Ben Gray/AP Photo
Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) talks with Morehouse College students while leaving the polls after he voted on the first day of early voting in Atlanta, October 17, 2022.
While dubious commentators concluded that young people would sit out the midterms, the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University had identified Georgia as the top state where the youth vote would be decisive. In the tight general-election contest between Sen. Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker, 63 percent of young people cast their votes for Warnock; 36 percent went with Walker. Some pollsters have doubted the Georgia youth surge, but it does seem clear that twice as many young people in the state voted compared to 2014. The youth vote kept up with the overall increase in turnout in Georgia, in addition to becoming more Democratic.
The youth vote remains a critical factor—one that Democrats hope will give Warnock the edge when the polls close next Tuesday on the final day of runoff voting. The contest promises to be as close as last year’s runoff between Warnock and Sen. Kelly Loeffler to serve out the remainder of Sen. Johnny Isakson’s term. (Isakson, who had been in poor health, resigned at the end of 2019 and died two years later.)
Ruby Belle Booth, CIRCLE’s election coordinator, points out that young people step up when they know their vote matters: 16 percent of the young people who voted in the 2021 runoff had not voted in the November 2020 election, including 23 percent of Black youth. The window between the general election and the runoff is also a critical time to reach out to these voters. Of all age groups last year, young people are the least likely to be contacted. But the young people who received the most outreach were contacted by Democratic candidates, and one-quarter of them got help with registering to vote and other election mechanics, the highest of all the age groups. “There is a possibility that that sense of their own power within the state could have a really galvanizing effect on young people [who learn] that if they turn out to vote they can send this election to a runoff and they can impact the outcomes of elections,” says Booth.
Curbing that youthful political power is one reason why Georgia’s Republican lawmakers came up with SB 202, a hornet’s nest of voting laws designed to suppress turnout by people of color, young whites, and older white Democrats in major metro areas. The nuisance measures—slashing numbers of ballot drop boxes, reducing the runoff timeline from eight weeks to 28 days, sowing confusion around provisional and absentee ballot use, and more—are all designed to make voting an exquisite exercise in inconvenience, at least for anyone who is not a white conservative Republican.
Young people have overwhelmingly cast their ballots for Democratic candidates, and the 2022 general-election vote shows that issues like abortion, climate, income inequality, and LGBTQ rights, rather than the sense of civic duty that sends many older voters to the polls, galvanize young people. The outcome of next Tuesday’s runoff may determine whether Georgia lets the current framework stand or launches a new round of voter suppression tactics.
The Georgia youth vote has been on an upward slope since the 2018 midterms, contributing to tighter contests.
Alex Ames, the Georgia Youth Justice Coalition’s Gen Z war room director, knew what she was up against. The Georgia Tech student had to weigh voting against the four final exams that she has next Tuesday, the last day to vote in the runoff. Last weekend, she voted early, waiting for more than an hour to vote at her campus polling place. Such hurdles can be too much for others. “It’s really concerning to hear young voters who pay attention, like my friends who are really politically engaged, still be really confused as to how to vote,” she says. Friday is the last day for early voting, and anyone who did not make it to the polls this week could find long lines next Tuesday.
The runoff vote is essentially a ferocious turnout battle. Voters in reliably Democratic and Republican places are breaking early-voting records statewide. In the Savannah area, early voting has already surpassed general-election turnout. Republicans are particularly interested in populous metro Atlanta Republican counties like Hall and Forsyth.
But it is a little too facile to conclude that Republican turnout might be depressed without the Senate majority in play: It may be that Republican voters want to crown the GOP’s sweep of statewide offices with a Senate victory, one that would compensate for the Democrats retaining control of the U.S. Senate. And those outside the region often forget what Chris Kromm, the Institute for Southern Studies’ executive director, calls an “uneasy alliance in Southern Republican politics between the corporate establishment and the religious right” that now includes a Trumpist base that dominates the primary season and produces candidates like Walker.
Hard at work cultivating the next generation of voters, Warnock has had multiple college visits this week—he has twice circled back to his alma matter, Morehouse College, on November’s Election Day and to deliver the May commencement address—with rock-star draw President Barack Obama on his calendar this Friday. Walker, having recently dipped into a bizarro world of werewolves and vampires, has found creative, new ways to drop jaws and alienate young people born after 1990. In a Sunday interview, he commented that young people today had “not earned the right to change America.” On Wednesday, he said that young people “don’t know anything about racism.”
The Georgia youth vote has been on an upward slope since the 2018 midterms, contributing to tighter contests. (Warnock beat Loeffler by just two percentage points.) The youth vote in Georgia has increased among all racial and ethnic groups, with Black youth voters making up 9 percent of the total electorate today—and engaged Black youth have provided overwhelming support for Democratic candidates.
According to the Georgia secretary of state’s Data Hub as of December 1, a little more than 10 percent of early voters are young people aged 18–34. But young early voters are also being swamped by an older cohort of early voters, ages 60–75. An AARP mid-November poll found that older respondents were “extremely motivated” to vote in the runoff. Indeed, AARP advised keeping an eye on Georgia voters 50 and older.
Abortion is a motivating factor in Georgia, but young people and women of color in Georgia and across the South have lived for decades with significant abortion access restrictions long before Dobbs. The Georgia Supreme Court ruling that the state’s six-week abortion ban could be reinstated while the state appeals a lower court’s ruling striking down the ban was simply more of the same.
But Walker’s comment about young people not being worthy of civic inclusion is just more fuel on voter suppression fires already blazing in Georgia and the South. Even when Georgia moves to increase the franchise, there are major issues. The state allows automatic voter registration with new or renewed driver’s licenses. But last year, election officials noticed a steep drop in registrations. During a Georgia Department of Driver Services website redesign, the automatic inclusion was replaced by a prompt directing a person to select yes or no before being added to the voter rolls, a flaw that persisted for more than a year before being corrected to offer an opt-out option. There are also new fears about violence against election officials, voters, and poll workers and places. Two poll workers who posted photos of their participation in the January 6th insurrection on Facebook were removed from their jobs on Election Day after another worker discovered that the posts contained security threats.
An increase in a diverse, motivated young electorate would put young people, especially college students, even more in the bull’s-eye of Republican lawmakers who see young Democrats and the issues they care about—reproductive rights, climate crisis, and gun control, for starters—as threats to their own permanent rule.
Kromm says that a few Republicans may be learning a different lesson. “Republicans, especially strategists who really look at the numbers, realize that some of these reforms are good for their base too,” he says. “They’re going to probably be treading somewhat carefully before going too hard.”
The other takeaway for future Georgia contests? Candidate quality matters. Many young voters are reluctant but willing to use their clout. And though they may not be excited about their choices, they have little interest in an abominable candidate like Walker even in a state as conservative as Georgia where blue tints have seeped into deep-red spaces.
