75% of Texas voters under age 30 skipped the midterm elections. But why?
Just 25 percent of young Texans who were registered to vote cast a ballot this year, data...
Cayla Harris, Austin Bureau
Nov. 30, 2022Updated: Dec. 4, 2022 7:55 p.m
People react to Tori Larned, Beto O'Rourke's press secretary, as she talks about reproductive rights and the importance of voting during the Fun(damental Rights) on Weekdays Happy Hour at Blue Norther Hard Seltzer in Austin, Texas, Tuesday, July 12, 2022.
Sam Owens, San Antonio Express-News / Staff photographer
Young Texans voted in record numbers in 2018 — but four years later, with Democrat Beto O’Rourke at the top of the ticket again, participation among 18- to 29-year-olds fell flat.
Just 25 percent of young people who were registered to vote cast a ballot this year. About 34 percent of the same group voted four years ago, while 51 percent of them did in the 2020 presidential election, according to a post-election report by Derek Ryan, an Austin-based GOP strategist and data analyst.
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The decline in participation is concerning for youth advocates, especially Texas Democrats who have doubled down on their efforts to register and turn out young voters in recent years. Young voters set a record turnout in 2018, helping Democrats pick up 12 seats in the state House of Representatives and put O'Rourke within 3 percentage points of defeating his foe, U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz.
This year's national political climate favored Republicans, but activists hoped young voters would again turn out in huge numbers, motivated by the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to end federal abortion protections and a series of mass shootings across the country. While young people pushed Democratic candidates over the edge in battleground states elsewhere across the country, many of them stayed home in Texas — and Republicans swept every statewide election here, as they have since 1994.
“Both parties in the state failed to mobilize and engage young voters in the way that they should have been,” said Olivia Julianna, the director of politics and government affairs for the progressive advocacy group Gen Z for Change. “When we look at other campaigns across the country, especially in Pennsylvania, there was very, very, very strong youth engagement coming from people running at the top of the ticket. Youth voices were prioritized. … We saw that in some races here in Texas, but we didn't see that in all of them.”
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Young voters made up 11 percent of the roughly 8.1 million people who cast a ballot this year. That’s down from 13 percent in 2018 and 16 percent in 2020, according to Ryan’s analysis.
“75 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds stayed home this year,” Ryan said. “Meanwhile, nearly five times as many voters aged 50 and up voted. … The election was won by older voters.”
The election post-mortems are still ongoing, but Julianna said there’s an obvious difference between previous elections and this one: Senate Bill 1, the massive voting bill that Republicans passed last year. The bill standardized voting hours across the state, cutting the window in some urban areas, and introduced new identification requirements for absentee ballots and the applications for them.
Mail ballot rejections soar
More than 10,000 ballots were rejected in the state's largest counties in the general election, most of them because of the new ID mandate. It amounted to a 4 percent rejection rate — lower than the 12 percent of ballots that were tossed in the March primary elections, but still higher than the roughly 1 percent of ballots that were rejected before SB 1.Many young Texans vote by mail when they’re away at school, Julianna said, and some of them never received a ballot. There were also concerns of disenfranchisement at Texas A&M University, which did not have an early voting location on campus this year.
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Those changes build on long-lasting complaints: Texas does not allow student IDs as valid identification at polling places, and the state’s Republican leaders have long resisted online voter registration. Texans also must register to vote 30 days before an election to cast a ballot, while 20 other states and Washington, D.C. allow registration up to and including Election Day.
Texas schools are also required to give students the opportunity to register to vote twice a year if they are 18 or will turn 18 soon. But Julianna, a 20-year-old who grew up in Sugar Land, said she was never given that opportunity — and raised alarms that many schools don’t inform their students about the civic process or encourage them to vote.
“When you make it harder for young people to vote, that's the logical answer as to why young people are having a harder time showing up to the polls,” Julianna said.
O’Rourke, who showed himself to be a strong contender in 2018 in part because of his appeal to young people, spent much of his gubernatorial campaign this year at colleges and universities. His team had little explanation for the drop in youth voter turnout at a post-election briefing earlier this month but noted that investing in the youth vote is always a two-part endeavor: Getting them registered first, then getting them to the polls.
“We thought there was significant enthusiasm,” said Jason Lee, the deputy campaign manager for the O’Rourke campaign. “I don't think, when we do the final analysis, we're going to see the type of youth turnout that we were hoping for and looking for, and there's probably a lot of reasons for that, but it wasn't for lack of trying.”
Still, youth advocates see room for optimism and growth. Young people are more progressive and more politically engaged than past generations, they say, and hundreds of thousands of young Texans did turn out this cycle.
“Young people are worthy of what we all expect and deserve in a democracy — real leaders who celebrate our participation, who are responsive to our needs, and take our issues seriously,” said Claudia Yoli Ferla, the executive director of the MOVE Texas Action Fund. “The real problem is that on many of the issues that are important to young people, extremist and out-of-touch politicians in Texas seek to silence us and have gone through extraordinary lengths to move in the opposite direction.”
Early data analysis by the Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University showed that the 2022 election saw the second-highest level of youth participation nationwide in a midterm in at least three decades. They made the most impact in states with competitive U.S. Senate races, such as Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Both of Texas’ senators were not up for re-election this year. But Cruz is on the ballot again in 2024, and presidential election years typically have higher turnout than midterms.
Political campaigns are less likely to contact young people than older groups, and there are additional hurdles for youth voters based on education, race and gender, said Ruby Belle Booth, the election coordinator at CIRCLE. Plus, young people are usually unfamiliar with the voting process overall, she said.
“This makes contact from campaigns and organizations all the more important in helping to clarify how, when, where, and why young people should vote,” Booth said. “In order to better engage young people, we — as a democracy — have to invest time, resources and cultural capital in helping young people develop their identities as voters. This involves everything from getting them information to building confidence in themselves as voters and in our electoral process.”
