Voter turnout continues to drop among BYU students. While BYU students express political interest on social media, their opinions aren’t transferring to ballots.
“I think it’s just apathy,” Serene Papenfuss, President of the BYU College Republicans, said.
Communications Director of the BYU College Democrats club Evan Woods made a similar comment to the reason college students are not voting.
“They are the same as all colleges—apathy and disconnect that the students feel in voting in the election,” Woods said. “College students are not a huge demographic so they don’t see the impact in their votes, or a connection in the election. So they don’t feel as though their votes will affect the election significantly.”
According to a source for NPR, Eva Guidarini of the Harvard Institute of Politics, fewer than a quarter of voters ages 18 to 29 showed up at the polls the last midterm election. This year, 23 percent of voters under 30 are expected to vote, an even lower result.
In regards to BYU students, Ethan Rank, President of the BYU College Democrats, believes that many people just aren’t engaged and “turned off to politics.”
“Millennials are very opinionated,” Rank said. “We think very highly of our opinions. That being said we’re also still millennials, so we don’t actually get involved. So, whereas baby boomers, and older generations, they don’t know how to use social media as well, they don’t talk maybe as much but they’re still much more engaged civically than we are.”
In choosing a candidate for this year’s election, Adam Dynes from the Department of Political Science at BYU said that people tend to side with the party with whom they already identify.
“Ultimately, most people already identify with one party or the other, so I think it’s usually a good bet to go with that,” Dynes said.
He also explained that people analyze certain issues that they are most passionate about, and those that are most important, and then determine where candidates fall with a particular issue.
Regardless if millennials are informed or have formed political stances, they haven’t “developed a habit of voting,” something that tends to happen after voting, according to Dynes.
Going out and voting is an important way to draw importance to the millennial vote, and have an impact on the election. Political opinions have little impact if they are never expressed on a voter’s ballot.
