Younger voters help power historic early voting turnout in Texas
Alex Le wasn’t particularly engaged in politics prior to Donald Trump’s election in 2016.
“I’d always thought we were on a positive trajectory until I saw the divisive and hateful rhetoric from the election cycle, particularly from the president,” said Le, 23, a public health student at Texas A&M, as millions of Americans headed to the polls on Tuesday.
Just a week after being inaugurated, Le recalled, Trump moved to bar people from seven majority-Muslim countries from entering the country, as well as to halt admissions of Syrian refugees indefinitely.
“My family wouldn’t be here today if American policies didn’t accept them as refugees decades ago,” said Le, who organized a rally of Vietnamese-American voters for Democrat Joe Biden in Houston last month. “I work to ensure that others can be afforded that same grace and dignity.”
Higher turnout by younger voters such as Le — those ages 18 to 29 — during early voting has clearly helped fuel historic levels of voter participation in Texas in 2020.
Some 1.4 million young voters cast ballots in the state this year during the early voting period, up from 1.2 million who participated altogether in 2016.
In fact, you really couldn’t have record-setting turnout in Texas without young voters stepping up. This is one of the youngest states in the country, with a median age of 34, according to the Census bureau, compared to a national median age of 38.
And — not coincidentally — Texas has historically been a nonvoting state, as former Democratic congressman Beto O’Rourke often said during the 2018 U.S. Senate campaign that he narrowly lost. The result has been what advocates describe as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Campaigns, laser-focused on turning out voters in the cycle at hand, tended to dismiss young voters, deeming them unlikely to participate. Young voters, in turn, weren’t motivated to turn out.
That is changing, said Charlie Bonner, the communications director of MOVE Texas.
“When you look at the investments that have been made, it is not altogether surprising,” said Bonner, 24, reflecting on the turnout of young people to date.
MOVE, for example, was started in 2013 by a small group of students at the University of Texas-San Antonio. They registered roughly a thousand voters in the 2014 cycle the oldfashioned way, through peerto-peer networking. The organization went statewide in 2018, and this year it has 30 full-time employees, several dozen fellows and a budget of roughly $4 million. It has registered more than 50,000 voters under the age of 30 this year.
Antonio Arellano, the executive director of JOLT Texas, which focuses on Latino voters, offered a similar assessment. He said there had long been “no investment by either party” in mobilizing younger voters.
“There is an untapped gold
mine of potential in the state,” Arellano said.
Although Trump on Election Night was seemingly headed to victory in Texas, political groups are starting to figure out the potential political clout of young people in the state. In the 2014 midterm elections, just 8.4 percent of young voters in Texas turned out, according to Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement. By 2018, that figure had tripled. And young voters achieved some tangible and consequen
tial wins that cycle, such as the election of then-27-year-old Democrat Lina Hidalgo as Harris County judge in 2018.
“We’re about to fundamentally change the Texas electorate, which then fundamentally changes the policy landscape,” said Bonner.
Downballot candidates elected by narrow margins, he reasons, will have no choice but to pay more attention to issues that young voters care about: climate change, racial injustice and health care access. One of the few Texas Republicans to outperform expectations this cycle was U.S. Rep. Dan Crenshaw, 36, who has called on his fellow conservatives to take climate change seriously. He was re-elected Tuesday by a significant margin against Democrat Sima Ladjevardian.
Many of the young Texas voters who turned out in 2020 were simply motivated by a sense that things had to change.
“Honestly, a lot of young people have been angry for the last four years,” said Ali Shirazi, voter expansion coordinator for the Texas Democratic Party. “They’ve seen what the older generations are doing to a world that they will have to grow up in and handle, and they’re upset that they’re unable to have a say.”
Shirazi said many members of Generation Z were upset by Trump’s election but weren’t old enough to vote. “Now that we’re of age, we’re not going to let ourselves be spoken for,” Shirazi said.
“Young people are always discounted because of our low participation rates,” Le said. “But our voices need to be prioritized because we have the most at stake.”