Student Voting Declined in 2022. What Could That Mean for This Election?

College students voted at lower rates in the 2022 midterm elections than they did in 2018, according to a new report, raising the question of whether the massive youth voting turnout that contributed to President Joe Biden’s victory in 2020 will be replicated in the upcoming presidential election.

Only 31.3 percent of college students voted in 2022, down from 40 percent in the previous midterms, according to data released by the National Study of Learning, Voting and Engagement (NSLVE), which is based at Tufts University and measures election participation among college and university students. Even so, 2022’s numbers were still higher than in the 2014 midterms, during which fewer than one in every five students cast a ballot.

Midterms always draw fewer voters than presidential elections across all age groups and demographics, but the dip could indicate that the high rate of student voters in 2020—66 percent—was an anomaly rather than the beginning of a trend.

“The rate of drop among college students was such that it brought into stark relief how remarkable 2018’s participation rate was among students,” the report’s authors write. “Still, when compared with other populations in the U.S., it seemed a drop was inevitable for 2022.”

At the time, NSLVE’s researchers attributed the 2018 surge to a wide range of factors, including students’ enthusiasm about important state and local elections; administrators putting renewed energy and resources into voter engagement initiatives, possibly catalyzed by low student voter engagement in 2012 and 2014; and efforts to create campus climates that are imbued with civic education year-round, rather than only during major elections.

That being said, young people’s enthusiasm for the presumptive Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris—as opposed to their apathy toward President Biden—may be enough to stave off further decreases this November. A nationwide New York Times and Siena College poll from early April showed that Biden and former president Donald Trump were essentially tied among voters ages 18 to 29, with 46 percent saying they would vote for Biden and 45 percent saying they would vote for Trump. But the most recent iteration of that same poll shows Harris has taken a lead of 21 points over Trump among that demographic.

The NSLVE report has its bright spots; voter registration rates among college students in 2022 rose to higher levels than in 2018, climbing from 73.3 percent to 76.1 percent—even though that didn’t translate into turnout. Some of that may have been carryover from the 2020 election, when a whopping 83 percent of college students were registered to vote. But it also reflects the fact that a large amount of civic engagement efforts on college campuses are more focused on registering students to vote than encouraging them to make it to the polls, according to Kassie Phebillo, curriculum and research manager for the Campus Vote Project.

Even students who are registered to vote may be disinclined to cast their ballots if they don’t know their polling location, don’t have time off from class, aren’t made aware of the options for early or absentee voting, or feel they aren’t informed enough about their choices to make the best decision. Campus efforts to ensure students know how to vote and who’s on the ballot can raise turnout, she said.

“The first step of helping to get students out once they’re registered is demystifying the political process,” Phebillo said. “Many of these students who are registered are first-time voters.”

There is one unique factor that may have contributed to the lackluster turnout in 2022: The COVID-19 pandemic and related shutdowns had led to low student engagement with election events on campuses nationwide. Phebillo saw that in her work with the Campus Vote Project’s Democracy Fellows, a group of student workers who promote civic engagement at their institutions.

That trend has changed this past academic year, though.

“It has felt quite across the board that [the fellows] are so much more excited about their events this spring and last fall than they were in 2022, when it was like, ‘I tried really hard and only 11 people showed up,’” she said. It was a phenomenon that reached beyond civic engagement events, too; many colleges have reported that student participation in campus life and student organizations plummeted following COVID shutdowns.

That’s important not just because students are more interested now in learning how to vote than they were in previous years, but also because a sense of community correlates with voter turnout, she added.

Demographic Differences

Although voting rates were down two Novembers ago among every demographic group and type of institution, some decreases were greater than others—including among some of the voters Democrats will be particularly counting on this November.

The greatest drop was among Black female students, who, in 2018, voted at the highest rates of any demographic of students, with 45 percent casting a ballot. That number went down by 16 percentage points in 2022, to just 29 percent. Historically Black colleges and universities saw the greatest decline of any type of institution; 38 percent of HBCU students voted in 2018 as compared to 23 percent in 2022.

Undergraduate students, who generally vote at lower rates than graduate students, also experienced a particularly precipitous drop in voting between the two most recent midterm elections, falling 14.4 percentage points from 2018 to 2022. Graduate student voting rates dropped by 8.6 points.

Jen McAndrew, a spokesperson for Tufts’s Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life, said that universities should work to close the gaps that exist at their institutions, whether that be between students of different races, genders or even fields of study (students in STEM disciplines are generally less likely to vote than those in other disciplines).

“The first step is making sure their campus communities are really aware of the data and what those gaps are, because they’re not the same for everyone,” she said. The NSLVE sends in-depth information to each college that participates in the study about its students’ turnout rates.

Just one state, Michigan—which is likely to be an important swing state in 2024—defied the decline in student voting with a 7.1-percentage-point increase in student voting from 2018 to 2022. Experts attributed that to two key factors: Several issues of key importance to students, including abortion, appeared on the Michigan ballot in 2022, and the state had recently passed several new voting access laws, such as same-day voter registration.

“The ease of voting is a huge aspect for students. Students have jobs; they’re really busy with their lives,” said Zena Aljilehawi, an incoming junior at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a Campus Vote Project Democracy Fellow.

The states with the greatest decreases in student voting were Florida, Missouri, Montana, New Jersey and Tennessee, some of which have implemented restrictive election laws in recent years that have impacted student voter registration.

Clarissa Unger, executive director of the Students Learn Students Vote Coalition, said she isn’t overly concerned about 2022’s numbers not matching 2020’s or 2018’s, because there has still been an overall upward trend over the past eight years.

“We made historic gains in recent years, and now we have proof that those gains have largely been sustained over multiple election cycles,” she said, “even in years when there was a downturn in overall voter turnout, like 2022.”