The Youth Vote in the 2020 Presidential Election: Idealism, Participatory Democracy, or Both?

by Emily Blake

this article was originally written in May 2020 and re-published to Wednesday

In their 1962 “Port Huron Statement,” Students for a Democratic Society was clear about their positionality as students, and clear about their dissatisfaction with the state of the United States government and its authority. SDS proclaimed “the Dixiecrat-GOP coalition” as it stood in the 1960s “is the weakest point in the dominating complex of corporate, military, and political power.” During and directly following the 2020 Presidential Election, the youth/ student vote is at the forefront of American political conversations. Tufts University research estimates 52-55% of youth voted in 2020, and their impact was decisive in key races across the country, compared to 42-44% turnout during the 2016 election. Using their methodology, Tufts released a hypothetical electoral college map titled “What Would the Map Look Like If Only Young People Voted?” where only seven states would have been Republican in 2020. 

SDS and student radicalism of the 1960s provides a historical example of merging cultural radicalism with radical politics. The student movement’s focus on participatory democracy and the “Port Huron Statement” overall could perhaps even provide insight into our current moment- a youth-led political movement stuck between voting and a radical vision of the future. 

We cannot talk about the 2020 Presidential Election campaign without addressing Bernie Sanders. Even in historically Republican states like North Carolina, Super Tuesday exit polls reported 62% of voters under the age of 25 went for Sanders. Despite a lack of resonance of the Biden/Harris ticket with students, Tufts and other sources declare youth voters as incredibly involved in the electoral defeat of Donald Trump. 

Whether or not SDS leaders would have potentially identified as Bernie Bros is beyond the point, but their conception of a new left as articulated in the “Port Huron Statement” contains a legacy visible in 2020. In 1962, SDS stated “a new left must include liberals and socialists, the former for their relevance, the latter for their sense of thoroughgoing reforms in the system.” As young people saw the few mainstream politician members of the Democratic Socialists of America, notably Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, endorse Joe Biden following the Democratic primaries, it seems like the Sanders supporters who perhaps abstained to vote during the 2016 Election decided to vote for Joe Biden. The 2020 Presidential election occurred in tandem with a Pandemic, a wave of highly contentious Black Lives Matter protests, economic recession, and explicit attacks on Americans’ voting rights. This is not to claim that the stakes were low for youth voters and students in 2016, but the 2020 Election is definitely reminiscent of the synthesis of both the social activism and civic participation that emerged in the tumultuous political and cultural moment of the 1960s.

thumbnail image source: Students For Bernie UCSB