In the three years and four months since Joe Biden and Donald Trump last squared off electorally, nearly 16 million Americans reached voting age for the first time while 10 million others exited the electorate for the last time.
That demographic conveyor belt, or something like it, isn’t new. Every election cycle people come of age, people die and voting happens.
But routine doesn’t always equal stagnation. Voters entering the political scene at any given time bring a different set of values than the voters they’re replacing. Sometimes the differences are slight, and America’s political direction changes at the margins. Other times the differences are stark enough to reboot the entire electorate, with the shift typically lasting several election cycles.
A lot of experts, of varying political stripes, say 2024 could be the start of one of those other times.
Think of the voters that came of age when Franklin Delano Roosevelt was president, and how they boosted Democrats until the late 1960s. Or of how Baby Boomer and Generation X voters, who came of age from the start of Richard Nixon’s administration to the end of Ronald Reagan’s, have a conservative tone that has included the Trump era.
This year’s new voters, Millennial and Generation Z types who have come of age during an era of whipsaw politics – the Great Recession, followed by Barack Obama, followed by Trump and the pandemic and, finally, Biden – could be similarly transformative.
No expert is saying the newcomers will instantly supplant older voters as the nation’s most influential. Numbers and voting patterns suggest that’s far off. But many suggest the attitudes, if not the behaviors, of younger voters could add some much-needed optimism to American politics.
A lot of young voters echo that belief.
“We matter,” said Henry Nguyen-Phuoc, a 21-year-old political science major at UC Riverside and president of the school’s tiny (“about 10, maybe 12 full-time members”)…
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