Young voters feel a new antipathy
Many say they grasp the moment but are dismayed by the choice
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. – President Joe Biden should have a lock on Viviana Ramos’ vote. She’s a liberal young woman from an immigrant family working a service industry job that keeps her living paycheck to paycheck, worried about climate change, health care, the cost of college and buying a house.
But Biden may not get her vote in November.
Ramos, 24, voted for him in 2020 but is now unsure whether she can bring herself to support him again, even if it means a second presidency for Donald Trump, whom she dislikes even more.
“That fuels the rage. It’s really disheartening. I have a moral battle with myself: Do I even vote this time around? I don’t want to have to choose between them. One is slightly worse than the other. It’s horrible,” said Ramos, who works at a coffee shop inside downtown Chattanooga’s historic train station.
Ramos is one of many young voters stewing with grievances over the country’s future, from the existential crisis of climate change to the frustration over inflation, reproductive rights, high
“I usually judge people if they don’t vote. But this is the first election where I understand if you don’t want to vote. I’m just stuck.”
Kathika Senevirante
25, of Knoxville, Tenn.
interest rates, Israel’s war in Gaza, immigration reform and the power corporations have over their work lives.
Experts say young voters nationally may ultimately decide this presidential race. In 2016, young voters helped Trump claim victory by either staying home or choosing a third-party candidate. And in 2020 they helped Biden win by turning out near-record numbers and skipping third-party options.
“I usually judge people if they don’t vote. But this is the first election where I understand if you don’t want to vote,” said Kathika Senevirante, 25, of Knoxville. “I’m just stuck.”
Turned off by both parties
In 2016, nearly 40% of young voters cast ballots, rising to 50% in 2020, according to the nonpartisan Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement at Tufts University in Massachusetts. Although young voters are typically less likely to identify as Republican or Democrat, they are also more likely to vote for Democratic candidates.
Today, polls show Biden has weak support among young voters, and while 26% of Americans overall have a negative view of both Trump and Biden, a significantly larger 41% of young voters dislike both, according to a poll by Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Many young liberal voters say they understand that Biden’s reelection depends heavily on their support, and they hope his campaign and administration begins addressing their concerns more forcefully. They’re well aware that if they don’t give Biden their vote, Trump will more easily win.
Kristian Mansel, 23 said she’s willing to see a Trump victory if it means Biden and the Democratic Party learn a lesson. She’s mad Biden and Democrats have failed to protect reproductive rights or wipe out student loans.
“It’s just there’s too many strikes against him and the Democratic Party at this point in general,” said Mansel, a University of Memphis student who considers herself liberal.
In 2020, Trump beat Biden in Tennessee by about 700,000 votes, but more than 1 million eligible voters – most of them young people – didn’t participate.
Overall, 66% of Americans voted in the 2020 election, and turnout was highest – about 76% – among people ages 64 to 74. Experts say high turnout gives elections more credibility because the results more closely mirror what the majority of people want.
“It feels like the older generation is still in charge, and there are such huge differences in our experiences,” said Jeremy Gold, 30, of Nashville.
“We feel like we’ve been ripped off by the ‘American dream’ idea – we’ve seen the financial repercussions of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations multiple times over, seen a lot more violence and war than we were originally told would happen,” he said. “The lack of voting is probably a little bit of a middle finger to those who passed that to us.”
Combating low turnout
In 2020, Tennessee’s youth turnout was among the lowest in the nation at 43%, well below the national youth-voting average of 50%. And in the 2022 midterm elections, Tennessee had the country’s worst youth-voter turnout at just 12.7%.
Some voting rights groups say young voters often feel disillusioned because lawmakers suppress their participation. In Tennessee, for instance, the state won’t accept a college ID as proper identification at the polls but will accept a firearms registration card.
Other examples: limiting polling places on college campuses, blocking same-day voter registration and requiring that voting registration be done via “wet” signature – a handwritten signature signed in pen and mailed in or hand-delivered to registration officials. All of this seems very last-century to people who have grown up in the digital age.
“We all know young people like to do everything on their phones,” said Andrea Hailey, of the nonpartisan voter participation group Vote.org. “All of that is meant to wash young people out of the system.”
Like many voting advocacy groups, Vote.org tries to help young voters understand that their voices matter. And there’s indications it’s working.
With help from influencers like pop superstar Taylor Swift, who lives in Tennessee, Vote.org this election cycle has already seen twice as many 18-yearolds register to vote nationally than it did by this time in 2020. Hailey said she doesn’t buy the idea that young voters are disillusioned.
“If what we’re seeing holds true, that means the youngest cohort is planning to show up,” Hailey said. “They have a vision for the world they want to see.”
After an Instagram post by Swift last September, more than 30,000 people, a record, signed up through Vote.org during National Voter Registration Day, many of them teenagers who will be eligible to vote this fall. Hailey said about 80% of the people who sign up through Vote.org ultimately cast a ballot.
Tennessee Secretary of State Tre Hargett has also been working to improve youth turnout. A Republican, Hargett said his job is to make sure anyone who is legally allowed to vote gets that chance. But he dismissed concerns about whether seemingly small obstacles dissuade young voters from participating.
Hargett said low participation reflects a choice of priorities by those young people. He joked those same young people would be the first to tear their county apart piece by piece if it meant free Taylor Swift concert tickets.
Hargett said he tries to explain to young voters that whoever shows up at the polling place really does determine policy, even if it doesn’t happen fast enough for some. He remains mystified, he said, by young people who withhold their votes in protest.
“When you don’t go vote, what you do is turn over the keys to government to those who do,” he said. “If you don’t do politics, politics will be done to you.”
More annoyed than apathetic
Though Trump has focused primarily on the health of the overall economy and closing the southern border, Biden in the past several months has announced initiatives aimed squarely at the concerns of young people, from tax credits to help people buy houses to capping credit card fees, reducing racial disparities in health care and income, and lowering college costs and student loan debt, including at historically black colleges and universities in Tennessee.
Ramos sees efforts like those as little more than tinkering around the edges.
She’s furious that past generations could more easily buy homes, afford college, save for retirement and access high-quality health care. She said she sees Biden as only marginally better than Trump, whom she considers a “dictator.”
She said older voters refuse to change society because it works for them, even if it means dooming young people to a subsistence existence without homeownership, savings or affordable cars, groceries and gas.
“The people we elect don’t speak for me,” she said. “I try to be a mature person. But it’s hard not to be angry when you were left with multiple situations where the older generations have literally messed up so much for us.”
Ben Schulz, a high school government teacher in Chattanooga, said many of his students share the same concerns.
Earlier this year Schulz helped his school, Chattanooga School for the Arts & Sciences, win a statewide award for registering every student who will be eligible to vote this fall.
Schulz said college costs are among his students’ biggest concerns, along with climate change and the war in Gaza. He said it’s a mistake to think young people aren’t interested in politics. The problem, he said, is that many feel their votes won’t make a difference because of uncontested seats or gerrymandered districts.
“It may be hard to get anything out of them, but they are paying attention,” he said. “They may not express it to older people, but they sure are talking about it among themselves.”
Clarissa Unger of the nonpartisan Students Learn Students Vote coalition said she believes young people are powerfully interested in the outcome of this year’s election, even if polls don’t reflect it. In the 2020 presidential election, two-thirds of eligible college students ages 18 to 21 voted, virtually identical to the national average.
“Young people and college students are not apathetic at all – they want to have their voices heard,” Unger said. “Disillusionment is something they’re worried about this year, and a way to combat that is through voter education.”
‘They aren’t listening to me’
Unger said one long-standing concern young voters have is that they often feel as if they lack enough information to make a decision. Unlike older voters who consistently cast a ballot for their party’s candidate regardless of who it is, younger voters focus on specific issues.
Chattanooga high school student Emersyn Ware, 18, said some of her classmates are talking about not voting because they don’t think they know enough, while at the same time understanding that failing to vote means their voices will get ignored.
“It’s kind of crazy. It’s making it feel like whoever I vote for is making or breaking America,” Ware said. “It’s kind of stressful to think about, how this will help determine America’s future.”
Ware, who said she’s likely to vote for Trump this fall, said the cost of groceries and gas are among her biggest worries, along with overspending by the federal government, including aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia. And she worries that both Trump and Biden are too old to effectively connect with millions of young people like her. She said she feels Biden in particular makes the country look weak because he’s so old.
“Age makes them seem less capable,” she said. “We are the future of America, and if you can’t connect with our generation, what’s the point? And I suppose that’s a deterrent. They aren’t listening to me.”
Grace Russell, a 20-year-old student at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, skipped the state’s Democratic primary this year, even though she considers herself liberal.
“I’m just really not super-into Joe Biden, you know,” she said. “It’s one of those things where … I don’t think the alternative is better, but at the same time, he’s being silent on these major issues, like Palestine and a hundred other things.”
The choice between Biden and Trump is a matter of “bad vs. worse” due to Trump’s stances on many of the issues impacting her, she said.
“I’m a queer person, I’m a woman and I have no interest in making that worse,” she said. “But at the same time, I don’t think Biden is great, either.”
University of Memphis student Luis Lopez Gamez, 21, said he’s also disillusioned with Biden and probably will not vote over frustrations about the lack of border reform and Biden’s inability to stop Israel’s attacks on Gaza. Gamez is Latino and queer and said that while Trump has been outwardly hostile to people like him, Biden doesn’t seem much better.
“I just I don’t feel that there’s any need for me to express a vote when I have two candidates I’m completely dissatisfied with,” Gamez said. “Why am I having to choose the lesser of two evils again? At the end of the day, the lesser of two evils is still making me choose an evil.”
And Wallace Welch, 21, a college student and barber in Chattanooga, said he’s inclined to support Trump because he feels like the economy overall was better three years ago. While Biden might have more specific programs aimed at young Black men like him, Welch said, he felt safer and expects car prices and inflation would be lower under Trump.
“He might not say the best things all the time, but he’s an actual businessman. And Biden is just old,” Welch said. “I don’t really want a world run by old people. Well, there’s nothing wrong with an older person – just an incoherent older person.”
There’s hope, not optimism
Ramos, the coffee shop barista, said she hopes Biden and Trump start focusing more on young voters, who hold the future of the country in their hands. But she’s not optimistic.
She said her immigrant family sometimes surprises her with their support for Trump and noted financial security goes a long way to resolving other problems facing Americans. Her concern, she said, is that neither mainstream candidate will actually follow through on their campaign promises.
“At first they say they will give you the world, and at the end of the day, it doesn’t seem like they’re doing a lot,” Ramos said. “I’m not going to vote for Trump, and now I guess I’m trying to build up the courage to vote for Biden, unfortunately.
“I’m glad I have a few more months to think about it.”