The brutal murder of George Floyd by four Minneapolis Police Department officers, and the failure of the justice system to quickly prosecute the police officers involved, has triggered an explosion of activism across the country, and the world, in loud protest of police brutality against Black people. These actions vary dramatically along spectrums of intended impact and severity. And the response from media, police, and the public have exhibited the same variation.

Overwhelmingly, we’ve seen peaceful demonstrations and efforts to funnel money to bail funds, Black-led organizations, and Black-owned businesses -- both powered strongly by the social media organizing of young people. We’ve also seen the amplification of looting and wealth redistribution actions, used as justification for violent police and military response which have been stoked and authorized by the president. Finally, we’ve seen the chaos and anguish of the moment used to leverage the importance of voting in the coming Presidential election and unseating Donald Trump.

These renewed calls to vote coincide with two clear barriers to democratic in-person elections: shelter-in-place orders in response to the ongoing spread of Coronavirus, and local curfew orders beginning as early as 1PM in some cities, aimed at reducing protest activity.

In mid-April, Talk Policy To Me reporter Reem Rayef spoke with Dr. Sunshine Hillygus, Professor of Political Science at Duke University and co-author of the newly published Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes Into Civic Action, about the behavior of young people when it comes to voting and elections. At the time of the conversation, the Democratic primary had swung definitively in favor of Joe Biden, California had been under stay-at-home orders for over a month, and George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Tony McDade were still alive.

Dr. Hillygus and her co-author Dr. John Holbein examine the personal and systematic barriers that stand between young people and the voting booth -- and the consequences of the vast disparities in voting rates between generations. In this episode, which is the last in Talk Policy To Me’s series on democracy, Reem and Dr. Hillygus discuss the damaging misconceptions about young people’s civic attitudes, and how these misconceptions are weaponized by conservatives in the service of voter suppression. Why is it so hard to get young people out to the voting booth? Who benefits when young people stay in on election day, and who pays the price? What is the role of the public school system in preparing young people to be engaged citizens? And how can state electoral policies support civic attitudes?

Dr. Hillygus asserts the importance of voting, particularly for those who want to see radical change in entrenched systems which seem broken beyond repair -- most notably, the healthcare and police systems. In the current moment, voting can seem like too small and too remote an action in response to the atrocities that have come to the fore in recent months, but which have been plaguing the Black community for much, much longer. And on its own, voting in November is too small an action.

The urgent challenges faced by the United States require direct action and local community, in addition to the long-term changes that could become reality if young people were proportionally represented in the voting booth.

Writing referenced in this episode is linked here:

• Stop Blaming Young People For Not Turning Out for Sanders by Ibram X Kendi
• An Excitingly Simple Solution to Youth Turnout For the Primaries and Beyond by Charlotte Hill and Jacob Grumbach

For more on the importance of voting for systemic change, check out the rest of Talk Policy To Me’s series on democracy:

• Talking Democracy in the Era of COVID-19
• Talking 16 Year Olds and Voting
• Talking Voting and Elections

For ways to support Black communities and frontline protestors in the Bay Area, please consider supporting the following organizations with your voice and/or money:

• The East Oakland Collective
• Anti Police-Terror Project
• People’s Breakfast Oakland
• National Lawyers Guild - SF Bay Area Chapter

Transcript

Trump: [00:00:01] We're not going to go to voting by mail. Voting by mail is wrought with fraud and abuse, and people don't get their ballots that happen to be in a certain district, whether it's Republican or Democrat. Thousands of ballots are sent out, but they don't happen to get them. So people are calling, Where's my bag? They call it a panic. Where is it? Where is it? The election's coming and all of a sudden the election comes, it goes and they say, Hey, I never got a ballot. But wow, that didn't affect. But it did affect because thousands of people that happens to you go and you vote. And ideally you vote with voter ID. But no, I don't we don't want to have vote by mail. We want people to vote. Now, if you're president of the United States and if you vote in Florida and you can't be there, you should be able to send in a ballot.

Reem: [00:00:54] Across the country, policymakers are trying to figure out how to make the 2020 election coronavirus proof. In some cases, that means one time stopgap measures like pushing primaries until later in the summer, when the spread of the virus has hopefully slowed. But others are trying to leverage the chaos of this era to promote long overdue electoral reforms, like expanding vote by mail, which would protect voters from the hazards of in-person voting during this pandemic. On its face, vote by mail is one of many common sense ways to improve access to the voting booth in the best of times. But particularly right now. As you heard in the opening clip, Trump and most Republicans strongly oppose efforts to make voting easier. They cite concerns about voter fraud and so-called vote harvesting, while study after study after study demonstrates that vote by mail doesn't actually compromise the integrity of our elections. Trump and other conservatives have made it explicitly clear that blocking election reform isn't actually about preventing voter fraud. It's about keeping people of color and young people who they assumed to be Democratic voters out of the voting booth. How do we know? First of all, political response to expansionary electoral reform falls neatly along party lines, which merits some suspicion. When the proposed reforms like vote by mail and automatic voter registration are not inherently partisan. Secondly, and more tellingly, conservatives are being explicit about it. Georgia State Speaker of the House Representative David Ralston recently said in a radio interview that expansion of vote by mail would be, quote, extremely devastating for Republicans and conservatives. The chaotic synchronicity of the general election and the COVID 19 pandemic may have brought talk of electoral reform to center stage. But Dr. Sunshine Hillygus and Dr. John Holbein have been thinking about them for a while. Specifically in the context of young voters. Well, listeners, we made it. It is our last episode of season three of Talk Policy To Me and the final installment in our series on Democracy. I'm Reem Rayef. And today we are talking about young voter behavior with Dr. Sunshine Hillygus. Doctor Hillygus and her coauthor John Holbein just published a book titled Making Young Voters: Converting Civic Attitudes into Civic Action. Helga's and Holbein's work illuminates why young voters are underrepresented in the voting booth and what policies can be implemented to reverse this. Their findings are the result of many years of behavioral studies and political science analysis of how young people become young voters or don't. The problem is as follows Despite the fact that millennials are the largest demographic in the U.S. and Gen Z is starting to reach voting age, we vote at much lower rates than our older counterparts. According to Census Bureau data. In the 2016 general election, 46% of eligible voters aged 18 to 29 turned out to vote, compared to 67% of 45 to 64 year olds and 71% of those 65 and older. That's a nearly 20 point difference between our youngest voting bloc and our oldest one. And the disparity is even wider in midterm elections. In this episode, I speak with Dr. Hillygus about how this gap has formed, how we can close it through reforms to voting laws and civic education curricula, and what this gap means for progressive politics in the United States.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:04:33] So we in this book, we actually had to kind of pass one as we wanted to understand, what about the decision for young people to vote or not? Like what stood in the way and in understanding how people made up their mind about whether to vote or not, we can better understand how to increase youth turnout. And and and so half of the book is really focused on that individual decision making. The other half were about the policy solutions. And pre-registration is one of the policy solutions that that we focus on as well as automatic registration would have the would have the same effect.

Reem: [00:05:15] A quick note for more about pre-registration and automatic registration, listen to our episode titled Talking Voting and Elections, in which Colleen breaks down the costs and benefits of electoral reform with two of our classmates. The bottom line is that both are great ideas that we should implement universally and immediately.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:05:34] Now, in terms of of what are the individual level processes going on, that's where one of our main takeaways is the fact that the assumption out there that young people are not participating because they are not motivated, because they're apathetic, that that just isn't the explanation. And it is very clear in all of it is that we looked at that that simply isn't the case, which is not to say there aren't young people out there who, you know, don't care about politics because there are at every age there are people that that don't, you know, that have other things to think about beyond beyond politics. So it could be very important to get those young people who are not motivated already to get them more motivated interests. What we focus on is the fact that the bigger chunk of young people who are showing up, it's not because they are not motivated, is not because they are apathetic about politics. It's because they don't follow through on their those civic attitudes and that and that realizing that that is the problem that has to be solved leads us to a different set of policy solutions than if the problem was that young people were just apathetic.

Reem: [00:07:01] I was canvassing during the California primary here for Bernie Sanders and that finding really resonates with what I experienced while knocking on doors, which is that there was a lot of apathy across all age groups. And also I experienced a lot of, not necessarily apathy, but like frustration and disenfranchisement among people who told me that they weren't going to be voting. They were saying, you know, I used to care about politics and I was really passionate and I really like Bernie Sanders, but I am so fed up. And so I'm not going to vote anymore. So I'm wondering, is that person out in your in your research?

Dr. Hillygus: [00:07:38] So not in this current book, although one of the things that I that I think is part of the reason that I think it's so important to focus on getting those people who do care to follow through rather than kind of spending effort on those who are less motivated is because there is certainly this subset of the population for whom not voting is in and of itself a political act. Right? So in some of my previous research, some of the things I've done is like re-interview the same people multiple points in time. And so one of the things we can do is look at those people who said a year out from the election like, I'm not going to vote. Right. It turns out they don't vote, right. If they tell you a year before the election that they are not going to vote. Oftentimes it is almost like this political statement about their disengagement from the political system for a reason. On the other hand, we also know and these are the ones that I'm kind of most interested in, is that, you know, 80% of young people will say they're going to vote, but then only 30% do. Right. And if we can solve that gap right, we're going to have much more impact on ultimately participation rates among young people than if we focus on the 20% who say, I'm not going to vote again. Like, I don't want to say that it's not important to understand them. But if what we want to do is increase youth turnout, that focusing on those ones that don't follow through is kind of you will get more bang for the buck.

Reem: [00:09:20] Yeah it seems like low hanging fruit and that statistic of 80% say they want to vote and then 30% and they actually do. It is so shocking. And we absolutely saw that in the results of the primary right now.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:09:30] Yes. Yes. And so, I mean, this. This is one of those things that our book came out, you know, right before Coronavirus kind of really hit. And so there were just like a couple of movements of people, like realizing that Bernie Sanders base of support was not following through. And we're like, We told you so. And then everyone's ignoring us because of Coronavirus. But you know it at the end of the day, part of the issue is that, again, there are both personal and structural things that make it more difficult for young people to follow through. And it doesn't matter the difference between excitement for Bernie and Biden. There were plenty of young people who supported Warren who also didn't show up. There are plenty of young people who supported Hillary Clinton that also didn't show up. There are plenty of young people who supported Trump that also didn't show up right like that. That that we have to think about the the the things that are not with, you know, specific to a given election and really think about like more structurally of what's going on in terms of explaining decades of low youth turnout.

Reem: [00:10:49] Yeah, it's interesting that kind of that low youth turnout occurred across candidates. But then just like impacted Bernie Sanders so intensely because of his dependance on that, that youth turnout. So he was much more exposed to this effect. But you and John Holbein point out in your book. Hillygus and whole bind strongly emphasize the importance that civics education in schools plays in future voter behavior by their measures. If your civics education is successful, yes, it should teach you about the three branches of government and landmark court cases, but it should also set you up to be a participating and involved citizen. What they describe a strong civics curriculum is a far cry from what I remember learning in school.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:11:33] And so the thing that we make the case for is that if part of what we want out of civics education is not just political knowledge, but also political engagement, that we need to focus on the things that actually engage people. So that is both talking about things that are relevant in politics today, which in our interviews with teachers, we find they're incredibly hesitant to do because of fear of what parents will say or what superintendents will say. It's also about the basic process of registration and voting. And so we report on one study that that found like 50% of college students messed up in filling out a registration form, like they didn't necessarily know there's a security number or they forgot to sign it or there's. And so even just knowing, you know, are you allowed to register to vote if you are a college student who lives out of state? What do you do if you get to the polling location and your name is on the registration roll like that? For a great many people who have been registered and voting for many years, it's hard to remember or to consider the possibility that registration and voting can be complex. And yet for new voters, and particularly for oftentimes for college students, it's sometimes a super easy right? If you live at home and you're going to the exact same place that your parents go and your parents are voters, and then then you'll probably find it to be an incredibly easy process. And some of the students that we talked to would say, like, it's so easy, I can't believe that, you know, anybody says that it's not. On the other hand, if you are a college student from out of state and you have an I.D. that doesn't have the address of your college dorm and there's a voter ID law like that, it suddenly gets much more complex. Right. And one of the things it that we found so fascinating was that young people were often really embarrassed by the fact that they found it confusing because. Right. This is something that should be so easy. Not only that, beyond, you know, these college students who, you know, are incredibly bright and they're like, wait a sec. It's like, I can't believe that this is there's something here that go, Why is this silly me? Yes. Right. There's also a little bit of this disconnect between the way they live their life normally and what is required for voting. And so one woman said, like, you know, we have to be registered to vote 30 days in advance, like I'm used to. If I need something, I order on Amazon and it comes the next day. So like just that shift in, you know, what is required and how we need to think about things is different. Right. For registration and voting. The third thing that I would just mention that I found especially fascinating was that young people often thought that everyone else out there voting was far more informed than they were and that they should be doing a lot of research in order to vote. So young people and I blame partly the way we teach civic education. The young people that we talked to who didn't vote often said like, well, I plan to vote, but then I didn't spend as much time doing the research and I didn't want to just vote straight ticket. And I just felt like I wasn't informed enough to vote and that an old person will never see real hope. You know, they like that it's okay if you don't vote in the dogcatcher race or the city council race because you haven't done research on those or it's okay to use a voter guide and to to to trust somebody else's recommendation that nobody is doing extensive research about every single office, about every single issue, about every single candidate. And we do a really bad job of explaining that it is okay to use heuristics when you vote right that we that most of us can muddle through and figure out, is it a, D or R that's better going to represent our interests in this election and it's okay to vote on that basis. You don't have to. And frankly, very few people are doing extensive research about every single race, about every single candidate, about every single issue. And that was a fascinating finding for us, too, to realize how much pressure young people were putting on themselves about, you know, what was required to be a voter. And so they have this expectation of themself about what it means to be a good voter and to hold themselves to a standard that is much higher and much different from what older voters are holding themselves to. And so I think that part of what civics education needs to do is to teach the basics of the voting process. Right. Like, what is the ballot going to look like? What is the registration form going to look like, The kind of the nitty gritty details of process to they should make available to young people the opportunity to register? And I'll talk more about that in just a minute. And then, three, they need to teach young people the obligation to vote, right, that we are able to do it competently with the use of heuristics. Right. That you don't have to research every single issue, every single candidate, every single race that most people don't. So schools are a place where we ought to be helping young people to overcome what is the single biggest hurdle to voting, and that is registration. Because right now the way it works is that people who grow up in a household where their parents are registered and active voters are the ones who are able to participate and get registered. And it's those who do not grow up in those type of households are the ones that are being left behind in public schools like the public school system. Right is one of the few places where we can reach those that are growing up in homes where they might not get the assistance they need in the home. And we did a surveys of schools in North Carolina and just found incredible variation across schools and what's being done in terms of registration drives, even though like in North Carolina, there's a law that high schools have to make available registration forms. So that's a law on the books. And yet, you know, half the schools don't do any type of registration drive. Some only do them in presidential election years. Four son is just a table in the cafeteria. You know, it's just incredible, incredible variation in what schools are actually doing. What schools need to do is they need to be in the classroom with a teacher, with a form where people can ask questions if they have questions. And that's pretty rare. But one of the things that we found is that preregistration reforms were most effective when they were coupled with efforts from schools to do things like voting demonstrations and voter registration drives. So it's a combination of both making it easier to vote, but also giving that opportunity directly to the to the individual right.

Reem: [00:20:02] So in a way, it sounds like you're saying public schools can kind of mimic this, the effect of growing up in a voting household. This is kind of the next best thing that we can do to kind of equalize that playing field and teach people who might not come from voting households.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:20:19] Exactly.

Reem: [00:20:19] How to do it.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:20:21] Exactly.

Reem: [00:20:22] This preparation to be an engaged and voting citizen, however, can begin way earlier than you might imagine. In their book, Hillygus and Holbein imagine a public education system that begins this preparation as early as kindergarten, though you might not recognize it as a civics curriculum at all.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:20:37] The other part of the book that we really focus on is that in in this follow through part of things is that what we find is, is that those people who are most likely to follow through are those who have strong non-cognitive skills, these non-cognitive or social emotional. They're called various things. But this is basically a set of skills that the people have to follow through on their intentions, regardless of what those intentions are and in the education policy world and both economists and psychologists and others have really been focused on the importance of having the schools teach non-cognitive skills because they are relevant to being able to finish high school, go to college, have career success. And one of the things we show is that actually in the political domain as well. Right. That it also helps to predict who follows through and in the development of social, emotional or non-cognitive skills are something that you can start at the super young age. I mean, this is a kindergarten type curriculum. A lot of those experiments kind of go into elementary schools and help to develop the sort of delayed gratification and grit and problem solving and things that are not just simply math and science, but really about how to get people to accomplish the things they want to accomplish.

Reem: [00:22:12] So there's this like education aspect of how you can improve someone's likelihood of voting. But to what extent is this a cultural kind of dynamic in that at least by my in my estimation, it feels like politics is something that is impolite to discuss that you're not supposed to bring in to just regular conversation. So do you think that if it were more normal to talk about politics and to talk about adversarial politics and to disagree politically with people in a professional sense and on a personal sense, if we were just talking about it more, would it maybe seem less intimidating and would we get greater participation maybe across the board. Like if you didn't feel like you had to be very educated or very opinionated to just talk about politics all the time?

Dr. Hillygus: [00:23:01] Yeah, I mean, I guess it is the case that when there are kind of organized opportunities for people to talk about politics, that those times in our history, like when the labor unions were strong, for instance, like there's all of these this kind of classic political science research that emphasizes the fact that like the civic culture that we used to have was really developed through these organizations that weren't necessarily political inherently, but could become political. And in that with time, you know, those organizations are not as strong and that those organizations help to compensate for, particularly those who were not going to college and and and creating. Exactly what you were saying. Right. The type of opportunities to kind of normalize and create expectations of political engagement. The only thing I do want to emphasize is that while all of that sounds great to kind of fix culture, you know, I don't know exactly how to do that. Right. Like, what I can say is like what are policies that we can change within education, within our electoral laws. And when we compare the gap in participation between young and old people in the U.S. relative to other countries. Right. Like if it was just about culture generally than we you know, it should affect old people in young people equally and it doesn't. Right. And so that gap between old people and young people is larger in the United States than any other Western democracy. Right. And so that says to me that it's not just about our culture, that it is about other things. And I in particular, I think it's largely about registration, right, like that. What is the thing that is different about us compared to all of these other countries? We make people friggin register to vote a month in advance, and only that the rules for registering are different in one state relative to another. In some states you can register online. In some states you can't. In some states you need to show ID, In some states you can't. In some states you can be 16. In other states you need to be 17.5 and you need to be a certain number of days away from the election so that we have this incredible variation in the hurdles that have to be jumped over. And it is in any one state, we we you know, anybody who is a long time voter might look at those and say like, you know, I show up the same place every, you know, every two years the vote and like, what's the big deal? But stepping back and realizing how much variation there is across states really starts to highlight, you know, the institutional things that could change. Now, granted, making it super easy, removing registration entirely is not going to mean that every young person is going to vote. Right. There are still personal hurdles that we have to to to get over. And, you know, there is there's also the aspect of young people are at a point in their lives that make it more difficult to follow through on their intentions. But the things that I focus on in terms of policy are things that we can do.

Reem: [00:26:37] It's worth saying, so much of this is frustrating. The challenge of getting younger people to vote and the weaknesses in our democracy that we acknowledge while doing so, relate to bigger and hazier challenges that we face here in this democracy. I wish that instead of telling younger people not to think so hard about who they're voting for, that we could tell older people to think much, much harder about who they're voting for. I wish the way to win elections required politicians to critically engage with the disenfranchised people who say they won't vote. I wish it wasn't so taboo to talk about politics in normal settings that adversarial politics weren't impolite in personal and professional contexts so that we could lean on our experiences and our communities to inform our views rather than pundits and lobbyists. But if voting is about power, and this democracy is what we're working with, there's a lot to learn about movement building from guess work.

Reem: [00:27:30] In a recent op-ed, you said youth voter turnout is at crisis levels and we are in the middle of a global pandemic, though a kind of different type of crisis. But I'm wondering, like what, why do you say crisis? What is at stake? And I know you do a little bit of writing about what this means for like the shape of politics now and in the past and moving forward.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:27:52] Yeah, I mean, so well, it is the case that young people do care about health care about the election. They are interested in politics. The reality is, is that the policies that get enacted represent those people who vote right. And until young people do participate, their policies are not going to be implemented. And if history is any indication, you know, the people who supported Bernie Sanders and actually voted for him will turn out and will vote Democratic. Like once you get over the hump of voting for the first time, you're far more likely to vote the second time. But there may have been a lot of young people who still had planned to vote and and might now be even less likely to kind of make it over the obstacles to get there this cycle. It is, you know, I had a lot of students that contributed to this project in various ways. So and I told them I always, like, start looking out for amongst your friends, even the ones that might be part of the young Democrats or might be part of the politically active. And I was like, look to see who of them don't turn out right. Don't ultimately vote. And sure enough, right, like we worked on this verbal election cycles that they did find, right, that in even some of the students who contributed this project ended up not voting for one reason or another of things that got in the way. And and and so they certainly came to appreciate the fact and recognize the fact that that intention is not always enough. And the thing that, you know, I have told people who are interested in mobilization is like rather than having the message that voting is cool, maybe instead send out calendar reminders. Right. Instead, thinking about all the exercises that get used for development of these non-cognitive skills and problem solving and so on that those exercises apply here. So, you know, when during the day on the Tuesday, do you plan to vote? Like what else are you going to have going on on a Tuesday? How are you going to get to the polling location? What are you going to do if you get there? And the line is long. Like how much time will you give yourself? You're so, like thinking through like all of the opportunities for there to be obstacles that get in the way. And again, a lot of the obstacles that people talked about were not necessarily physical obstacles that were things like, Oh, I had planned to do a lot more research so that I would know what's going on in this midterm election. And suddenly here we are on Election Day. And I didn't do as much research. And so so again, that messaging of reassuring that like it's okay to skip some of the races, it's okay to vote straight ticket if you feel like you can at least give a broad sense of whether you are ready or not or it's okay to use a voter guide, it is about changing expectations. And also I think about mentally thinking through the things that might get in the way.

Reem: [00:31:32] Yeah, so kind of like imagining yourself on Election Day and really putting yourself in your future shoes.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:31:38] Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like one of the things that that is the case is that research finds that early voting doesn't really increase turnout. Right. Like because most of the people who use early voting are going to show up on election Day if they don't use early voting. And one of the things that happens with early voting is it allows us to kick the can down the road right away. You know, a lot of things came up, so I'm going to vote tomorrow. And so that kicking the can down the road, you know, ends up like at the end of the day. But it doesn't actually increase turnout in the aggregate.

Reem: [00:32:09] Are you making a case for caucusing?

Dr. Hillygus: [00:32:12] No, definitely not. No, definitely not.

Reem: [00:32:15] All right. Well, it's on the record now. So that's good.

Dr. Hillygus: [00:32:19] Yeah, right, Right. When we, you know, when I focus on the complexity of the registration system and residency rules. Right. The only thing that is more complex and more detrimental, I think, to our democracy is our nomination system. But that's a conversation for another time.

Reem: [00:32:50] Recent attacks on democracy by conservatives have brought this issue to center stage, raising the question who has a vested interest in suppressing the voices of young people, incarcerated people, Black people, Brown people, undocumented people. And while Republican efforts to suppress votes are certainly the most explicit, it's important to remember that power protects power. Dr. Ibram X Kendi wrote in an article for The Atlantic, quote, Both Republicans and moderate Democrats share a joint interest in not increasing the voting rates of young people. Republicans lose general elections to Democrats when young people vote in high numbers. Moderate Democrats lose primary elections to progressive Democrats when young people vote in high numbers. End quote. He goes on to, quote voting rights advocates Charlotte Hill and Jacob Grimm back in a 2019 op-ed. Nobody wants to be a victim of the next Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ayanna Pressley. Reforming voting in even a small way, a way that captures the votes of those who want to vote could mean a change in the balance of power between parties and within them.

Reem: [00:33:56] Talk Policy To Me is a production of UC Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy and the Berkeley Institute for Young Americans. Our executive producers are Sarah Swanbeck and Bora Lee Reed. Michael Quiroz is our sound engineer and music heard on today's episode is by Pat Mesiti-Miller and Blue Dot Sessions. I'm Reem Rayef. Be well.