Nikki Fox/Daily News-Record via AP
James Madison University sophomore Parker Anderson, left, registers to vote during National Voter Registration Day, September 26, 2017, in Harrisonburg, Virginia.
The knock on young people is that they don’t vote, but when it comes to national issues and presidential elections, they can get motivated to cast a ballot. James Madison University, a large public university located in Harrisonburg, Virginia, saw 75 percent of its student body vote in 2020—over 15,000 students. The Shenandoah Valley school outvoted the rest of the state’s 18- to-29-year-olds by nearly 20 percentage points.
But when the presidency isn’t at stake or if major state constitutional issues aren’t in play, the youth vote mirrors the broader decline in voter participation during off-year elections. Overall, Virginia’s youth turnout had increased from 13 percent in 2014 to 33 percent in 2018. Yet young Virginians did not pick up the pace: Voting declined more than ten percentage points in the 2022 midterms.
Carah Ong Whaley, the academics program officer at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, says that one reason for the drop-off is that the battles between the Democratic and Republican Parties have alienated young people who find that infighting and hyper-partisanship prevent lawmakers from being effective. “I think we do have a crisis of motivation, given the political environment we are in,” she says.
After the Dobbs decision in 2022, states like Kansas and Kentucky confronting the question of abortion access and wider reproductive rights had constitutional amendments to consider. While Maine, which traditionally has had remarkable youth turnout rates, had a governor’s race on the ballot. All three states saw the defeat of anti-abortion amendments and candidates, but as other states across the country revoke citizens’ reproductive rights, young people remain unconvinced about the value of voting.
A significant barrier is a lack of information about elections, politics, and policy that compounds the disconnect between voting and change and amplifies dissatisfaction with the political system.
But 2023 may be different in the Old Dominion. The future of Virginians’ reproductive rights rests on whether Republicans gain control of the state legislature. Currently, the GOP holds the governorship. Republicans have had a narrow majority in the House of Delegates; Democrats controlled the Senate and have blocked Republicans’ anti-abortion proposals—leaving Virginia as the only state in the South that has not implemented new abortion restrictions since Dobbs. If the GOP secures a majority in the Senate, new abortion restrictions are likely: Gov. Glenn Youngkin has proposed a ban on abortion after the 15th week of pregnancy.
Abortion and reproductive rights are top priorities for Virginia college students. Ella Cabel, an undergraduate student, told The Commonwealth Times, “Abortion, abortion 1000%, it’s a big topic right now. Abortion. Women’s health rights. I want a pro-choice candidate.”
However, another significant barrier is a lack of information about elections, politics, and policy that compounds the disconnect between voting and change and amplifies dissatisfaction with the political system. Inflation, abortion, jobs, climate change, and gun control consistently rank as top issues for 18-to-29-year-olds. “Where we really see the difference between young people just caring about an issue and getting mobilized to turn out is if these issues are really being made central to every election,” says Ruby Belle Booth, an elections coordinator at Tufts University’s CIRCLE, a research organization focused on youth civic participation. “There’s a preparedness and confidence that we need to be instilling in young people if we want to have an intergenerational and functional democracy,” she adds.
But Mehmood Shajih, a Northern Virginia Community College student, says many of his friends and classmates don’t know where to begin when it comes to candidates and their stances on issues that are important to them. Consequently, when young people aren’t sure who represents their “voices,” he says, they often choose to be silent. That’s a major problem for Shajih. “We need our votes out there because a lot of times our voices are clouded by all the older generations that are usually more involved in politics,” he says.
Ong Whaley tried to bridge that information gap and significantly increased civic participation when she worked as associate director of the James Madison Center for Civic Engagement during the 2020 presidential election. The 2020 voter engagement plan at JMU included traveling town halls with local candidates, nonpartisan voter guides created in partnership with undergraduate political science students, and weekly student-led “tent talks” on public issues.
Dukes Vote, a student group at James Madison University, empowered student leaders, dubbed “democracy fellows,” to work with their peers on practical issues like registration and absentee ballots, and around motivational issues like dissatisfaction and feeling uninformed. The fellows working with the university’s Madison Center for Civic Engagement utilized data gathered from the National Study of Learning, Voting, and Engagement to target the people who were the least likely to vote, such as engineering students. Through their work, the turnout rate increased from just over 40 percent to almost 70 percent between the 2016 midterms and 2020 presidential elections. The hands-on approach helped JMU surpass the national voting average at higher-education institutions by nine percentage points.
When students can make decisions based on concrete information, they are more willing to vote and encourage their college community members to follow suit. Alexis Gayle, a recent University of Virginia graduate, works in central Virginia as the Hampton Roads community organizer at Planned Parenthood Generation Action, a youth organizing program. In addition to registering student voters in the region, the reproductive rights advocacy organization’s college chapter program helps youth organizers educate students about the need for state-level reproductive rights legislation and the importance of getting to know the candidates running to represent them in the General Assembly. “Boots on the ground and creating a web of conversations is just as important as voting, but neither of them can stand alone,” says Gayle. “They have to go together.”
Two schools, Christopher Newport University and the College of William & Mary, are in Senate District 24, which includes Williamsburg and sections of Newport News. The district features one of the state’s most competitive races, with incumbent Democratic state Sen. Monty Mason running against Republican Danny Diggs, a former York County-Poquoson sheriff. The recently redrawn district favors Republican-leaning candidates, so Mason faces an uphill battle to protect one of his top priorities, abortion rights.
Virginia’s 45-day early-voting period, same-day registration, and automatic voter registration all make voting easier for young people. Ong Whaley also pointed to other key factors that help crystallize a young person’s thinking about voting, whether or not their parents took them to the polls as a child or encouraged them to vote as an adult.
Annabelle Midden, a senior at William & Mary, explains that she plans to vote “to stem the sense of helplessness in the face of rising conservatism and polarization in the United States that scares me every day.” She adds that there’s a second important reason, too: “My mom said she would disown me if I didn’t.”
