If you are a millennial who lives in Tennessee, you fit into the least likely demographic in the country to vote this November. According to an analysis by PEW Charitable Trust on the previous midterm election in 2014, voter turnout in Tennessee is the lowest in the country, at just 28.5 percent. Their analysis also found that voter registration in Tennessee was ranked at 40th overall with 74 percent of the state’s population registered. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the voter turnout for ages 18-34 in 2014 was 23.1 percent. Their data also shows that the 18-34 age group has been the least likely age group to vote since they began collecting data in 1978.
In July of this year, at least 31 voters were killed and over 40 more were injured in an attack in Pakistan on their election day. Even with the threat of being killed while voting, their turnout was 55.8 percent. This figure is almost 20 percent higher than the U.S. 2014 midterms and is comparable to the turnout during presidential elections. This speaks volumes to how we as Americans take our right to vote for granted.
Pew Research Center data shows that the top two reasons that voters didn’t vote in 2016 were: (1) they didn’t like the candidate/campaigning issues; and (2) they were not interested/felt their vote wouldn’t make a difference. These are both issues of voter confidence with the latter largely being an issue of voter suppression. In order to combat voter suppression in regards to hacking, Tennessee is spending $8 million in order to update voting machines and other security measures.
In regards to the first aforementioned reason, this will never be resolved until we learn to see past our differences. Former President Barack Obama put it this way during a recent speech at the University of Illinois: “To make democracy work, we have to be able to get inside the reality of people who are different… we have to engage them even when it is frustrating, we have to listen to them even when we don’t like what they have to say, we have to hope that we can change their minds and be open to them changing ours.”
According to CNN, millennials have surpassed Baby Boomers as the largest voter-eligible group. A CIVIQS poll of over 130,000 people found that millennials prefer Democrats to Republicans, 53 to 31 percent, with the rest identifying as independent. Despite low voter turnout among millennials, we have already seen the effect they have had in recent years. In the 2012 presidential election, millennials flipped their traditionally red states into blue ones in Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Ohio. For the presidential election of 2016, a survey of 30,000 people provided to Mic by SurveyMonkey, showed that if all eligible millenials had voted, then Donald Trump would have only won in five states: Idaho, Wyoming, North Dakota, Kentucky, and West Virginia.
Whoever you decide to vote for, make sure it is an informed decision and to vote for the candidate, not the party they represent. The last day to register is October 9 and the election is on November 6. You can register and find your polling location on the GoVoteTN app or online.