Nate Silver cautions that campus activists are not synonymous with “the youth vote”:
Speaking of which, as you can see from the poll, “Israel/Palestine” and even climate change also ranked as issues of relatively low importance to young voters. The Middle East may be the exception that proves the rule — even if relatively few people care about it, those who do are obviously extremely passionate about it, and I don’t think people are bluffing when they say it could swing their votes. However, the reporting often treats protests on elite college campuses, or social media posts from articulate activists, as though they’re a proxy for the youth vote overall. Young voters do differ from older ones on some issues, including Israel-Palestine and free speech. But they do not care about these issues nearly as much as they care about more basic stuff like the economy and health care.
Here are the poll results to which he refers:
As you can see the issues they’re most concerned about are inflation and healthcare while the issues most frequently mentioned in the media as issues swaying “the youth vote”, e.g. climate change, Israel/Palestine, and student debt, are way down on the list. How to explain the discrepancy? I think there are many reasons including:
- The issues they report on make more colorful copy
- The issues they report on are more important to them, personally
- The issues they report on reflect the interests of people who work on political or campaign staffs
- The issues that are actually young people’s highest concerns don’t fit the preferred narrative
- The issues that are actually young people’s highest concerns are seen as disadvantageous for Biden and advantageous for Trump
Here’s a wacky idea. The White House could start focusing on the problems that people including young people actually care about rather than the issues political activists care about.
I think there is another aspect to the youth vote. Those most likely to vote using likely voter criteria are very much to the “left,” but the marginal youth voter tends to be moderate or even conservative. In other words, Democratic efforts to drive-up the youth vote as an end in and of itself can be counterproductive. They pretty much own the best portion of the youth vote (almost certain to vote and almost certain to vote Democratic).
To clarify, I’m talking about polling, Silver links to some data about actual vote changes year over year. My information comes from 538 which is essentially unsearchable now.
Full Bellies equal happy voters, is an idea that our elites find unacceptable, what they need are hour long postdoc level harangues about something or the other.
The first is clearly what drives coverage. There is actually a steady stream of articles on inflation and health care, they just arent that interesting for most people. So health care stories are mostly about some kid getting better from cancer or someone angry because their insurance didnt want to pay for something. It’s like crime, where even when crime drops in half and is near record lows news stories will keep focusing on crime stories and people will think crime is still increasing.
It also will get a lot fo coverage if its viewed as divisive as the opposition media will cover the hot issue a lot and the other media tribe will cover it a lot as they dont eat to lose ratings. So 12 kids with signs out fo a university of 30,000 gets a story lead that says “Protests hit our local university”.
What more would you like the White House to do about inflation and health care? Inflation is mostly about the Fed and even you probably dont believe the current Congress could pass a meaningful health bill. They did achieve the ability to negotiate prices for Medicare drugs (including limits on insulin prices) though it’s pretty watered down.
Steve
I still haven’t seen evidence voters are willing to turn on incumbents due to dissatisfaction on inflation; as in election results vs polls.
My surprise was how unimportant student debt was.
CO- There have been a number of articles fairly recently looking at the prices people actually pay to go to college, not the list prices. Once you include the price of aid, ie discounts, being offered by colleges costs have been pretty much in line with inflation so for the large majority of kids it hasn’t been any more difficult to pay off loans than it has been in the past. However, a lot more kids went to college (that’s decreasing now) so many more of those were marginal and lots of those went to the very marginal for profit schools. Some legit schools also expanded by accepting marginal students. I think these are largely the people with debt concerns.
Steve
Either stop increasing spending or increase taxes or both. The Federal Reserve is required by law to cover Treasury’s checks and increasing spending beyond increases in aggregate product causes inflation.
There is another alternative: increase aggregate product faster. Unfortunately, no one really knows how to do that. Some will argue that you do that by decreasing taxes and regulation and in theory that’s right. Remember what Yogi Berra said?
Dave- Remind me who controls the budget.
Steve
I notice that President Biden has not vetoed any of the spending bills that have come across his desk.
For instance, Nixon won a majority of voters under 30 in 1972.
It’s possible that the youth vote will correspond with the younger candidates,
but this time around they’re both old.