Older people carry day, but more millennials cast ballots
Statewide, 25% of registered voters have already been to polls
Blue and red aren’t really the primary colors in New Mexico’s general election. No matter which way the trend goes, a gray wave will be responsible.
Seventy-eight percent of the voters who have cast ballots so far are over the age of 50, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
But data also shows that younger people are going to the polls in far greater numbers than they did four years ago.
So, while oft-maligned millennial voters and their Generation X counterparts are still less likely to vote than their parents or grandparents, there’s a sharp increase in turnout among younger residents.
More New Mexicans have already participated in early voting than in 2014, the last midterm election. About
322,000 voters had cast ballots across the state through Wednesday. That is about 25 percent of all registered voters in New Mexico.
Tom Bonier, CEO of TargetSmart, a firm that tracks voting nationwide, said he expected turnout to increase, particularly over the relatively low numbers seen in 2014. Some of the increase in early voting, which ends Saturday, can be attributed to voters who may have cast ballots anyway but simply changed their habit of waiting until Election Day.
But turnout among younger voters is increasing at a significant rate this year, Bonier said.
“Younger voters as a share of the electorate are still small compared to older voters. … But the gap is closing much faster than one would have predicted,” he said.
According to data from the end of last week compiled by TargetSmart, three times as many New Mexico voters age 18 to 29 had cast ballots this year than in the same period in 2014. The same was true of voters 30 to 39. Those were bigger spikes than the increase among voters over 50.
That could be particularly significant when you consider that younger voters are more likely to go for one party — the Democrats — Bonier added.
Younger voters tend to be first-time or infrequent voters, he said.
And while New Mexico is not seeing an outsize increase in first-time voters, it is seeing an increase in irregular voters, Bonier said. That is, voters who may rarely vote in midterm elections are lining up to cast ballots.
Given that many polls are based on voters who have cast ballots in the past, an increase in younger voters and infrequent voters has the potential to prove those polls wrong, Bonier said.
Still, New Mexico’s uptick in younger voters does not match the rise in participation among their peers in Georgia and Texas.
In those states, five times as many voters age 18 to 29 had cast ballots by the end of October than in the same period in 2014.
The reasons may be obvious. U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Texas, has excited his long beleaguered party in the deeply Republican state in no small part because he appealed directly to younger people through social media and an unapologetically left-leaning platform.
No race in New Mexico has animated voters in the same way.
And the share of voters over 50 is still bigger in New Mexico than even neighboring Arizona, where the median age is also 38.
While campaigns often ask how they can better reach young voters, Gus Pedrotty, 23, suggests that is the wrong question.
Pedrotty finished fifth in an eightway race for mayor of Albuquerque last year, getting more votes than the candidate who would go on to become the Republican nominee for lieutenant governor.
The race also saw a significant jump in younger voters.
“My biggest gripe isn’t about people who don’t show up,” Pedrotty said. “It’s about how we don’t change campaigns.”
Campaigns, he said, often are unwilling to innovate, organize for the long term or get voters involved in meaningful ways.
“We see a lot of attempts to reach younger voters,” Pedrotty said. “If you are only using text messages to communicate in the same way or get people to the same end, is that doing anything different?”