Economic Concerns Are Top Priority For College Voters

While much of the discourse about college voters has focused on campus war protests and reproductive rights, America’s youngest voting block does not rank these as priority issues. If young voters turn out in high numbers on Election Day 2024, they will likely be driven by economic concerns like the cost of rent, food and college tuition. That’s according to the latest analysis from The Brookings Institution, which synthesizes their ongoing research on this critical subgroup of the electorate.

“In short, young voters are experiencing a complexity of economic stress,” according to the Brookings analysis. “This includes a dramatic rise in the cost of rent and mortgages that has led many to move back in with their parents; a drastic increase in the cost of higher education that has saddled them with college debt; and limited job opportunities, even for those with college degrees.”

Gabriel R. Sanchez, a primary author of the Brookings paper, says that this is the extension of an underappreciated trend that’s been simmering among youth voters for several years.

“Inflation was actually the number one issue for voters 18-29 in 2022, so this is not a new trend among this age group,” says Sanchez. “While more ideological issues like abortion are often talked about much more in the national media, young voters have been feeling the economic downturn and are voting based on the economy.”

He points to the results of the 2022 African American Research Collaborative Mid-Term Voter Election Poll which was an early sign of these emerging economic priorities. The findings are consistent with those of the 2024 Harvard Youth Poll and the 2024 Tufts Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement youth poll, both of which found inflation and cost of living as the top concerns among young voters this year.

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Young voters are not a monolith, and not all attend college, but these trends appear to hold true among the subgroup of young voters who are currently in college. A 2024 poll from Young America’s foundation found that economic issues outrank all social issues for college students, across party lines.

Mike Burns, national director of the Campus Vote Project, points out that, as the most diverse voting block in the electorate, youth voters express interest in a broad range of concerns.

“This generation of college voters is incredibly diverse so they are motivated by a range of issues. However, economic issues such as inflation, cost of rent/housing, and income inequality rank highly for them in surveys just like for older voters,” says Burns. “Students are also very concerned about mass shootings. We hear students wanting to see elected officials take strong action to address these issues.”

How these concerns will translate to voter turnout remains unknown. Most of the political data available today predates the July shakeup in the Democratic party, when President Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris as the Democratic nominee.

Early signs suggest that Harris’s entry into the race provided an infusion of enthusiasm among many young voters, including a September poll from Tufts that shows a dramatic increase in youth voter registration since July. In eight states, there are already more young voters registered than there were on Election Day 2020.

Youth voters are always outnumbered by their older counterparts, but the bar for making history is higher than it has ever been.

“2020 was also the highest turnout election in the history of the country and youth and students had especially high voter turnout, even compared to the increase for other groups of voters that election,” says Mike Burns. “So we are optimistic that will we again see young people, and students in particular, making their voices heard in their communities up and down the ballot at very high rates.”