Tag Archives: Texas Voter Apathy

Houston Politics, Politics

Where Are Houston’s Young Voters?!?!

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So it’s an off, off year election with no President or Governor to be found on the ballot.  But so far, turnout for the 2015 Houston Municipal Elections is up.  Here’s KHOU with the details…

After one week of early voting, 61,008 people have already gone to the polls in Harris County. When you combine that with the 21,141 who have mailed in ballots, the county’s total early vote amounts to 82,149 with Election Day still more than a week away.

“It’s very clear that what we’re seeing is an uptick in turnout,” said Bob Stein, the Rice University political scientist and KHOU political analyst.

Given the high early vote, Stein predicts the total turnout for Houston’s city elections could reach 220,000 to 240,000 voters — a dramatic increase from the roughly 180,000 voters who cast ballots in 2009 when the city last elected a new mayor.

It is generally good news to have turnout increase for any election situation.  But the overall picture for early voting only tells part of the story.  When broken down by age group, turnout is expanding rapidly among older voters in Houston, while younger voters are all but absent from the polls.

And the phrase “all but absent” is not hyperbole.  Early Vote totals, broken into age groups by fellow blogger Erik Vidor, reveal the sad truth.  From October 19th through 25th, the first complete week of Early Voting, 56 percent of those that turned out to the polls were aged 65 and over, while just 1 percent were ages 18-24. And even when you add in the next age group of persons 25 to 34, you still only reach 5 percent of the total votes cast!!

TheOnePercent

(photo credit:  Erik Vidor via Facebook)

Umm, Houston’s young voters… where are you???

This is a national problem.  In a country where Millennials now outnumber Baby-Boomers, why have our nation’s youngest adults decided to let the older folks make critical decisions for them??

The answer most Millennials give?  They’re just too busy to vote.  Here’s how the Huffington Post summarized some data from 2014…

Young voters are more likely to say they are too busy to vote than the general population, an analysis by the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning & Engagement (CIRCLE) at Tufts University finds.

According to CIRCLE, 33.5 percent of young voters who were registered said their schedules conflicted with their ability to vote in 2010, compared to 25.2 percent of voters above the age of 30.

Only 5.8 percent of young voters, defined as those ages 18 to 29, said they didn’t cast a ballot simply because they didn’t like the candidates, and only 2.1 percent said transportation problems stopped them from voting. About one in ten 18-29 year-olds said they simply forgot to vote.

NEWSFLASH fellow Millennials… these excuses are C-R-A-P.  If one has the time to stare at  Snapchat or Yik Yak for 15 minutes without noticing anything beyond the phone screen, they have time to vote.

Texas got a major dose of voter apathy in 2014. Sadly, the alarming trends of young people simply not caring to vote for anything or anyone continue.  But one has to wonder why this generation has become so removed from the institution of government.  Beyond ridiculous, this is now kind of scary.

Please do your part, and get to the polls for Early Voting or Election Day.  If you don’t know about the candidates, look them up or ask someone who is informed.  Don’t be part of the problem!!

VOTE

Texas Politics

The 2014 Electorate: Fewer, Older, Less Diverse

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#TurnOutForWHAT???

Literally, that is the question on minds all across the nation right now.

With 2014 in the books it’s time to take a look at what happened to Democrats this go round.  Why were the results so drastically different than the last two Presidential elections?  Despite the efforts of groups like Battleground Texas, it seems that the Republicans had little to no competition in the end.  But what also needs to be said is that the so-called “Red Wave” of 2014 shares some similarities with its predecessor in 2010.  Here’s what Talking Points Memo had to say about the results…

Older voters helped propel Republicans to sweeping victories Tuesday in Senate and gubernatorial races nationwide, according to exit polls from NBC News.

The disparity between the under-30 and over-60 was the widest it’s been in a decade, those polls found. The seniors comprised 37 percent of the electorate; young people made up 12 percent.

That was even more extreme than 2010, another great Republican year, when the split was 32 percent over 60 and 12 percent under 30.

As we know, an older electorate is more likely to be a Conservative electorate.  But what else was very true about voters this week was that there were simply fewer of them that showed up to the polls.  In fact, fewer voters showed up than anyone previously thought possible in the state of Texas… over 200,000 fewer than the pathetic voter participation rates of 2010.   When you include all registered voters, a full 66 percent of people sat out on this election.  Greg Abbott was elected with 20 percent of the actual voter population, Wendy garnered 13 percent, and the rest, well they D.G.A.F…

 

IDGAF 2014

Yes,  I know it’s not a phrase you often find in what one considers “serious” political writing, but is there truly a better descriptor for what happened on Tuesday?  The vast majority of Texans Didn’t Give A ____ about the future of our state.  And if they did, they still did not care enough to go out of their way and participate in a most critical decision.  In other words, a decisive majority of voting-age Texans did not vote at all. 

This post is not meant to sound bitter about the current historic levels of voter apathy in the Lone Star State.  But at the same time, it is no longer acceptable to keep waging these issues in such polite and non-provocative terms.  We want our voters to care enough about who leads Texas through the next four years, and into the next decade.  This is important.

And as one would guess, the 2014 electorate will probably reveal a less diverse group of Texans who showed up to the polls.  There are no official numbers yet, but one need only look at Harris County Early Voting totals to see that the practice was low in many minority EV locations.

So there you have it.  The state’s race for Governor was decided by a puny minority of the state.  And yet the political pundits have to use the decisions made from these voters as some validation that Texas is and will forever be a Red State?  Some blogs, like Texpatriate are fully convinced of this.  But given just how large the IDGAF majority is in the above chart, it’s just impossible to say for certain what this state will do in future election cycles.  When you start reading all these articles about the impressive Republican ground game, don’t take it as the gospel truth of the situation.

Personally, I happen to be a voter, a racial minority, relatively young, and someone who used to not GAF about voting or politics.  This Silent Majority can be moved if they are empowered by the right set of opportunities.  Let’s use 2014 as a teaching tool, and get back to work.