College voters: Increased importance and expanding turnout

If you were walking through a college campus right now, there’s a good chance you’d see a table – or maybe a few tables – set up with lots of pamphlets and clipboards.

And then, a student might stop you to ask the golden question.

"Are you registered to vote?"

Maybe you stop and register. Or maybe you ignore that student, and forget all about voting.

If you did the latter, you wouldn’t be alone. During the 2014 midterms, just 19 percent of all registered college students in the U.S. voted.

But since the 2016 presidential election, voter turnout among college students has been steadily increasing.

Take the last midterms for example. In 2018, 40 percent of registered college students voted.

It’s too early to tell if that trend will continue during this midterm election.

But what we do know is that when young people vote, lawmakers are more likely to pay attention to the issues that matter to those young people, for example the Biden administration's student debt relief plan.

One of the people digging into student voting is Nancy Thomas, director of the Institute for Democracy & Higher Education at Tufts University’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life. Every election cycle, Thomas and her colleagues create the nation’s largest study on student voting.

Soundside host Libby Denkmann spoke to Thomas about the upcoming midterms and the power of college students as a voting block.

"We've been talking for 50 years about how the boomers shape policy," Thomas said. "Well, this youngest group, they are shaping policy, and they're going to continue to do so with more and more vote power, and people power, so I absolutely think that they should be taken seriously."

College students are at the forefront of the push to keep their classmates engaged.

Soundside producer Noel Gasca spoke with Kasey Moulton, a junior at Whitman College in Walla Walla, about her work as the president of Whitman Votes, a student-led, nonpartisan organization that's dedicated to increasing voter turnout on campus.

In 2020, 91 percent of voting-eligible students at Whitman were registered to vote. And 84 percent of eligible students cast their ballot.

Moulton has spent the last couple of months working to keep that momentum going.

"Student voters don't stay student voters forever, which I think is something important to remember," Moulton said. "So, creating that engagement early is really important and making sure that resources are available for college students is incredibly important to making sure that they are voting for what they believe in both now and into the future."