Thank you, Zoomers, for Staving Off Autocracy for Another Year
The 2022 midterm election is officially over (although there are still some counts to finish).
Repudiating pollsters’ and many pundits’ expectations, this election defied the odds, as the party in power, the Democrats, did not sustain the beating that was predicted.
We owe a great deal of this to the youth vote.
Once again, young voters aged 18 to 29 — aka “Zoomers” — demonstrated the second-highest turn out in nearly three decades, after 2018.
If they had stayed home, as some predicted they would, we would be looking down the barrel of the fascist takeover animating the republican party agenda.
While not finalized yet, it is estimated 27% of Zoomers cast ballots this year.
In some key battleground states, turnout was even higher, at 31%, and support for Democratic candidates was roughly over 60%, driven in large part by the fight for abortion rights after the supreme court overturned Roe v Wade.
An Edison Research National Election Pool exit poll finds 18 to 29 year olds were the only age group with a strong majority supporting Democrats.
Black and Latino youth voters showed even more impressive numbers, 89% 68% respectively.
Newhouse Director of the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University (CIRCLE), Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, stated:
Young people proved once again that they’ll turn out to vote and impact election results, and their turnout in 2022 is one of the highest we’ve ever seen in a midterm election.
In many states youth overcame changes to election laws that posed direct barriers to participation and a lack of strong and continued investment in youth registration.
There’s both a big need and extraordinary potential to continue building on this trend of strong youth voting by stepping up our support for all youth to have a voice in our democracy.
The most important issues for this demographic, according to some polls conducted in early autumn, put health care, mass shootings and mental health at the top of their lists.
Among cisgender women, trans men and women, and gender-fluid Gen Zers, abortion was of paramount concern.
Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez, president of progressive youth advocacy non-profit and political action committee, NextGen, explained:
There’s very much a popular belief that young voters are apathetic, and actually the data shows that it’s quite the opposite. This is the most politically engaged cohort of young voters in American history — even higher than in the 1960s in the United States.
They’re voting more. They’re participating in protests. They are more avid readers of politics and social issues. So I think that that surprises a lot of people about young voters.
But Zoomers don’t just get plaudits for voting.
They’re sending one of their own to Capitol Hill.
Florida progressive Maxwell Frost, 25, was elected the first Gen-Z member of Congress.
Sunrise Movement’s national spokesperson, Ellen Sciales, explained in Teen Vogue:
It’s never been just about Trump for us. It’s about stopping the climate crisis, protecting our reproductive freedoms, and ending gun violence in our classrooms.
Jack Lobel, spokesperson for the Gen Z-led youth voter engagement and education organization Voters of Tomorrow, added:
Young people show up when we see that our future is on the line. After the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018, we showed up. After former president Donald Trump’s dangerous policies and inaction on the pandemic, we showed up. On Tuesday, we again showed up because we are infuriated by the far-right attacks on our future.
We preserved democracy for another year.
Thank you, Zoomers.
Stay engaged. Stay in the fight. We need you to run, activate, and rise up.
The future is yours!
