Gabrielle Gurley
Bowdoin College juniors Amari Polk and Eliza Schotten turn out to back Gov. Janet Mills, October 23, 2022, in Brunswick, Maine.
Amari Polk is not political. But after the Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade, she channeled her anger into political spaces. “I was shocked, but at the same time it wasn’t really a shock,” is how the Bowdoin College junior described her reaction to the abortion decision. “It was more: So this is the state that we’re living in right now. And if it’s come to this point, then I really shouldn’t be quiet anymore.”
So when Maine Gov. Janet Mills, the pro-choice Democrat up for re-election, kicked off a statewide tour of colleges with Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Polk decided to meet up with friends and support Mills.
At the University of Maine at Farmington near Augusta, Reese Remington, president of the Maine College Democrats, decided to raise awareness about abortion’s political stakes and energize students about making an impact with a reproductive freedom rally through the center of town. The payoff was a surge in interest about the midterms and registering to vote.
For many young people, the 2022 midterms are shaping up to be a referendum on abortion. Broader civil rights questions and issues like climate and jobs get mentions in interviews, but the conversation almost always comes back to abortion. Maine students do not view the midterms primarily as a contest between two candidates for governor, Mills and former Gov. Paul LePage, her Republican opponent, says Remington, who graduates next year. “It’s more, this candidate supports choice and this candidate doesn’t; I’m gonna go with the one that’s pro-choice.”
That observation syncs with the findings of an October Teen Vogue national poll: 6 out of 10 young voters surveyed plan to cast a ballot for a candidate who supports abortion rights. Majorities of Americans from 18 to 65-plus support the right to abortion, but 74 percent of people under 35, the highest percentage in the survey, do.
The loss of the right to terminate a pregnancy in certain states shocked young people, but those who had skipped voting or had never bothered to register appeared to be hit hardest by the consequences of failing to keep tabs on their elected representatives. In Maine today, abortion rights depend on the governor and the state legislature; abortion is not protected under the Maine Constitution. Mills and other Maine Democrats have been actively courting the youth vote, and 2022 will be an important test of the ability of young voters to steer election results.
Young Mainers are among the most engaged young voters in the country. In 2020, 61 percent of Maine voters ages 18 to 29 cast a ballot, a six-percentage-point increase over 2016. Only New Jersey, Minnesota, and Colorado had higher youth turnout.
Another unusual feature of Maine civic life is that out-of-state college students who are at least 18 years old have the right to vote in Maine if they have established and maintain a residence in the municipality where they plan to vote. (Younger voters can also preregister at ages 16 and 17 and can serve as poll workers.)
An October Teen Vogue national poll found that 6 out of 10 young voters surveyed plan to cast a ballot for a candidate who supports abortion rights.
Mills has been crisscrossing the state wooing high school and college students. At the annual Youth Voting Summit organized by Maine Students Vote in September, Mills repeatedly underlined that she wanted young people to get civically engaged and settle down in the state, contingent, of course, on the job market. “If you can find a good career here, stay here,” the governor said. “If you live here, even if you’re here to be a student, you have residency; you can reside here and vote here.” (She has also touted the state’s own education debt relief programs, its educational tax credit, and a one-time $20 million allocation for free community college scholarships through 2024—which has bumped up enrollment by 12 percent at the state’s seven community colleges. (The federal student debt relief program, which helps nearly 180,000 Mainers, has split the state’s two Democratic members of Congress, with swing-district centrist Rep. Jared Golden opposing the plan and Rep. Chellie Pingree supporting it.)
A governor’s pleas on residency and voter engagement are not surprising considering that Maine has one of the oldest populations in the country. The pandemic persuaded many workers nearing retirement to leave their jobs earlier than they had planned, exacerbating workforce shortages that predated the pandemic by at least a decade.
Cracking the code on inculcating youth voting habits is a work in progress. Framing voting as a civic duty appeals to older voters, but that concept does not necessarily resonate with younger people. Tools that build an informed citizenry—civics and social studies instruction and extracurricular activities like field trips to polling places to learn about the mechanics of voting—have been in free fall for a decade.
Eliza Shotten, a Bowdoin College junior, has concluded that the best way to reach young people is through making personal connections. “The only way to get people who aren’t so politically affiliated into the field is to move them with stories,” she says. “They’re not going to be persuaded by statistics.” Allyson Gardner, director of Maine Students Vote, a nonpartisan statewide voter education advocacy group, agrees. “A lot of our messaging is based around action, change-making, and making an impact,” Gardner says. “I find over and over again that what hooks them is that they want to make a change in their community.”
Despite the state’s youth turnout track record and the salience of the abortion debate, there is apprehension that the youth turnout numbers that the state saw in the 2020 presidential election-year verdict on Donald Trump may not materialize in 2022. Rob Glover, a University of Maine associate professor of political science who studies voter mobilization, believes that turnout will be “decent.” But he notes that “the sense of urgency among young people that we saw in 2020 has faded a little bit.” Young people, he adds, particularly the ones who experienced 2020 as a kind of “civic euphoria”—working in polling places and voting for the first time—are now frustrated with the slow pace of change, incremental progress, and a “two-party system that does not adequately represent their views.”
Yet in 2020, youth turnout also ended up being considerably higher than expected. A nationwide Institute of Politics/Harvard Kennedy School of Government youth poll released on October 27 shows that 40 percent of 18-to-29-year-olds plan to vote this year, an indication that, according to the institute, turnout may possibly match or even surpass the historic numbers posted in 2018, when voters, reacting against Trump, gave control of the House to the Democrats.
