Thursday, October 23, 2014

Young people have low turnout

This is ridiculous. Millennials "don't vote" because they are young.

It wasn't all that long ago that people wondered why my generation, the "Gen Xers," didn't vote. People floated all these reasons, we were alienated and "bitter", we listened to too much Nirvana, we were spending too much time making money from dot-com startups and didn't think that politics was relevant to our lives, etc. Now I don't read that stuff, because we are older, we vote at roughly the rates that middle aged people vote, and there's a new younger generation to fret about.

Almost every time that someone makes a point about the unique characteristics of a generation, I think it is utter crap. These are nothing more than just so stories. With a large diverse group of people like a generation, you can always pick and choose any set of characteristics to support whatever stereotype-based story you want.

Especially for voting, there's really no reason to resort to that kind of narrative. It is well documented that people turn out for elections (especially in non-Presidential elections) in lower numbers when they are young, and that their turn out rate increases as they age. That's it.