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Kitchen Table Kibitzing -- 12/31/22: (Maybe) the very best thing about this year [1]
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Date: 2022-12-31
Not sure how I happened to draw the KTK New Years’ Eve straw this year (my sundial at Stonehenge appears to have failed me) but this week has been eventful for me to say the least, in ways I can’t really get into here. Bottom line, in normal circumstances I’d have had time to prepare a vast, monolithic overview of the year’s best and worst moments, but this week was not the one for me to do that.
Fortunately, PBS Newshour did the work for me. They interviewed a disparate group of PBS viewers, asking them what they considered to be the highlights and lowlights of the year for them, along with their “hopes for themselves and the country in 2023.” Presented by Judy Woodruff and compiled by the Newshour’s producers, the responses ran the gamut from the personal to the political and geopolitical, but what really stood out for me were the responses of some of the younger people (including some of the comments about what they had paid most attention to).
This one, in particular, by college freshman Grace Friedman:
I think the biggest news event of the year, on a little more positive light, was the midterm elections and the youth vote specifically changing the outcome of it.
I can’t recall any prior year in which the results of a midterm election figured among young peoples’ “best” or “worst” moments to the extent this particular midterm appears to have galvanized them. The youth vote has historically been a quixotic quest for the Democratic Party, usually ending in frustration, until this year, it seems. While the raw 2022 numbers don’t show any overwhelming surge in the youth vote, the percentages of young voters favoring Democrats increased substantially. And because political affiliations are generally established early on, those percentages are likely going hold outsize sway year after year, election after election.
Last month PBS aired a segment specifically examining the cause of this phenomenon in 2022. Interviewees John Della Volpe of the Harvard Kennedy School of Politics and Victor Shi, a student at UCLA and strategy director of a nonpartisan group, Voters of Tomorrow, which focuses on Gen Z voters’ interests, discussed the 2022 election results.
Della Volpe was asked how the youth vote impacted the election:
I think they made all the difference, John. Let me break it down for your pretty simply. When you think about Gen Z, and you add in millennials, OK, those are essentially two generations of voters who have a similar set of values, they voted for Democrats by 18 points, OK, plus-18 for Democrats, the under-40 vote, 59-41. Republicans won the over-40 vote, which, as you said, is much larger, by 10 points. So, if not for Gen Z, and the combination of Gen Z and millennials, I do think we have that red wave that so many people were expecting. Gen Z, specifically the people under 30, increased their level of participation relative to the average, increase their support for Democrats, and made all the difference in the world a couple of weeks ago.
Shi was asked why the youth vote impacted the election:
[T]he biggest thing that we're seeing in terms of just having conversations with young people and some of the polling that we have seen among young people leading up to the election is the Dobbs decision and overturning Roe vs. Wade, because, at the end of the day, that was the first time that young people, who thought that abortion would be a guaranteed right in their life, was overturned by the Supreme Court. And then, all along the way, you also saw Republicans engaging in really a sustained effort to attack our lives, starting with abortion, then going into classrooms, controlling what we can say about racial conversations, doing LGBTQ stuff. So all of these things, I think, contribute to this overwhelming sense among young people that Republicans don't really care about our lives...[.] ... I think it was this really clear contrast between both parties, one that cared about us and one that didn't. And I think that's why you saw a lot of young people turn out overwhelmingly for Democrats in this election cycle.
Given the fact that Millennials and Gen Z voters will comprise 40% of the electorate in 2024, as Shi observes, “the time of ... ignoring or actually not taking seriously or even mocking young people, that needs to be over if you're seeking to win a national election.”
That’s possibly the best news of the year, at least in my view. If there is any silver lining to be had in the narrow loss of a Democratic House, it’s that Republicans have been allotted just enough rope to hang themselves, dangling themselves with their perverse hatred and cruelty on display for another two years before the eyes of younger Americans. They’re already off to a promising start and — despite the dire warnings of their consultants -- I’m absolutely sure they’ll keep it up, thus ensuring the continued alienation of even more young voters than they managed to do in 2022.
On that note, hey everyone, have a Happy New Year!
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