Young voters care about the same stuff as everyone else

Inflation and health care, not climate and student loans

The youngest cohort of Americans is less white, less religious, and better-educated than the national average, so naturally it’s more Democratic-leaning and less conservative than older cohorts.

But young people also pay less attention to politics, know less about politics, are less rooted in their communities, and are less likely to vote than older people. So across multiple cycles now, Democrats have understandably tried to “mobilize” young people — i.e., get them to actually vote. Younger Democratic Party primary voters (a group that is distinct from young people writ large) also famously did not love Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden in their respective primary campaigns, preferring the more left-wing Bernie Sanders. As a result, progressive advocacy groups often argue that the key to youth mobilization is adopting strident progressive stances on the groups’ issues.

Note, though, that this is largely a fallacy.

Here are two true propositions:

1. Young people are less engaged than older people

2. The young people who are engaged love Bernie Sanders

Logically, nothing about (1) and (2) implies that if more Democratic candidates were more like Bernie Sanders, more non-engaged young people would engage with politics.

In fact, the median young person self-identifies as moderate, just like the electorate as a whole. And at all ages, less-engaged people are less ideological and more moderate than consistent voters. Your socialist niece who posts obsessively about Genocide Joe is not representative of the typical member of her generation, who is on the bubble as to whether to vote for Joe Biden. You probably don’t hear a lot about the political opinions of politically disengaged young people because they are politically disengaged. Into the void step opportunists who try to convince Democrats that they have the key to the youth vote, even though on the most plausible measurements, the stuff that young people care about is very similar to the stuff that everyone else cares about.

In particular, the idea that there’s some magic trick to mobilize young people via progressive messages on climate change has basically no evidence behind it.

Young voters care about inflation and health care

Despite all my moaning and complaining, I am actually quite a bit more progressive than the average American, so I think it would be great to have a reasonably high carbon tax and split the revenue between a Child Tax Credit and deficit reduction. But as even the most strident climate change advocates in the world agree, a broad-based carbon tax is toxically unpopular. When gasoline prices spiked early in Joe Biden’s presidency, nobody stood and cheered and said “hooray, we are getting closer to our climate goals!”

And that’s the basic paradox of climate politics.