Don't confuse attention-seeking activists for "the youth vote"

Student loan relief isn't a big deal to most voters. And the youth voter turnout surge of 2022 is a myth.

Two quick announcements. 1) I’m hiring! You can find a job listing here for an Assistant Elections Analyst — basically somebody to help with running this year’s presidential election forecast. 2) We’re approaching the end of the month, which means it’s almost time for the April edition of SBSQ (Silver Bulletin Subscriber Questions). There’s still room to squeeze in one or two more questions. Now back to our regularly-scheduled programming.

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What explains Democrats’ way-above-average performance in the 2022 midterms? The Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade? Republicans nominating the worst imaginable candidates in nearly every competitive Senate race? Democrats benefiting from a college-educated base that turns out reliably in midterms and other non-presidential elections? Yes, yes and yes.

A tsunami of young voters going to the polls? No. In fact, that’s complete bullshit. This story from Business Insider, and others like it, are fake news. The premise that young voters flocked to the polls is a lie.

According to the Edison Research exit polls that most networks use, the percentage of voters aged 18-29 declined from 13 percent in 2018 to 12 percent in 2022. And Democrats’ share of the youth vote fell too, from 67 percent in 2018 to 63 percent in 2022.

Catalist estimates also had the youth vote declining, from 12 percent to 10 percent as a portion of the electorate — although they differ from the exit polls in having Democrats’ share of the 18-29 vote rising (from 62 percent to 65 percent).

CIRCLE at Tufts University estimated youth turnout at 23 percent as a fraction of eligible voters in 2022, down considerably from 28 percent in 2018. (CIRCLE’s initial estimates were higher, which contributed to the misleading coverage.)

Don’t trust polls or estimates? Well, North Carolina actually has hard data, tracking turnout based on the age and other demographic data. And in the Tar Heel State, despite a highly competitive Senate race, youth turnout was pathetic. Just 24 percent of registered voters aged 18-25 showed up at the polls, far below the rate of older groups:

The reporting on young voters doesn’t match the reality

Another part of that Business Insider headline is probably a lie too: it’s unlikely that the student loan forgiveness program — announced by President Biden in August 2022, overturned by the Supreme Court in June 2023, now being partly restored by the White House — made much difference in the election either way.

A recent poll of Americans aged 18-29 by Harvard’s Institute of Politics asked them to rank the importance of different issues. The poll did this in a slightly unusual way, by randomly generating pairs from a list of 16 issues and asking respondents to pick the more important one. (For instance, you’d have to pick whether climate change or health care was more important to you.) I’m not sure I’ve seen this methodology used before, but I like it: making pairwise comparisons is often easier for people than picking from a laundry list of issues. Anyway, here were the results:

Student debt performed terribly, winning only 26 percent of its matchups, basically making it the political equivalent of the Charlotte Hornets.¹ Despite the headlines, it’s a boutique issue that most people don’t care about all that much.

This data, of course, does not match the rhetoric you’ll read from activists, which is often passed along uncritically by the media:

President Biden is pouring a tremendous amount of political capital into student loan relief ahead of the November election, and experts say the impact in key states could be crucial.  

“The swing states are going to be kind of where we look to see the biggest targeted return, states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan,” said Michael Hopkins, CEO of Northern Starr Strategies.

The few remaining purple states have seen billions of dollars in student loan forgiveness since Biden took office, and with polling showing a tight race with former President Trump, every voter counts.   

“Loan borrowers in the country, distressed student loan borrowers, I think they are the largest, really politically untethered voting bloc in modern American history,” said Alan Collinge, founder of StudentLoanJustice.org. “This is a huge group of people who vote in a much higher percentage than average.”

Pretty much all of this is bullshit. There’s no reason to expect the student loan issue to have outsized impact in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan. Instead, the share of the population that attended college is higher in blue states, not in swing states.

Nor is there any reason to think student-loan holders are particularly likely to be swing voters. Instead, student-loan holders are mostly young-ish people who attended college, a strongly Democratic cohort.²

I’m not sure why — although I’ll propose some theories in a moment — but the reporting on this issue has been poor. There are some obvious problems with both the policy and political implications of student loan forgiveness. It is economically regressive — student loan forgiveness mostly benefits people who are already pretty well off. It creates a moral hazard and could further increase the price of college. It is also obviously unfair to people who worked hard to pay off their loans. Look, I can think of a lot of much worse policies. But student loan forgiveness is a relatively cynical giveaway to a highly Democratic voting bloc. That’s fine — Republicans do the same thing with tax policy — but the reporting ought to reflect that. It is not a terribly popular policy, either — in fact, student loan relief is net-unpopular in some polls, although the issue is highly sensitive to question wording

Maybe journalists are sympathetic because they themselves are often in the class of people who would benefit from student loan relief.³ But there’s also a how-do-you-do-fellow-kids aspect to the reporting here. Journalists don’t want to appear uncool by questioning the wisdom of groups they see as marginalized. So an activist who claims to speak on behalf of young voters, Black voters, gay voters, Jewish voters, Palestinian voters or whomever else will rarely have her receipts checked.

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.

1. And — as with the Hornets — some of those wins came against other weak competition; student debt got crushed against the issues that ranked higher on the list. Only 12 percent of young Americans said student debt was more important than health care, for instance, and only 10 percent said it was more important than inflation.

2. There’s also no reason the head of a student loan advocacy website should be cited as an “expert”.

3. Journalism heavily selects for graduates of expensive, elite colleges — even though it really shouldn’t. But the industry is also in a perpetual state of crisis and doesn’t pay terribly well or offer much job security. I’m sympathetic — I’d rather pay off a journalist’s student-loan debt than some corporate lawyer who will soon be making seven figures. But you almost couldn’t pick another field more tailor-made for people who would benefit from student debt forgiveness.