How Many Percent Of College Students Are Registered To Vote

Franziska Barczyk for NPR

Updated on Nov. 12 at 10:30 a.m.

Efforts to increase youth voter turnout helped, at to the lowest degree according to early estimates. NPR's Brakkton Booker reports that early figures bear witness youth voter turnout in the midterms jumped in 2018 . Read below for our original story about why analysts who study youth voters expected this.

Opening on-campus early voting sites, installing a practice voting berth with sample ballots and throwing election turnout parties: These are some of the ways college campuses across the country are trying to become students to vote in Tuesday'southward midterm ballot.

And analysts expect those efforts will help; new research shows young people plan to vote in record numbers. But continue in mind, the records are low: 2014 marked the lowest youth turnout and voter registration rates in about 40 years.

"We have nowhere to go but up," says Nancy Thomas, a researcher who studies college student voter participation at Tufts University.

Forty pct of eighteen- to 29-year-olds say they volition "definitely vote" in the 2018 midterm elections, according to the Harvard Institute of Politics' most recent national youth poll. That's compared with 26 percent who said the same in 2014.

But merely because students say they'll vote doesn't mean they'll actually cast a ballot on Ballot Day, says John Della Volpe, the institute's manager of polling. Still, it's possible youth activism, which Thomas says increased after the 2016 election, will motivate even more students to vote. It has certainly already motivated more than young people to register, Della Volpe says.

"I retrieve that for the first time, possibly, students are making the connectedness that if they want to see things modify, they can't but protest and rally and fight for their causes," says Zaneeta Daver, director of the All In Campus Democracy Challenge. "They actually demand to act. And by acting, I mean participating in elections."

This isn't the showtime election cycle in which colleges are taking an involvement in whether their students vote, says Clarissa Unger, leader of the Students Acquire Students Vote Coalition, a grouping that promotes civic appointment on college campuses.

Colleges beyond the land have been working on boosting educatee voter turnout since at least 2012, when the Department of Pedagogy published a written report calling on universities to increment civic appointment on campus. That spurred the growth of nonprofit organizations aimed at helping campuses encourage their students to vote, like Campus Vote Projection, Unger says.

"It's non considering of the political climate or who is in office now," Unger says. "It is the consequence of a lot of hard piece of work past college instruction associations, nonprofit organizations and researchers that have been working for years to lay the background for high turnout in this election and for many elections to come up."

College students, some of whom are part of the 18- to 29-twelvemonth-one-time group, are also more than interested in specific issues than traditional political parties, says Volition Miller, who recently authored a report about politics on college campuses.

Clubs like College Democrats or Higher Republicans aren't the but options to go involved in politics on campus. Instead, students are gravitating toward effect-based clubs, like Dumbledore's Ground forces, a lodge where Harry Potter fans talk over social problems, or surfing guild, which cleans local beaches, Miller says.

"The traditional idea of, you know, 'I'chiliad going to exist a Democrat or I'm going to be a Republican because I believe everything Democrats or Republicans believe,' I don't call up that resonates with the college voter today," Miller says.

Issues are college students' "entry into politics," Miller says, and candidates demand to focus on the issues that interest college students if candidates want to capture the younger vote. Colleges can also increase educatee voter participation past education them that they can influence the issues they intendance about by voting, Miller says.

There's also some misconceptions almost college student voters. Thomas, from Tufts University'south Establish of Democracy and Higher Didactics, explains a few of them (and why they're wrong).

Myth 1: Students are uninformed.

College students accept access to an academic surround to get informed before they vote, making them knowledgeable voters.

Myth 2: Well-nigh higher students vote from out-of-land.

Almost 85 percent of higher students in Tufts' information set (which included virtually 10 million students in 2016) are voting in the country they nourish higher. That doesn't mean they're all from the same state as their college, but well-nigh are, Thomas says.

Myth 3: Higher students all vote for Democrats.

Higher students right now are leaning left, only they don't all vote Democrat.

Myth 4: College didactics pushes students to the left

Research shows college students come to college with formed ideas, and that attending college isn't likely to motion them politically to the left. "They are not these sort of empty vessels where yous tip off the superlative of their head and pour noesis into it," Thomas says.

It's non simply today's college kids that vote at depression rates. Babe boomers and Generation Ten, the two generations that preceded millennials, voted at low rates when they were young adults, also, explains Harvard's Della Volpe.

"And this generation could alter that, frankly," he says.