Only a handful of college students—8 percent of those surveyed by Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab in late September—say that they are not planning to vote in the 2024 presidential election.
It’s certainly an extreme underestimation of how many students will actually forgo casting a ballot this year; college student voter turnout in 2020 was 66 percent, a record. But of those who have made the choice not to vote this year, the majority indicated that that decision was tied to distrust and dislike of American politics and the politicians on the ballot this year.
“Those are the folks that no get-out-the-vote campaign is going to reach,” said Anil Cacodcar, chair of the Harvard Public Opinion Project, which runs the largest poll of young Americans’ political opinions. “Seven out of 10 of them are saying they don’t like the candidates, and they think their vote won’t matter, and those aren’t beliefs you can change in two weeks. Some of them are almost as committed to not voting as some folks are to voting for one or the other.”
Just over 1,000 college students across the United States responded to the Inside Higher Ed and Generation Lab survey, which has a margin of error of plus or minus 3.1 percent. Ninety-eight students said they weren’t planning to vote while 15 percent said they were undecided.
Of those who have decided not to vote, 26 percent said they dislike the candidates and 24 percent said they are “turned off” by politics when asked why they won’t cast a ballot. A smaller number, 16 percent, say they feel their vote won’t count, while only a minuscule 4 percent said they felt voting was too difficult.
About 28 percent of respondents selected “other” when asked why they don’t plan to vote, with some specifying they are not a citizen or are too young to vote. But others reiterated dislike of the current political system or a sense that voting was fruitless.
As one student put it: “My vote doesn’t count, the candidates are trash.”
Some respondents seemed to feel not only that their individual vote wouldn’t impact the election’s results, but also that the country will likely go in the same direction regardless of who wins.
“I don’t care who wins, and I don’t think it’ll make much of a difference anyway,” one of the respondents wrote, while another said that the election amounts to “picking lesser evils and tolerating two parties who seem to never get anything good done.”
Only one respondent expressed that they wanted to withhold their vote to protest the current presidential administration, despite the rise in youth activist campaigns aimed at protesting the Biden administration’s handling of Israel’s war in Gaza by refusing to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Cacodcar said that understanding the perspectives of students who don’t intend to vote “isn’t really something, at this point, a campaign would want to study in depth. But people who are interested in long-term civic engagement would be interested in why people are not engaging this election.”
Young voters broadly may make the difference between a victory for Harris and a second Trump term, having played a significant role in electing Joe Biden in 2020. Plus, the large majority of respondents who said they are not voting identified as either Independents (41 percent) or registered with a third party (26 percent)—another population both Trump and Harris are working to court.
Past research has shown that many young people who abstain from voting do so because they don’t feel voting is an effective way to make change, even when they are politically engaged, said Mindy Romero, founder and director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the University of Southern California. Campaigns are often ineffective at changing that perception, too.
“Candidates and campaigns are not reaching out to them in significant ways,” she said. “There’s an information gap and an outreach gap for younger people versus older voters.”
Key Issues
Students who aren’t planning to vote said that economy and reproductive rights were some of the most important issues that could affect their decision to cast a ballot this fall. That lines up with the overall survey found.
Other political priorities of nonvoting students differ somewhat from the general student population. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a little over one in five nonvoters said they care about none of the issues, which are listed in the graph below, or do not care about politics.
The only issues on which nonvoters cared about the same amount as all voters were the environment (20 percent among all respondents and 22 percent among nonvoters) and crime (17 percent for both categories). They also cared slightly more about the Israel-Hamas war, with 13 percent of nonvoters selecting it as a key issue versus just 11 percent of all student voters.
But nonvoters were far less likely than their peers to say they care about the future of democracy (by a difference of 17 percentage points), racial justice and civil rights (a difference of 10 percentage points) and LGBTQIA+ issues (a difference of 10 percentage points).
Cacodcar said he was unsurprised to see that the top issue—the economy—was consistent between all students and not only those not planning to vote. It ranks as the issue of most concern among young people in general according to numerous polls, and college students, juggling tuition costs and the often-high costs of living in a college town, often face the brunt of inflation and other economic challenges.
He said he spoke to one Michigan student, for instance, who said he top issue of concern was reproductive rights, “but she was struggling to pay attention to that when she was struggling to put food on the table as a college student.”
It may be near impossible to change the minds of students who are set on not voting, but when asked what steps college could take to make voting easier, 35 percent said canceling class on Election Day would be helpful. The second most common answer, though, at 26 percent, was that colleges shouldn’t be encouraging students to vote.