Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else. Matthew Yglesias

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Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else

Matthew Yglesias

11 - 13 minutes

The youngest cohort of Americans is less white, less religious, and better-educated than the national average, so naturally it’s more Democratic-leaning and less conservative than older cohorts.

But young people also pay less attention to politics, know less about politics, are less rooted in their communities, and are less likely to vote than older people. So across multiple cycles now, Democrats have understandably tried to “mobilize” young people — i.e., get them to actually vote. Younger Democratic Party primary voters (a group that is distinct from young people writ large) also famously did not love Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in their respective primary campaigns, preferring the more left-wing Bernie Sanders. As a result, progressive advocacy groups often argue that the key to youth mobilization is adopting strident progressive stances on the groups’ issues.

Note, though, that this is largely a fallacy.

Here are two true propositions:

    Young people are less engaged than older people

    The young people who are engaged love Bernie Sanders

Logically, nothing about (1) and (2) implies that if more Democratic candidates were more like Bernie Sanders, more non-engaged young people would engage with politics.

In fact, the median young person self-identifies as moderate, just like the electorate as a whole. And at all ages, less-engaged people are less ideological and more moderate than consistent voters. Your socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe is not representative of the typical member of her generation, who is on the bubble as to whether to vote for Joe Biden. You probably don’t hear a lot about the political opinions of politically disengaged young people because they are politically disengaged. Into the void step opportunists who try to convince Democrats that they have the key to the youth vote, even though on the most plausible measurements, the stuff that young people care about is very similar to the stuff that everyone else cares about.

In particular, the idea that there’s some magic trick to mobilize young people via progressive messages on climate change has basically no evidence behind it.

Despite all my moaning and complaining, I am actually quite a bit more progressive than the average American, so I think it would be great to have a reasonably high carbon tax and split the revenue between a Child Tax Credit and deficit reduction. But as even the most strident climate change advocates in the world agree, a broad-based carbon tax is toxically unpopular. When gasoline prices spiked early in Joe Biden’s presidency, nobody stood and cheered and said “hooray, we are getting closer to our climate goals!”

And that’s the basic paradox of climate politics.

If you ask people “is climate change important?” they often say “yes.” But if you ask them to make small personal financial sacrifices to address climate change, they rebel. My interpretation of this is that most people don’t care much about climate change, and that Democrats’ decision to elevate this to the top of their priority stack is their central political difficulty.

The Harvard Institute of Politics did a good polling exercise in their most recent youth poll where they gave respondents a bunch of pairwise comparisons — they asked them to consider two issues and pick which one is more important. Then they aggregated the winners of the head-to-head matchups to see which issues young voters care about most. Climate does not crack the top 10.

Note that two other issues that are frequently said to be politically important to young people — student loans and Israel — ranked even lower than climate change.

The top issue for young people is inflation.

Inflation, of course, is a tough issue for Biden. So he is lucky that number two is health care, which remains the thing that I think Democrats should talk about more. Unfortunately for Democrats, abortion rights rank higher than climate, but still not that high.

I think this carries a few implications. The main one is that if you’re a Democrat and you need to address a persuadable group of young people, you should probably talk about the same stuff you’d talk about to any audience. Threading the needle on inflation is tricky, but Trump really would make inflation worse. Biden has a bunch of good health care ideas. Young people seem to care more about housing and less about immigration than the general public, and that’s an underlying strength for Democrats.

In terms of organizing and mobilizing work, I know that Israel critics like to say they are trying to help Biden by coercing him into shifting his position to one that’s more popular with the Democratic base. But look at these numbers — most people don’t care about this issue. When you stage protests and do other things to try to drive up its salience, you are driving up the salience of a Trump-friendly wedge issue and making it more likely that a candidate who is relentlessly hostile to Palestinian interests will win. If you can’t in good conscience actively work to help Biden get elected, that’s fair enough, but don’t be deluded about what’s happening here. Conversely, if we’d had University of Texas students getting arrested last week staging a pro choice protest at the Texas Capitol, that would have driven up the salience of an issue that is much better for Democrats. Organizing on abortion rights is very valuable precisely because this issue has a tendency to fall out of the headlines.

Not only are events at Columbia and Yale not representative of American higher education, college students are not representative of young people in general. Most people in the 18-24 bracket are not in college.

It is true that most high school graduates do enroll in higher education, but the completion rate is a rather low 62 percent.

I would not particularly suggest making boosting college completion rates a major point of rhetorical emphasis on the campaign trail. But if you want to understand a substantive policy issue impacting young people, the fact that 38 percent of people who enroll in college don’t finish seems like a big problem. Some of those people probably shouldn’t be enrolling in the first place, and the rest of them should be either getting more help with their work or enrolling at better institutions.

Note that one reason the student debt issue is not as high a priority for young voters as many Democrats seem to believe is that a majority of young people owe $0 in student debt.

Think about a cranky old boomer who has no student loan balance and thinks it’s weird that at a time of high inflation and interest rates, the government would give free money to random recent college graduates. Now consider that the typical American under 30 is in the exact same position. It’s true that this situation is less common among young people than it is among boomers. But it is still the case for the majority.

If you want to make a pitch to young people, my advice would be to find an issue that is impacting a majority of them. Most young people care about inflation, so you might be able to persuade them that Trump’s plan to explode the deficit, tax bananas and coffee, and shrink the workforce is going to make prices higher. And young people care about health care! Trump’s plan to repeal the Affordable Care Act impacts every single young person in the country.

Most of all, though, I think it’s absolutely crucial that Democrats not let themselves get snowed by climate advocates.

There is currently an effort under way to convince Joe Biden to declare a “climate emergency,” which would allegedly unlock sweeping authority to block fossil fuel extraction projects. This is being pushed by youth activists who are claiming that it will help galvanize climate voters.

I am begging anyone who is contemplating this issue to try to think it through logically.

Everyone agrees that raising the gasoline tax would not be popular. And the reason it would not be popular is that people like cheap gasoline. So why would you block domestic oil projects? One possibility is that blocking these projects won’t influence gasoline prices. But if it doesn’t influence gasoline prices, that’s because foreign producers are fully substituting for the lost output and there’s no impact on global emissions. If there is an impact on global emissions, then the mechanism through which the impact occurs has to be higher prices.

Note that Joe Biden has been reluctantly forced to re-impose sanctions on the Venezuelan oil industry due to human rights abuses by the Maduro regime. I say “reluctantly” because the administration had been trying to score Venezuela generously precisely because the were afraid of the impact on global oil prices. Venezuela, unfortunately, did not play ball and the sanctions are getting tougher again. It’s completely reasonable for Biden to consider the impact on world oil prices and the US domestic economy when making foreign policy decisions. But he should consider the exact same issues when it comes to the so-called climate emergency.

Most of all, he shouldn’t fall for the idea that there is some secret youth exception to the rule that people care about cheap energy. It’s right there in the Harvard poll — inflation is a much, much bigger concern for young people than climate is. Advocates tend to talk around this reality by interpreting the fact that young people often don’t know what Biden has done on climate as evidence that he needs to do more left-wing stuff:

    “We’re seeing a number of especially young people and people of color who are not convinced right now that Biden is doing enough on climate change. And many of them are actually feeling disappointed,” [Anthony] Leiserowitz from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication said. “And he’s going to have to win them back. He's going to have to help them understand what he has done and what he will do with a second term, because right now he has not sealed the deal.”

I think a much more natural interpretation of this set of facts is that many young people don’t know what Biden has done on climate — which was, after all, the centerpiece of his biggest legislative initiative — because they don’t care that much about climate change.

It’s not some big secret that he signed legislation creating big subsidies for zero-carbon energy, for electric cars, and for clean home appliances. There was a huge, months-long legislative debate about this, and there have been tons of articles about it. I’m sure lots of people don’t know these facts, but that’s because they don’t care that much about the issue in particular and don’t care that much about politics in general. Of course, you don’t need to care a lot about politics to notice that there was a huge surge in inflation and find that annoying, and if you don’t follow politics closely, you might wrongly assume that Trump has good ideas to fix this. The best thing Democrats can do right now is to tell these people why Trump is bad on inflation and Biden is good on inflation, not take dramatic steps to indicate that they don’t care about energy prices.