No. Youth Turnout Was Not Down on Super Tuesday Compared to 2016
Yesterday (3/3/2020), 14 states concurrently held their presidential primaries. (The territory of American Samoa held its caucus as well). The quadrennial tradition — commonly called “Super Tuesday” — can often be a pretty big deal. They can make or break the campaigns of presidential aspirants before they even make it to their party’s convention. And, although all the results haven’t been totally resolved, it looks like former Vice President Joe Biden pulled out a number of large, important wins — much to the chagrin of who, after last night, appears to be his lone, chief rival: Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.
Before this Super Tuesday, pundits and political observers were preparing their eulogies for the Biden campaign. After Sanders’ strong finishes in the earliest contests, many were waxing on about how he was the only person with a viable pathway to a majority of delegates. He was said to be breaking away from the pack — no one else was even close! But then South Carolina happened. And Sanders took a shellacking. And the losses yesterday were large and important, compounding that decisive defeat.
A lot of people, as is our nature, started looking for an explanation. And, pretty quickly, it appears that a plausible one is emerging from the bubbling journalistic ether. Why did Sanders falter? Well according to MSN, The Washington Examiner, Vox, and USA Today, it’s because youth turnout was down compared to when he last vied for the Presidency in 2016. In both contests, the youth vote (defined as being younger than 30. Which, you know, yay!) were instrumental to his success. And it appears that those fickle youths simply sat this primary out.
As an explanation, it strikes us all as plausible, yes? Political scientists know that it’s damn hard to get young people to turn out to vote. So it seems like, if we’re going to try and spin a narrative here, this one might just be on to something. Right?
You can probably guess from the title where I’m going with this.
The assertion that youth turnout was lower across the board on Super Tuesday 2020 compared to 2016 is factually wrong. In over half the states that we have data for, it was actually higher. The median change in absolute youth turnout among them was an increase of about 8 percent.
I’ll let Leyard King of USA Today spell out the evidence for the youth-didn’t-vote claim.
Exit polls for five southern states that Biden won — Alabama, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, and Virginia — found that young voters did not show up at the rate (emphasis his) they did in 2016…In addition the Vermont Senator has been grabbing a smaller share of them in most cases.
· In Alabama, only 10% of the voters were in the 17–29 range compared to 14% in 2016. Sanders won six of every 10 of those voters Tuesday compared to 46% in 2016.
· In North Carolina, 14%of Tuesday’s electorate were young voters, compared to 16% four years ago. Of those, 57% went for Sanders in 2020 compared to 69% in 2016.
· In South Carolina which held its primary Saturday, young voters made up 11% of the electorate Tuesday compared to 15% in 2016. Sanders won 43% of those voters Tuesday compared to 54% four years ago.
(For the record, I’m not a huge fan of not including the confidence intervals of those estimates in here — because exit polls are, well, polls. I’d wager that most if not all of the differences in rates are statistically insignificant. For simplicity’s sake, though, I’m going to pretend that they are totally precise and accurate values for the rest of the article. Just know that it’s wounding me, dear reader. It’s wounding me deep).
In effect, these analyses are conflating youth proportion of the vote-share with youth turnout overall. Youth took up a smaller percentage of the electorate in 2020 than in 2016. As a result, people are assuming that this meant that fewer young people voted in 2020 than in 2016.
The thing is, those are totally different claims. They would both be true if turnout remained unchanged between 2016 and 2020. It didn’t. In the vast majority of Super Tuesday contests, there were far more people voting in Democratic primaries in 2020 than in 2016. There are a number of reasons for that: more competition, more favorable competition, the perception of a closer contest, state-level population increases, animus being driven by President Trump — take your pick and mix ‘em. The culmination of these factors mean that way more people voted than they did before. Youth didn’t have to take up as large of a share of the voters as they did in 2016 to be more active overall.
What does the youth turnout picture look like when this critical fact is actually taken into account? There were 9 Super Tuesday states with exit polls in both years. Of those, youth turnout was down in less than half of them: Alabama, Oklahoma, Vermont, and Massachusetts. Massachusetts has the most room to make up that number — but it would need to find an additional 23,000 youth vote at time of writing (nearly 145,000 total votes if the youth’s share of the vote remains constant). I’m not sure how likely that is, but I’m going to hedge on the side of caution and assume “un.” (And it also should be noted that Oklahoma was actually a bit weird compared to the others; it was the only state I looked at where overall turnout was lower in 2020 than in 2016).
In the other 5 states, however, youth turnout was actually higher than in 2016. It was up in North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and Texas. In the case of North Carolina, it was up by an astonishing 33 percent.
So if more youth turned out, why did they take up a smaller percentage of the over-all vote-share? Because, while youth turnout (generally) increased other age groups increased at higher rates. Would Sanders have done better if younger voters took up a larger proportion of those who turned out? Quite possibly. But it’s just factually wrong to spin this as “youth not turning out” for Sanders. They did. Older voters simply turned out more.
This is a big reason that I and other social scientists don’t like just relying on exit-poll data. It tells us the inverse of the story that many people seem to be interested in. They tell us what percent of voters a certain group made up. It doesn’t tell us how many members of that group voted.
To be sure Sanders took some massive losses over the last few days. We’ll have to see how this fact gets ingested, interpreted, and promulgated to know just how much of his “momentum” has been dissipated. We shouldn’t overplay it though: Sanders is far from dead in the water. This looks like it’ll continue to be a tough campaign for both Biden and Sanders — even if a lot of wind has definitely been taken out of the latter’s sails.
But, if people are interested in accurately understanding why, they’re going to have to spin a better yarn than “blame it on the youths.” Youth turnout was up in many contests on Super Tuesday. Raw turnout in general was up Super Tuesday. A pattern that you can be pretty sure will crop up from here on out to November.
Peter Licari is a PhD Candidate in Political Science at the University of Florida specializing in American Political Behavior, and Political Methodology. The opinions expressed are his own. He can also be found on YouTube and on Twitter(@PRLPoliSci). What little spare time remains is dedicated to long-distance running, video games with his ever-patient wife, Stephanie, walking his dog, Dude, and holding oddly productive one-sided conversations with his cat, Asia.
