Youth Vote 2000 They'd Rather Volunteer by Michael DeCourcy Hinds Whether young people voted in the last election or sat it out, their voices had an impact.

Voting is a civic right, duty and privilege. So there’s cause for concern about democracy’s health and future when about 30 million young Americans don’t vote.

It is, however, also possible to look at the youth vote with some pride and amazement: One in three young people did vote last November, overcoming a variety of cultural, educational and political impediments. To name a few: As usual, the Democratic and Republican campaigns paid scant attention to young people, writing them off as likely nonvoters. Except for Bill Bradley, John McCain and Ralph Nader, the candidates did not champion any compelling or inspirational youth issues—and largely ignored the age-related perspectives and concerns the young have about mainstream issues. Nor, from the start, did young people have much interest in following the political debate: most said in surveys that their schools and colleges hadn’t taught them much at all about politics or the democratic process, and many said they rarely, if ever, discussed politics at home.

As society’s silence conveyed the message that politics and voting weren’t important, record numbers of young people poured their energy into community service—which they consider to be far more effective than government at solving public problems, even national ones. This trend may be reshaping politics: surveys indicate that somewhere between 24 and 44 percent of young people identify themselves politically as Independents.

In this context, it could be considered something of a countercultural act of rebellion that young people went to the polls and voted. Moreover, their disproportionately strong support of Nader not only made a significant difference in the extremely close election, it arguably gave a leadership voice to the rumbling discontent that many older Americans express about the two-party system.

“Not a bad day’s work for a small bunch of young reformers,” says Terry Madonna, director of the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Millersville University of Pennsylvania. Exit polls show that in Florida, where Al Gore lost to George W. Bush by about 500 votes, young people gave Nader an estimated 35,000 votes. The exit polls, conducted by Voter News Service, found that, nationally, young people between the ages of 18 and 29 gave Nader five percent of their votes, or two-and-a-half times the support that he received from voters over 30. Nader had the strongest youth support in New England: 16 percent of the youth vote in Massachusetts, 11 percent in Maine and Vermont, 10 percent in Rhode Island and 8 percent in New Hampshire.

Apart from their stronger support for Nader, exit surveys indicated that young people split their votes: 48 percent for Gore, 46 percent for Bush, and about one percent for Patrick Buchanan.

What brought young people to the polls? The same things as their elders, according to a post-election survey sponsored by Third Millennium, a nonpartisan think tank that has received Carnegie Corporation support. The top three reasons cited by people between the ages of 18 and 34 who supported Gore: he was pro-choice, represented the Democratic Party perspective and had more experience. For Bush, his young supporters said he had better moral character, would restore dignity to the White House and was pro-life. For Nader, the top reasons were that young voters didn’t like the other two candidates, were fed up with the two-party system and wanted to help Nader’s Green party qualify for federal funding in the next election.

Those were Paul Ambrose’s top three reasons for voting for Nader. Ambrose, 22, is a business major at the University of New Hampshire and plans a career focused on community service. He says, “I agreed with Bush on some things and I agreed with Gore on others. But I felt like I was trying to choose the lesser of two evils. As I was walking into the high school to vote I decided to vote for Nader. I figured that a vote for Nader might mean I’d be able to choose from three candidates in the next election.” the youth vote, we need to stop paying lip service to the importance of voting and start paying attention to what young people are saying.

They Say: No One’s Listening
“They ignore us! We’re nonentities,” Iahana Spain, 25, an office manager, told the Washington Post just before the election. She said she was tired of inaction and canned rhetoric. “Young people won’t vote. Why should we?”

Young people have long felt out of the political loop. In a landmark study of 15-to-24-year-olds in November 1998 by the National Association of Secretaries of State, nearly seven out of ten young people agreed with the statement: “Our generation has an important voice but no one seems to hear it.” A nonvoting college student in Salt Lake City said: “I think if they’re speaking to us, instead of over our heads, then we’ll pay more attention. If I feel like they’re speaking to me, I’ll register to vote.”

What were the young people’s concerns that fell on deaf ears during the 2000 campaign? On the surface, young people share the very same concerns as the rest of the electorate. Consider the similarity of responses to surveys of the general public last year by Gallup and an August 2000 survey of 18-to-24-year-olds by Princeton Survey Research Associates for MTV and the Kaiser Family Foundation. In the surveys, both groups were asked to identify issues that were very important in determining their vote for president. Seven issues appeared on both groups’ top ten lists: education, economy and jobs, healthcare, the environment, Social Security, taxes and crime.

Despite the overlap, younger voters have very different, age-related, concerns about the same issues. For example, education was the highest-priority issue for the electorate. But young voters were most concerned about the costs of tuition and paying off college loans. The candidates occasionally addressed these concerns: among other things, Gore called for tax credits for higher education and Bush proposed increasing federal Pell grants for under-graduates. But the candidates concentrated on the general public’s main concern in education, which was school reform in grades K-12.

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