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Plenty of Signs Surging Youth Vote Will Play Major Role in 2020 US Election
Millennials and GenZers have seen more than most generations in their young lifetimes: a terrorist attack on U.S. soil in 2001, two economic crashes and record unemployment, extreme weather events, divisive politics and a global pandemic.
And most recently, social unrest in response to the death of George Floyd, an African American man who died after being restrained by Minneapolis police.
“Millennials Don’t Stand a Chance,” economics journalist Annie Lowrey wrote for The Atlantic in April.
Yet there are plenty of signs that young Americans could play a major role in the 2020 election, helping to determine the outcome of the race between Republican President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden, as well as political control of Congress, and beyond. Their record turnout in the 2018 midterm elections, signs of political activism, and a handful of issues being used as a rallying cry, including soaring college debt, health care and climate change, stand as evidence.
“Young people can decide elections, and their participation is central to our politics. Expanding the electorate and addressing inequities in youth voting is a crucial task for strengthening democracy,” according to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE) based at Tufts University in Massachusetts.
While younger generations mimic their elders when they were young — by not engaging at the voting booth — the 2018 midterms saw an upsurge in participation.
Election involvement
Millennial voting nearly doubled between 2014 and 2018 — from 22% to 42% — according to demographer Richard Fry at the Pew Research Center in Washington. Thirty percent of Gen Zers eligible to vote turned out in the first midterm elections of their lives. And for the first time in a midterm election, more than half of Gen Xers reported they had voted, Pew reported.
“This 2020 election cycle is particularly interesting because, for the first time in almost over 25 years, we’re moving from a midterm election where young people’s participation dramatically increased,” Abby Kiesa, CIRCLE’s director of impact, said.
“Now there are 47 million 18- to 29-year-olds who are eligible to vote in the 2020 election, and 15 million of them have turned 18 since the last presidential election,” Kiesa said.
While young people — millennials born 1985-1995, GenZers born in 1996 onward — are casually viewed as a homogeneous group of like-minded thinkers, research shows otherwise.
In the 2018 midterm elections, two-thirds of all young voters age 18-29 supported the Democratic candidate for Congress. That’s the widest party gap in the past 25 years, CIRCLE said.
And the 2020 election will happen amid a huge demographic shift, said Jesse Barba, senior director of external affairs at Young Invincibles, a youth voting and political advocacy group “to expand economic opportunity for our generation.”
The U.S. population is poised to move from majority white to majority minority, or mostly non-white voters, by 2045, according to Brookings Institution.
“This would be the first time in history where nonwhite people make up the largest electorate,” Barba said. “I think for so long people have been talked down to rather than included and talked with, so … any candidate who wanted to motivate and mobilize young people should have tried to speak about four or five key things.”
Key issues to young voters
Those key issues include college debt, affordable health care, expanding voter rights, gun violence, immigration, climate change and economy, he said.
“I think the public health crisis has now put two issues top-of-mind squarely for young people, and that’s economy and mental health,” Barba said, citing record unemployment driven by the coronavirus pandemic and widespread shutdowns of businesses, such as restaurants, bars and retail, which all typically employ younger people and seldom provide benefits.
“Many of those young people [are] disproportionately working in industries that are hit the hardest, right? So not only are they losing their jobs, they’re also at risk of losing that job-based health coverage or inability to afford their own individual plans,” Barba said.
“Healthcare probably is huge for me,” said Paul Haarstick of Vergas, Minnesota, who lost his health care benefits when he pivoted from a corporate job with corporate benefits to be an entrepreneur. Haarstick is also the county director for Otter Tail County in the Democratic Farmer Labor Party.
“Since our healthcare system is tied with ‘employment equals health insurance,’ … there’s no real good second option for an entrepreneur. You pay more for healthcare and you get worse coverage.”
Health care costs added to student debt costs are subtracted from salaries that can’t cover everything.
“Is it fair that an entire generation lost out on a decade’s worth of wages in 2010 in the Great Recession?” he added, referring to the banking collapse in 2008 and resultant economic downturn.
For college graduates at the time, especially those carrying student debt, jobs were hard to come by.
“Is it fair that an entire generation press ‘pause’ on family planning and had to crawl back to mom and dad’s house? No,” he said. “So I think that is a constant reminder for young people when they walk into the ballot box in November.”
Former pastry chef and author Alechia Dow, who writes Young Adult sci-fi featuring black girls, tweeted about student debt this week, along with hundreds of others who share laments about debt burden on Twitter.
“It’s my dream to one day own a house, with brightly painted walls and a big kitchen with an island,” she wrote. “But then I look at my student loan debt, and that’s as much as a house, so I know that dream is impossible.”
Young white males
One voting bloc that takes a different path are young, white, male voters, statistics show. “They form a sizable and sometimes disproportionate swath of the American electorate,” CIRCLE said.
Young white men voted at a higher rate than young Latino and black men, according to CIRCLE’s analysis of the 2018 Current Population Survey data, which is produced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau. In the last presidential election, the bloc also preferred Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton by 22 percentage points.
Young men of color and young women, conversely, preferred Clinton, by from 15 to 60 percentage points, CIRCLE said.
And in some key swing states — Iowa, Ohio and New Hampshire — young white men make up a larger share of the population compared to national averages.
Five months before the U.S. general election in November, the pandemic continues, unemployment remains high and many young people, especially people of color, are advocating for racial and social justice after the death of George Floyd and other similar incidents and inequities in American society.
“You can tweet about it. You can hashtag about it. You can be upset about it and share the video,” said Markus Tarjamo, a student and Democratic National Convention delegate candidate from suburban Washington. “But until we start going and taking political power, not much will change.”
CIRCLE’s Kiesa says that attitude could spark other young people to activate at the polls.
“And so we’re really interested in following how much that youth enthusiasm, how much that energy from young people and reaching out to other young people, is going to carry in to 2020,” Kiesa said.
Bronwyn Benito and Esha Sarai contributed to this report.
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Members of a U.S. presidential advisory council have approved a student exchange deal between an American college and a Nigerian university as part of the council's effort to strengthen collaboration on education, health, entrepreneurship and development between Africa and Africans living abroad.
The council also visited a health facility supported by the United States Agency for International Development in the capital.
Nigerian authorities and visitors chatted with members of the U.S President's Advisory Council on African Diaspora Engagement as they toured a healthcare facility in Karu, a suburb of Abuja, on the last day of the council's three-day visit to Abuja and Lagos.
The facility is one of many supported by the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID, to improve the management of childhood illnesses, family planning, immunization and delivery.
The tour was part of the council's effort to promote African diaspora-led investments in technology entrepreneurship, education and healthcare delivery.
"They're doing a phenomenal job there, it really gave us a sense of what the healthcare system is in Nigeria," said Deniece Laurent-Mantey, executive director of the advisory council. "This is our first trip as a council to the continent and we chose Nigeria for a reason — the diaspora in Nigeria is very active, very influential, and they're really a source of strength when it comes to our U.S.-Africa policy. And so for us coming to Nigeria was very intentional."
The council was created by President Joe Biden in September to improve collaboration between Africa and its diaspora in terms of economic and social development.
Akila Udoji, manager of the Primary Healthcare Centre of Karu, said officials in Nigeria were pleased that the council members were able to visit.
"We're happy that they have seen what the money they have given to us to work with has been used to do, because they have been able to assist us in capacity-building, trainings, equipment supply and the makeover of the facility," Udoji said.
Earlier, the council signed a deal for a student exchange program between Spelman College in the southern U.S. city of Atlanta and Nigeria's University of Lagos.
Laurent-Mantey said education exchanges are one of the council's top priorities.
"In Lagos, we had the president of Spelman College — she's also a member of our council — she signed an agreement with the University of Lagos to further education exchange programs in STEM and creative industries between those two universities," Laurent-Mantey said. "And I think for us it's very important, because Spelman College is a historically Black university, and so here we are promoting the importance of collaboration between African Americans and Africans."
In March, the advisory council adopted its first set of recommendations for the U.S. president, including the student exchange initiative, advocating for more U.S. government support for Africa, climate-focused initiatives, and improving U.S. visa access for Africans.
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5 killed, dozens injured in clashes over Bangladesh jobs quota system
At least 5 people were killed and dozens injured in two separate incidents in Bangladesh as violence continued Tuesday on university campuses in the nation's capital and elsewhere over a government jobs quota system, local media reports said quoting officials.
At least three of the dead were students and one was a pedestrian, the media reports said. Another man who died in Dhaka remained unidentified.
The deaths were reported Tuesday after overnight violence at a public university near Bangladesh's capital, Dhaka. The violence involved members of a pro-government student body and other students, when police fired tear gas and charged the protesters with batons during the clashes, which spread at Jahangir Nagar University in Savar, outside Dhaka, according to students and authorities.
Protesters have been demanding an end to a quota reserved for family members of veterans who fought in Bangladesh's war of independence in 1971, which allows them to take up 30% of governmental jobs.
They argue that quota appointments are discriminatory and should be merit-based. Some said the current system benefits groups supporting Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina. Some Cabinet ministers criticized the protesters, saying they played on students' emotions.
The Bengali-language Prothom Alo daily newspaper reported that one person died in Dhaka and three others, including a pedestrian, were killed after they suffered injuries during violence in Chattogram, a southeastern district, on Tuesday.
Prothom Alo and other media reports also said that a 22-year-old protester died in the northern district of Rangpur.
Details of the casualties could not be confirmed immediately.
While job opportunities have expanded in Bangladesh's private sector, many find government jobs stable and lucrative. Each year, some 3,000 such jobs open up to nearly 400,000 graduates.
Hasina said Tuesday that war veterans — commonly known as "freedom fighters" — should receive the highest respect for their sacrifice in 1971 regardless of their current political ideologies.
"Abandoning the dream of their own life, leaving behind their families, parents and everything, they joined the war with whatever they had," she said during an event at her office in Dhaka.
Protesters gathered in front of the university's official residence of the vice chancellor early Tuesday when violence broke out. Demonstrators accused the Bangladesh Chhatra League, a student wing of Hasina's ruling Awami League party, of attacking their "peaceful protests." According to local media reports, police and the ruling party-backed student wing attacked the protesters.
But Abdullahil Kafi, a senior police official, told the country's leading English-language newspaper Daily Star that they fired tear gas and "blank rounds" as protesters attacked the police. He said up to 15 police officers were injured.
More than 50 people were treated at Enam Medical College Hospital near Jahangir Nagar University as the violence continued for hours, said Ali Bin Solaiman, a medical officer of the hospital. He said at least 30 of them suffered pellet wounds.
On Monday, violence also spread at Dhaka University, the country's leading public university, as clashes gripped the campus in the capital. More than 100 students were injured in the clashes, police said.
On Tuesday, protesters blocked railways and some highways across the country, and in Dhaka, they halted traffic in many areas as they vowed to continue demonstrating until the demands were met.
Local media said police forces were spread across the capital to safeguard the peace.
Swapon, a protester and student at Dhaka University who gave only his first name, said they want the "rational reformation of the quota scheme." He said that after studying for six years, if he can't find a job, "it will cause me and my family to suffer."
Protesters say they are apolitical, but leaders of the ruling parties accused the opposition of using the demonstrations for political gains.
A ruling party-backed student activist, who refused to give his name, told The Associated Press that the protesters with the help of "goons" of the opposition's Bangladesh Nationalist Party and Jamaat-e-Islami party vandalized their rooms at the student dormitories near the Curzon Hall of Dhaka University.
The family-of-the-veterans quota system was halted following a court order after mass student protests in 2018. But last month, Bangladesh's High Court nulled the decision to reinstate the system once more, angering scores of students and triggering protests.
Last week, the Supreme Court suspended the High Court's order for four weeks and the chief justice asked protesting students to return to their classes, saying the court would issue a decision in four weeks.
However, the protests have continued daily, halting traffic in Dhaka.
The quota system also reserves government jobs for women, disabled people and ethnic minority groups, but students have protested against only the veterans system.
Hasina maintained power in an election in January that was again boycotted by the country's main opposition party and its allies due to Hasina's refusal to step down and hand over power to a caretaker government to oversee the election.
Her party favors keeping the quota for the families of the 1971 war heroes after her Awami League party, under the leadership of her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, led the independence war with the help of India. Rahman was assassinated along with most of his family members in a military coup in 1975.
