Why young voters could dictate the US election outcome
As Donald Trump and Joe Biden prepare to go head to head at the polls, there’s one particular voting group who could dictate the outcome of the US presidential election.
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With a mastery of social media and a fire in their bellies, young voters are set to have their biggest impact for decades on an American election.
When thousands of teens using TikTok booked fake tickets for a Trump rally in Tulsa in June they sparked an embarrassing over-estimation of the eventual crowd size for the President’s return to the campaign trail and drew a spotlight on how young activists are organising on social media platforms.
And with more than eight weeks of the presidential race remaining, more of America’s youth have already registered in many battlegrounds than had done so by Election Day in 2016.
The state where they will have their biggest impact is Wisconsin, according to experts at Tufts University who measure how likely young voters are to impact the race.
Recent violence in the small city of Kenosha has been dominating the US news cycle and as one of six swing states that narrowly swept Donald Trump to power, Wisconsin has been the site of serious campaigning, with both candidates visiting last week. It was also the official location of last month’s scaled back Democratic Convention.
Researchers with Circle, who create the Youth Electoral Significance Index at Tufts University, say that while their polling of young voters shows more currently supporting Joe Biden there is still a sizeable slice of undecided and Republican supporters.
Interviews with more than a dozen young voters in several Wisconsin cities last week showed an almost equal split between supporters of Trump and Biden outweighed by a higher number of 18 to 25 year olds who say they are undecided.
These swing voters are the demographic both parties need to win, and with young voters set to have an outside impact similar to that of the 1970s, the grab for these moderates is one of 2020’s most keenly watched battles.
“There’s no doubt in my mind that young people are going to affect this race,” says Circle director Abby Kiesa, who said youth turnout at the 2018 midterms was the highest since the 1970s.
“In some of the top swing states in the presidential race in 2016, young people cast far, far more votes than the margin of victory, sometimes 20 times more votes than the margin of victory.
“So in close races young people are inevitably going to be important and sometimes when young people vote differently than the state overall, they have more power.”
This responsibility is not lost on Jessica Rieder, 18, a first-year sign-language student from the state capital of Madison who has just moved to Milwaukee for college and will vote Democrat.
“For me it’s mainly about human rights, social issues, that type of stuff. I just feel like it’s important to have someone in office who is thinking about everyone, and I don’t think the current leader is,” she says.
“If I could have an impact on giving power to someone who actually wants to make a change, who wants to help people better themselves in their lives, that would be really cool.”
Like the majority of young voters polled by Circle, Milwaukee student Ariel Lopez said her support for Biden was heavily influenced by her family.
“My parents really want me to get my voice out and vote on what I believe in. And I think that it is a good idea to vote for something that I’m passionate about,” said the 18 year old student who grew up in Kenosha.
The recent troubles in her hometown had further convinced her.
“I don’t support the rioting, but the protesting is a good thing because they’re people trying get their voice out, because black lives do matter,” she said.
“And they just want people to have the freedom of speech and believe what they believe.”
Nursing student Cheyanne Bodenstein remains undecided and says: “I’m still watching everything”.
“The biggest thing for me to vote is that I always saw my parents do it, and they always just told me to do it,” says the 18 year old from Madison.
“It’s important to have your voice.”
That high school student Georgia Lacroix, 15, says she is not sure how she would vote when she’s old enough, is kind of surprising.
She is friends with the 17-year-old vigilante who been charged with double murder after shooting two protesters.
Like many who gathered when Trump visited last week, she believed Kyle Rittenhouse was acting in self-defence and was helping a local businessman by travelling from neighbouring Illinois with an AR15 rifle to stand guard.
“Kyle is a super nice kid. Very funny. Very supportive of the police and military and, you know, America and everything like that,” says Lacroix, who lives outside Kenosha.
Standing in a crowd of Trump supporters cheering the President’s visit last week, she said she would likely vote Republican when she was old enough in 2024, but that it wasn’t a given.
“I would probably go red, but I mean depends who’s up for a candidate. Both sides bring pretty good points, I’m gonna be honest,” she said.
“There are some points on the left side where I kind of do actually agree with. It just depends what people bring to the table.”
Student Rylee Mazur says she comes from a Republican family but that she hasn’t committed to a side to support.
“I just don’t have enough understanding about both sides,” said Mazur, 18, in Milwaukee.
“I’m not informed enough yet.”
And fellow student Alex Semrow, 18, said that although most of his friends were voting Democrat he wasn’t ready to commit because he didn’t trust the majority of what he was being told about the election.
“Right now I’m kind of in the middle,” said Semrow, a Milwaukee native who is studying business at university.
“Most of my friends are left leaning, but I kind of try and stay in the middle as much I can.
“I try and try and look at both sides as much as I can.”
He said he tried to get his information from as many sources as possible.
“There’s just a lot of information right now on the internet and it’s hard to go through it, see what’s real, what’s fake, and try and get the best of what I can.
“I try not to watch the news on TV. I try and do my own research as much as I can.”
Most of the teens got the majority of their news and political information from social media, with Cheyanne Bodenstein saying she was drawn to platforms such as Facebook because they limited confrontation.
“My biggest thing about politics is just that I want everyone to be respectful, no matter what,” she says, adding that the TikTok teens prank had inspired her.
“I love like hearing about things like that where it’s not someone being rude to someone else. It’s something that’s actually going to make a difference and prove a point. I feel like there’s a lot of bashing back and forth when in reality we should all just be trying to work together to make everything better.”
Circle’s Abby Kiesa said “it is not a new phenomenon for young people to be using social media to organise their peers” but that their current engagement, shown to great effect with the student-led protests against gun violence in 2018, was “more dramatic”.
“And TikTok hasn’t been around that long … so that’s particularly unique,” she said.
“It shows the savvy and the potential power of young people to organise themselves and to not rely on political campaigns to organise them to have a voice on issues that they care about.”
Distrust of traditional media is a big part of the reason electrical engineering student Matt Heinz and his military-bound friends from rural Mukwonago in Waukesha County, are steadfast Trump supporters.
Like many Republicans he doesn’t believe the mainstream media “at all”, particularly about the coronavirus pandemic, and would only possibly trust what he heard on conservative-leaning Fox News.
“I believe it’s all politics that is going on,” he says.
“By the time the election is done, this Covid crap will be gone probably.”
He said he was frustrated by the state-mandated shutdowns that put his mother out of work and annoyed that Wisconsin’s Democrat governor waited to deploy the National Guard as Kenosha burned.
“I’m voting Republican, I’m proud to be far right,” he says.
“So are a lot of my friends.”
Sisters Olivia and Jessica Zank said the Kenosha situation had firmed their support for the President.
“It was very scary,” said Jessica, 19, of the recent riots.
“We actually left town for a night because we weren’t sure we were safe. In our neighbourhood people had to come together and guard it because, like, no one was there to guard it for us.
“So we had to step up and as citizens guard our own property. But once the National Guard came in, I felt like way safer. And there’s less crime going on and no buildings are being burned down.”
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