centers around a 22-question survey randomly administered to 82 University of Michigan students. The sample was reasonably balanced — age, demographics, majors, etc. — though that sample size and spread is naturally imperfect. I went into this project with some theories I hoped to evaluate. This section will break down those prior hypotheses and how the data changed those prior thoughts.
1. Donald Trump’s election, during a coming-of-age period in our lives, has reduced faith in the systems of government and thus diminished enthusiasm to vote.The raw results of the survey indicate there’s something to this theory; asked to indicate their agreement with the statement “Donald Trump has reduced my faith in the systems of politics,” nearly 80 percent of students indicated that they either strongly or moderately agreed. Only about 15 percent of students indicated they either strongly or moderately disagreed with that statement. Now, of course, that does not inherently imply that disillusionment actually leads to non-voting, particularly if and when Donald Trump himself is on the ballot.
But the framing of the question is important to understand here. This is not merely asking for support or disapproval of Trump — hardly worthwhile in a survey of a broadly liberal, anti-Trump sample. The reduced my faith portion of the statement points to something more broad about the functionality of government and a country which could elect someone like Trump. At some point, a reduction in faith leads to apathy. Apathy then translates to antipathy toward voting. This could be measured in the statement People who don't vote have no right to complain about government. Among those who answered affirmatively that Trump’s election reduced their faith in politics, 54 percent indicated they either strongly or moderately agreed with the latter statement; in comparison to 33 percent who either strongly or moderately disagreed, that figure indicates, still, that distaste for Trump offers no proper rationale for not voting. In other words, distrust does not inherently lead to disengagement.
Astoundingly, every single respondent in the entire survey indicated an intention to vote in the 2020 election — undoubtedly a prime example of response bias, which we will get to later. While, statistically, it would be nearly unfathomable that each participant votes in 2020, the intention behind that response matters quite a bit for this project. Again, more on that later.
Conclusion: Trump is not the main hindrance to contemporary youth voting, though his presidency may be creating a broader cynicism toward the political process, which has hard-to-see, long-term consequences.
2. The hurdles to voting, particularly voting absentee for out-of-state students, simply outweigh the benefits of casting that vote.Voting for President requires significantly more effort than even filling out this survey. Those challenges are often accentuated for students, especially at a school like University of Michigan, where nearly 50 percent of students come from out of state. If you intend to vote absentee in your home state, you must mail in an absentee ballot request, wait for its arrival, fill it back out and mail it to the right address. You must do so without mishaps (mailing, transportation, misspellings, misunderstands, etc.) and you must do so with enough time to meet the deadlines as specified by state. For a Presidential election, many students may decide to commit to completing this process; many, clearly, do not. For midterm elections, special elections and more local races — ones that receive only a modicum of the national attention — completing that process might seem less important. In a life consumed by school, social life, internships, jobs, etc. voting might not sit atop the priority list.
These hurdles inspired the framing of the statement: “Voting requires too much effort”, asked on a five-point scale from strongly agree to strongly disagree. The results bare a strong majority (70.8 percent) of respondents who said they either strongly or moderately disagree. But the remaining 29.2 percent speak for the actuality of many rather than an idealization; there is, unquestionably, a degree of laziness involved in that. The most common response in the list of potential rationales for why a respondent chose not to vote in a given election was: The process of getting to the polls or mailing an absentee ballot was too difficult.
Conclusion: Laziness alone cannot explain low youth turnout. But, for reasons worth exploring in further research, laziness undoubtedly plays a role.
3. Growing up in the most hyper-partisan era in modern American history has disaffiliated youth from positive sentiments about government as a whole. This cynicism drives an ambivalence about the political process.For students of current undergraduate age, more than two-thirds of the present population have grown up in a state that has never voted for the “opposing” party in a Presidential election. In other words, 31.24 percent of the population live in states that have voted for Republican Presidential nominees in every cycle since 1996 and 36.64% have grown up in states that have only voted for Democratic Presidential nominees. They know nothing else other than to think their vote has no appreciable impact on the result. More to that point, according to a 2020 Pew Research survey, 71 percent of Americans see the conflict between Democrats and Republicans as “very strong.” The result is a Congress with a dismal 22 percent approval rating and a President whose approval divides sharply along party lines Students of our age have grown up in a political climate defined by its historic polarization, among the worst in American political history. This context was the backbone behind putting the statement, “I would be more likely to vote if the government was more effective” in the survey, from strongly agree to strongly disagree.
This question yielded results to indicate there’s some validity to that claim. Just 34.2 percent of respondents indicated they either strongly or moderately disagree with that statement. For those who have lived through eras with more bipartisan compromise and sentiment of government competence, cynicism toward the process as a whole might appear incomprehensible. But the idea of hope and change as attainable goals of an individual vote falls further and further from comprehension as polarization and antagonization grow worse.
The combination of an Electoral College system that renders a majority of states uncontested and a government in the midst of historic polarization (and incompetence), invariably breeds some sentiment about the way the system operates. If that's all you've ever known, it's not wonder you might not feel inclined to vote.
Conclusion: There appears to be a level of cynicism about government, having grown up in a political environment rich with vitriol and incompetence, that is unique to the younger generation. That has a measurable impact on voting rates.
4. College students tend to be of a higher socioeconomic background; therefore, they are less beholden to the day-to-day functions of government and feel apathetic to voting as a result.The causation here is hard to measure — but the stakes of politics become far more accentuated for people living paycheck-to-paycheck than those who live in comfortable suburbia. That premise, though, is rejected fairly resoundingly in this self-reported data. Two statements intended to gauge this relationship: 1) I don't really care who wins elections because they don't impact my life. 2) On a scale from 1-10, with 1 being "not at all worried" and 10 being "very worried", how much do you worry about money? If this relationship held up, there should be a correlation between answering closer to 10 on the “Money Scale” and believing that elections do impact your life.
That turned out to be moot, as 91.5 percent of respondents either strongly or moderately disagreed with the first statement. Simply, nearly everybody who responded to the survey believed elections impact their life. That number was actually slightly smaller among those who worry about money at a “5” or more — an admittedly flimsy assessment of family income, anyway.
It would be interesting to test this in a way that doesn't rely on self-evaluation about financial status and voting, two touchy subjects in American life.
Conclusion: People believe elections have consequences for their lives. In this sample, that does not vary based on perception of wealth.
5. There’s a remarkable amount of recall bias in these results. That means something important.If you take away anything from these results, this is the single most important result from this survey of students, both because of what it does and does not say.
Statistically, the odds that more than half of the respondents vote with any regularity is slim. According to a study conducted by the university, just 39 percent of students between the ages of 18-21 voted in 2016. In the 2014 midterm elections, that number tumbles to 10.2 percent. Yet in this survey, 90 percent of those surveyed who were eligible to vote indicated that they voted in 2016 and roughly 80 percent suggested they voted in the 2018 midterm elections. Additionally, and most stunningly, 98.8 percent suggested they planned to vote in the 2020 general election. This recall bias is further substantiated by prior research; in a survey of 18-34-year-olds conducted by NBC News in 2018, 55 percent of respondents said they would either probably or definitely vote in the November midterm elections. In reality, 35.6 percent of eligible 18-29-year-old voters cast a vote — still, a sizable uptick over 2014, but far short of self-reported intentions.
There are survey flaws and constraints to account for with this data — the survey, marketed about voting preferences, inherently attracts politically-inclined students; the questions allow for recall bias, people often feel as though they should vote, so they indicated they had; the sample skews more highly-educated and civically-minded than your average student. Even accounting for these shortcomings, this result suggests something really important: Students want to think they vote. They value the right to vote. If all things were equal, they hope they become regular voters. That’s further reflected in the results asking about the following statement: Voting is a very important civic duty for all citizens. Eighty-two percent of respondents strongly agreed with that statement. An additional 15.9 moderately agreed. It was nearly unanimous.
Which is to say: the thrust of this project is important. The data only offers a sliver of opinions within the ocean of young voices. It has flaws. But if more students want to think they vote than actually cast a ballot, then that makes the mission of getting to the root of this problem all the more important.
6. Admitted non-voters skew slightly more “Conservative.”Of those who assigned themselves a “5” or higher on a 1-10 scale, from “very liberal” to “very conservative”, only 41.6 percent of those eligible responded that they “definitely voted” in the midterm elections. That number rose to 78 percent in the 2016 general election, though that still comes in under the percentages for the full sample of survey respondents. This tracks with college-educated Conservatives on the whole, who anecdotally feel alienated by a Republican Party steering into the skid of racism, sexism, and xenophobia — not to mention, completely defying traditional norms of conservatism.
Education is becoming the single best predictor in American politics. More than race. More than geography. More than class (though education and class are, obviously, correlated).
These findings are not significant enough to make any grand conclusions about the future of highly-educated conservative youth, kids who often describe themselves as “fiscally conservative and socially liberal.” These groups have come to populate the groups of Never Trump conservatives. These voters, to be sure, are still vehemently opposed to social welfare programs, gun control legislation, higher taxes, liberal judges, and other pillars of the Democratic Party — but increasingly find themselves misaligned with the modern day Republican Party. This helped spur a mass migration of suburban voters in the 2018 Midterm Election.
But it doesn’t follow logically that this group would willingly sit out elections for more than one election cycle or two. Most likely, those respondents in the survey simply couldn’t stomach assenting Donald Trump, and opted to sit out rather than back Democrats. That’s hardly a long-term predictor.
Conclusion: Though ideology among college-educated students were more inclined to not vote, that more likely represents a short-term blip than a long-term trend.
7. Apathy with government and politics was noticeably stronger among students of color.The demographic results of this survey, while limited, unfortunately broadly reflect the demographics of the University of Michigan, which remains a majority-white institution. Still, the scope of the survey (n = 82 respondents) limited the number of people of color represented.
With that caveat in mind, the disparity between white respondents and non-white respondents provided an alarming — and important — finding. Cynicism as it pertains to the political process was far more abundant among respondents of color than that of white respondents. A staggering 94 percent of non-white respondents indicated that they either strongly or moderately believed elections don’t impact their lives, a staggering contrast to the 6.2 percent of white respondents who indicated such. On the same note, 53 percent of non-white students indicated that they either moderately or strongly agreed that their vote does not matter; just 20 percent of white students indicated that same sentiment.
These results are both stunning in their disparities and unsurprising given the history of American politics. The right to vote was unavailable to Black people in the United States until 1870; and even then, hurdles have been put in place to stop minorities from voting. In modern contexts, voter suppression continues to run rampant throughout the country, re-ignited by the Supreme Court decision in Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, which invalidated a key part of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. More broadly, college students of color in the United States have lived through post-9/11 fear tactics, the murder of Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, the formation of Black Lives Matter movement, the Muslim Ban, and the election of a President who’s openly hostile to non-white citizens, among other hardships. At best, governmental response to these issues has been tepid. At worst, it’s been actively detrimental. That doesn't even begin to delve into voter suppression tactics and gerrymandering, which have been a prominent strategy by lawmakers to dissuade the democratic rights of people of color, in particular.
Still, it’s startling to see these sentiments in empirical form — and to see how that sentiment translates to voting habits and preferences. It seems intuitive, but if you don’t think your vote matters (or will even count) and you don’t think the people who purport to represent you actually make a positive impact in your life, you probably won’t vote. To ascribe these non-voters as “lazy” or “passive” would be to discount their life experiences that led to these (largely-conscious) decisions.
Conclusion: The degree to which students of color respond that elections don't impact their life matters. When government is not only unresponsive to your needs — but actively undermining them — you're less inclined to feel obligated to participate in the system entirely.