Democrats need young voters

The woman who left a message on my answering machine a few days ago didn’t mince words: She was sick of hearing about senior citizens during this election campaign.

Enough about Social Security and prescription drugs, she demanded. What about my health-care needs? What about my children and their education? Who cares about us?

I wish she had left her name and number; I wanted to understand what fueled her stridency and left her feeling as irrelevant as a campaign poster the day after the election. I wanted to find out more, but after Tuesday night’s results, I think I know.

The age gap in our political discourse is driving the generational resentment of my anonymous caller and turning off the very people who need to be turned on to replenish our electoral process :quot; younger voters.

Nationwide, about 39 percent of eligible voters cast a ballot Tuesday, a smidgen higher than during the last midterm election in 1998. That’s according to Curtis Gans, who, as director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, is something of a guru on turnout trends.

Thirty-nine percent is lousy, but that’s what we’re famous for in midterm elections: not voting. Beyond those preliminary estimates, we don’t know much about who came to vote. After a new system for predicting election results crashed Tuesday, the day of its big debut, analysts now will have to wait months to identify who voted and why.

But Gans is certain that youth turnout, even if up slightly, was still shockingly low.

And Gans is certain of something else: “I don’t think the Democratic Party offered young people anything to vote for.”

Young people, in particular, care about jobs, getting them and keeping them. They worry about paying for education, for themselves and their children. They fret about health care in ways that don’t yet entail paying for expensive blood pressure medicine.

Either somebody forgot to tell all this to the Democratic leadership, or they just didn’t listen.

And young people respond to politicians who evoke their latent idealism, who :quot; like a John F. Kennedy or a Ronald Reagan :quot; can lift their sights higher and imagine a different, better America. President Bush has done that for some. If the Democrats want to keep pace, they’ll have to come up with an alternative.

There is another way the Democratic Party could help spur young people to vote :quot; by removing barriers. As Peter Beinart notes in the latest New Republic, a bipartisan commission headed by former presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter last year proposed voting reforms that, while not specifically targeted at the young, would have addressed their concerns.

It proposed, for instance, to simplify overseas balloting (young people are more likely to live outside the country); make Election Day a national holiday (young people find it harder to leave school or jobs to vote); and enfranchise felons who have served their time (they’re likely to be young).

Now in the minority nationally, perhaps Democrats could raise the banner of real election reform. At least it will make them seem like the party of the future.