The Riddle of the Young Voter

...Political independence is now most pronounced among the new voters under twenty-one...

...WILLIAM CHAPMAN is a national affairs editor of The Washington Post...

...Perhaps the experts are correct and 1972 will prove that all the hoopla over youthful voting is meaningless...

...At the University of Kentucky there are some 18,000 potential voters, and during elections Congressional and gubernatorial candidates participate in elaborate campus political rallies...

...The persistence of Wallace's influence among young voters is too strong to overlook, and it is still another indication that the young voter in 1972 is straying from the centrist track so closely followed by his elders...

...What is the reason...

...A few months earlier, in fact, the younger people were telling Gallup's pollsters that they approved of Mr...

...One clear victory emerged in the state of Washington...

...the longer one votes Democratic, the more likely he is to continue doing so...

...It would seem, then, that young people are just as centrist-oriented as their parents and unlikely to upset any applecarts in 1972...

...They are much more likely than older people to swing sharply in their voting habits in a time of crisis, when there are clear alternatives...

...Two—The young voter is growing more independent, is much less likely to follow his parent's lead, and may shift radically from patterns of the past...

...Perhaps the most serious campaign is being made within a special voting-rights project sponsored by Common Cause and devoted to clearing away many of the registration obstacles...

...but again there is room for questioning the slide-rule sages...

...Twenty per cent of those under twenty-one said they would vote for Wallace (as compared with only thirteen per cent of those over twenty-one...

...Democratic State Chairman Harry Makris believes the eighteen-year-old vote law will add about 40,000 potential voters to the rolls and estimates 25,000 of them will be Democrats...

...the attorney general ruled that state law permits a student to register where he attends college...

...Campus registration easily could mean collegiate dominance in local elections...

...In Michigan, both parties are nominally in favor of permitting campus registration, but action by the legislature seems doubtful...

...What is measured in the past is not necessarily binding on the future...

...Changes in American political currents cast doubt on both those assumptions and suggest the following: One—Whether the young voter participates significantly in the 1972 elections is a question still to be answered...

...There is a general suspicion among politicians that the average American does not become seriously interested in politics until he gets his first tax bill, and that all the campus excitement over national affairs—the war in Vietnam, poverty, racism, pollution—is a passing phenomenon involving only the relatively small activist fringe...

...On the other side of the political spectrum, there is a persistent penchant for right-wing politics as exemplified by Wallace's appeal among young voters...

...Two phenomena of modern times suggest that "contemporary events" are producing a similar shift—or possibly two different shifts in opposite directions...

...A recent Gallup survey found that forty-two per cent of them consider themselves independent rather than affiliated with either the Republicans or Democrats...

...Regardless of what the experts say, politicians certainly are taking the young voter seriously...

...District Judge MacSwinford turned down five student petitioners, saying, "A person temporarily in a college community could so organize a student body as to destroy the town...

...it depends in large part on what election law changes occur between now and then...

...In 1968, according to the U.S...

...nearly seventy per cent of the people over twenty-five years of age did so...

...The conventional rule of thumb is that young voters behave like their elders once they get into the polling booths...

...There are plenty of statistics that seem to support those assumptions, but there is also reason to believe they may not hold true in the future...

...As Scammon and Wattenberg enjoy pointing out, the hands that held the chains threatening Martin Luther King's march into Cicero, Illinois, were young, white hands...

...Twenty-seven per cent would have called themselves liberals when they first went to college...

...More recently, Gallup divided voters into two groups—those under twenty-one and those over twenty-one —and asked both groups whom they would vote for in a three way race involving Muskie, Nixon, and Wallace...

...Two—When they do go to the polls, they tend to cast their votes much as their parents do...

...Again, past records say they will not...

...If he is right, a fifth of the state's electorate voting in the Democratic primary next March will be under twenty-one...

...American politics is always kaleidoscopic and the appearance of the new young voter makes it even more volatile for 1972...

...Perhaps the most extreme form of discrimination is found among college youth...

...Nationally, Wallace got thirteen per cent of the total vote in 1968, but he received about fifteen per cent of the votes cast by people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine...

...Younger people are more likely to switch...

...Other political analysts also accept this assumption, as if the addition of 10.9 million Americans to the rolls of eligible voters is merely some curious, isolated fact of only symbolic significance...

...Those are obviously exaggerated objections, but the impact of student voting could have significant effects on local elections and on those in certain Congressional districts...

...Clearly, the picture of the politically-motivated student does not represent the age group as a whole...

...Only a third of them bothered to cast ballots...

...When the Kentucky lawsuit came before him, U.S...

...They are "most susceptible to the impact of contemporary events...

...Guido, who has worked with both collegiate Democrats and Republicans in a lawsuit challenging the domicile law, estimates that on-campus registration would produce a turnout of about seventy per cent...

...Fifty-one per cent of the youngest voted for a Presidential candidate...

...The University of Michigan Survey Research Center has established that among non-Southerners Wallace got less than three per cent of the vote of people over seventy...

...Both indicate a growing independence in political alignments among young people and a movement away from centrist, moderate politics...

...But history also suggests that young people do have one peculiarity worth measuring for its potential impact in 1972...

...Half of them move every year...

...It is also true that the youngest group of voters is the most mobile...

...Yet, unless the laws are changed, the vast majority of them will be denied the privilege of registering and voting in the campus communities where they spend most of their time...

...It is not difficult to understand why the status quo is defended so strongly in most other places...

...only twenty-seven per cent of those over twenty-one subscribed to an "independent" status...

...The second hints at a strong and persistent swing to the right towards the politics of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace...

...Nearly half (44.5 per cent) of people aged twenty-two to twenty-four moved from one place to another between March, 1969, and March, 1970...

...Consider, for example, a Republican primary contest pitting President Nixon against some peace candidate such as California's Representative Paul McCloskey in Wisconsin—a state where cross-over voting is permitted...

...Until recently, furthermore, Gallup surveys disclosed little difference between young and old in their attitudes toward President Nixon...

...One points to a decided shift among college students toward liberal positions, a movement that extends far beyond the small groups of campus activists...

...Thus, it is said, there really will not be a large increase in the electorate in 1972, and the voting patterns of the past will remain largely unchanged...

...Some illuminating information comes from a series of Gallup surveys extending back through the Presidential elections to 1952...

...One Michigan Democratic leader paraphrased the unspoken argument of the opponents in this way: "The kids would elect a hippie to the Drain Commission...

...The only requirement is for the student to swear that the campus will be his home "either permanently or indefinitely for an appreciable period of time...

...Mass drug arrests and the breaking-up of rock festivals might become less popular activities for local prosecutors if students voted in their elections...

...Polls can be wrong—and frequently are, as the record of Harris and Gallup in the 1968 primaries illustrates...

...There is, it is said, no significant generation gap once the curtain is pulled shut...

...They spend at least nine or ten months a year away from home and most of them will never return to their parents' towns and cities for permanent residence...

...Surveys show that during the depression years, the new voters in their twenties led the swift, unexpected movement into the Democratic Party...

...Political independence is now most pronounced among the new voters under twenty-one...

...The Harris survey asked students what political label best described them—now and at the time when they entered college...

...Kentucky, where persons between eighteen and twenty-one have been eligible to vote, offers an illuminating example...

...Nixon was handling the Presidency...

...So what...

...I think that politicians would stop using students as scapegoats to get elected," Guido says...

...To support this point of view, the experts point to past track records of the young voter and emphasize two general trends: One—The youngest are far less likely to vote than their elders...

...According to the Center for Political Reform in Washington, forty-four states now have laws which, in effect, say that a student's "domicile"— the place where he can legally register —is his parent's home...

...In New Hampshire recently, professional Democrats could talk of little other than the potential of the young voter—possibly because of the impact Eugene J. McCarthy's collegians made there three years ago...

...Indisputably, the records of previous elections suggest a massive disinterest in politics among those in the younger age brackets...

...Both parties have youth-vote projects under way...

...The Census Bureau, in a recent study of the characteristics of American youth, proved this beyond doubt...

...It is accepted, for example, that transient Americans face almost insuperable obstacles to voting...

...Nixon even more strongly than did the older ones...

...By early 1970, Gallup found, sixty-two per cent of the people in their twenties approved of the way Mr...

...Census Bureau, only about half of the eligible persons between twenty-one and twenty-four years of age went to the polls, as compared to about two-thirds of the entire electorate...

...New voters," wrote the authors of The American Voter, by Angus Campbell and others, "are always more likely to be moved by the prevailing political tides because they have not as yet developed stable party attachments...

...First, activists are a minority on virtually every campus...

...Packed together on campuses, vulnerable to well-organized campaigns, students might easily change the balance of power if there were a clear-cut difference between candidates in either the Republican or Democratic primaries...

...The Berkeley election, where self-styled "radicals" captured partial control of the city council, exacerbated some fears...

...One reason for the low turnout is not difficult to spot: unless he is married, is a graduate student, or has a full-time job in Fayette County, the student may register only at home and vote by absentee ballot...

...Generally, surveys show that Wallace's strength in the twenty-one to twenty-nine age group ranges around twenty per cent, or one-fifth of the electorate in that bracket...

...The primaries are volatile elections, subject to unpredictable swings in voting patterns, and the addition of a strong student vote in New Hampshire, Wisconsin, or Oregon could easily have powerful national impact...

...Second, only about a third of the new voters under twenty-one are college students...

...In four states that year—Georgia, Kentucky, Alaska and Hawaii— persons under the age of twenty-one were eligible to vote...

...There is much to support this view...

...Few groups are as elector-ally weak as are young people," declare Richard M. Scammon and Ben J. Wattenberg in their book, The Real Majority...

...Some states have registration laws requiring residence as long as one year...

...forty-one per cent of them chose that designation in the survey last summer...

...It's just too difficult for them to take the trouble," observes Kenneth Guido, a University of Kentucky law professor...

...If we don't get eighteen-year-olds into the primaries," says Kenneth Bode of the Washington Center for Political Reform, "I don't know whether it makes any difference if they vote in general elections...

...One of the many surprising results of 1968, one which has received little attention, is the fact that outside the South Wallace ran stronger among young voters than among older ones...

...They are graduating from colleges, entering military service, moving away from home to find their first jobs...

...Even more surprising is the persistence of Wallace support among the young since the 1968 election...

...For many reformers, the goal is to legalize on-campus registration before next year's Presidential primaries...

...The college students shift to the left philosophically, while the other new young voters show a lasting affinity for the extreme right...

...Certainly, the statistics demonstrate that, for whatever reason, the young person is less willing than his older fellow citizen to exercise his right to vote...

...There will be a lot of interest in, say, a gubernatorial election, but when it gets down to the act of voting it's just too complicated...

...The mobile American faces almost as many difficulties in registering as the black Southerner once did...

...No one knows whether they would have voted had state election laws permitted free registration unfettered by residency rules...

...It is simply not true that the northern Wallace supporter was a middle-aged man with a middle-sized mortgage in a neighborhood threatened by blacks...

...The proportions were almost identical in a Humphrey-Nixon-Wallace contest...

...Is it a widespread disinterest among the young in electoral politics...

...One can detect in these straws in the wind a widening of the ideological gap which has not been apparent in the American electorate for several decades, with the exception of the Johnson-Goldwater election in 1964...

...the rest are working youths, dropouts, soldiers...

...Maybe the newly enfranchised young will not vote in sizable numbers and maybe they will not make any difference in the outcome...

...Yet, it is reliably estimated that only twenty-five per cent of the students actually vote...

...In Kentucky, Alabama, and Tennessee, lawsuits are under way to overturn the restrictions, and in many other states either legal actions or political pressures are being used...

...Assuming that they achieve fairer access to the polls, and then turn out in sizable numbers, will the young voters make any difference in the national voting pattern...

...Kentucky* s law professor Guido points out that local politicians are in the habit of "running against the students," appealing to the townsmen with the argument that the student body must be controlled...

...Most likely, he was between twenty-one and twenty-nine...

...Within the college communities, both Gallup and Lou Harris have in the past year discovered a substantial swing to the left...

...The United Auto Workers are financing a special registration project among their young rank and file members, and the Steelworkers are largely underwriting another...

...With one exception (the 1952 election, when young voters showed a greater appreciation for Adlai Stevenson), people in the twenty-one to twenty-nine age groups voted much the way their elders did...

...Only if Edward M. Kennedy were to be the Democratic candidate would Wallace lose a significant share— about half—of that under-twenty-one vote...

...For example, a poll conducted privately for the Republican National Committee last year showed that eighteen per cent of the twenty-one to twenty-nine age group want Wallace to run again...

...Senator George McGovern, South Dakota Democrat seeking his party's Presidential nomination, plans to establish between 500 and 700 campus organizations before the primaries begin...

...but he got thirteen per cent of the vote of those under thirty...

...But the prudent man would hedge his bets...

...Partisanship is a habit, the experts tell us...

...The point is that they, like Southern blacks in the days of the white primaries, had less of a choice than did other people...

...Perhaps it is, but there is another explanation worth considering: the young American voter faces more obstacles to voting than his elders, obstacles either deeply imbedded in election laws or inherent in the pattern of his life...

...So did the same proportion of people over fifty...