As Will Bunch points out, voters under 30 were the difference in keeping Democrats in striking distance of keeping the House and Senate, an unprecedented midterm move in my lifetime, and they voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic party.
What a difference a day makes: 24 little hours. As the darkness descended across America on Tuesday, editors at the New York Times locked in their doom-for-Democrats front page while 3,000 miles west in Arizona, the extremist femme fatale Kari Lake was boasting to reporters that “I’m going to be your worst frickin’ nightmare” as Arizona’s next governor. Inside the Beltway, the pundits who’d issued a political tsunami watch gazed out on the waters with their binoculars, waiting for a “red wave” to roll ashore.
Hardly anyone was paying attention to what was happening on college campuses from Tempe, Ariz., to Champaign, Ill., where teens and 20-somethings stood and waited for hours to cast their ballots in the 2022 midterms, patiently scrolling through their iPhones or even sneaking in some homework. At the University of Michigan, in a state where abortion rights were on the ballot through both a referendum and a pro-choice governor, hundreds of students — some draped in blankets as the mercury plunged — stood on a line for two to three hours to cast their ballot. It was a new twist on the save-America battle cry of “Wolverines!” from the 1984 movie Red Dawn.
“I was voting based on women’s rights in terms of candidates who were supporting women’s choice,” said Lauren Snyder, who endured Tuesday’s massive line at the University of Illinois. She added: “It’s important — as a student — as a young person to come out and vote for issues that I care about.”
As bright sunshine broke across America on Wednesday morning, the outlines of an epic and truly historic election were starting to come into clear focus. If democracy was on the ballot in 2022, as President Joe Biden and so many others had warned, then it was young Americans — especially those under 30, including women like Snyder — who just saved it. Shocked into action by the loss of their reproductive rights and repulsed by candidates who threatened not to count their votes going forward, Millennials and Gen Z put down their books (or their beers) to make sure any “red wave” was subsumed by the deep blue sea.
Here’s the situation, less than 12 hours after the nation’s last polling place closed: Control of Congress is very much up in the air, defying predictions that Republicans were on track for double-digit gains in the House and possibly tipping the currently 50-50 Senate. The situation remains fluid but it looks as if Democrats could have 50 or even 51 Senate seats; network projections show the GOP with maybe a five- to seven-seat House majority, but that could be undone by late vote-counting out West. Scores of Republican election deniers fell Tuesday, led by a landslide defeat for Pennsylvania’s Doug Mastriano. Arizona’s gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake is currently behind in that state’s slow count — meaning future harassment of the press may have to come in a cranky letter to the editor, not from the governor’s mansion.
We got here through a Democratic surge among voters under age 45, but especially in the 18-to-29 bracket, and a female electorate that was clearly energized by the Supreme Court’s reversal of the Roe v. Wade decision that had guaranteed abortion rights for nearly a half century. That was especially true here in Pennsylvania, where a preliminary CBS exit poll showed the No. 1 voter concern was not inflation, as experts predicted, but abortion rights, cited by 36%. CNN’s national exit poll showed the GOP won over-45 voters, while Democrats, who narrowly won the 30-to-44 bracket, gained from a whopping 28% win among voters aged 18 to 29.
“I think young people realize that this election cycle is so much about the issues,” Victor Shi of the group Voters of Tomorrow presciently told the radio host Dean Obeidallah shortly before the election. “Because the other side, Republicans, really have no issue that they can offer young people in terms of how they’re going to support our lives and how they’re going to improve it.”
The determination of young voters to be counted in 2022 clearly flummoxed a political establishment and a punditry that looked like a cadre of baffled generals fighting the last wars. Certainly in the past, midterm elections have tended to be disastrous for the party in the White House, especially with exacerbating factors like high inflation. The New York Times, in particular, struggled to turn the “Dems-in-disarray” battleship around, finally landing on a front page that read “GOP GAINS EDGE, BUT ITS EXPECTATIONS DIM.” Not quite “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” but not great. Remember, Politico had commissioned a poll that picked up the late Democratic surge on the congressional ballot, but dismissed it as “an outlier.”
Spoiler alert: It wasn’t an outlier.
Voters age 18 to 29 voted for Team Blue by a whopping 28 points, and made up more than 12% of the electorate, according to CNN's national exit polling. Even white voters under 30 overwhelmingly picked the Dems, 58-40%. Hell, even 18-29 white voters without college degrees chose the Democrats 53-46%.
Expect Republicans to get rid of early voting, college campus voting, and to try to raise the voting age in response.
The kids are alright.
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