What happened with the age of the average American voter in 2020 versus 2016? Was it younger due to the hourly nagging of the typical young person by various social media platforms?
Separately, is it good or bad that the voting age skews younger? I spoke with a smart 13-year-old in a coastal elite school system. What had she learned from her immersion in an all-Democrat neighborhood (many government workers!) and from all-Democrat teachers? “I’m a Democrat because of the issues that are important to me.” Such as? “Like it is legal right now to kill LGBTQ people.” I.e., she will be voting Democrat to ensure the outlawing of murder.
(Of course, I couldn’t resist asking why there were any gay people left in the U.S. “The New York Times informs us that our country is packed with people who hate the LGBTQIA+. If it is legal to kill gay people, why wouldn’t these anti-gay Americans have killed all of them?”)
GermanL in a comment on an earlier post pointed us to Peter Schiff:
Even back then, everybody wasn’t voting. You had to be 21 to vote. That means you’re in the workforce for many, many years because people generally got out of school at 12 or 13. So you had been working for many years. In many cases, you had property qualifications, you had poll taxes, you had literary tests. There were all sorts of ways that they limited the suffrage, just so it wasn’t everybody voting because they recognized the damage that you could create when you turn elections into advanced auctions on the sale of stolen goods.
If social media is, in fact, a force for reducing the age of our electorate, what should we expect these young people to vote for? Free college tuition and student loan forgiveness?
If you’re not liberal in your 20’s, you don’t have a heart.
So I’d expect younger people to vote more liberal, which really means spending more of other people’s money, money that wasn’t rightfully theirs (other people’s) in the first place.
“What happened with the age of the average American voter in 2020 versus 2016?”
It’s too early to say. Exit polls are always unreliable, and they’re even more unreliable this year (since so many people voted before Election Day).
Generally speaking, voter turnout among older people is much higher than among younger people, which is why health care tends to be a hot topic.
How much of a difference does this make? In Australia, voting is mandatory (there’s a fine for not voting), and voter turnout is very high across all demographics, but in terms of policy decisions on issues like climate change, which younger voters regard as more important, it doesn’t look that different.
It’s well known by psychologists that the human brain isn’t mature until ~age 25 (bit less for women, but more for men). Until that age, humans are more easily influenced by others than by their own reasoning.
It’s really not fair that we allow 18 year olds to vote, assume debt, or to join the military.