Spin Control: Is courting the Gen Z vote a great strategy for candidates?

Because this is campaign season, there’s rarely a day that I don’t receive an email, tweet or text from someone explaining the importance of young voters in the election.

On the rare day that doesn’t occur, someone on a cable news talking-head panel or some internet pundit is discussing how this candidate or that campaign needs to go after younger votes.

Because I was born the year the Spokane Coliseum was built, most voters are younger than me. But what these deep political thinkers usually mean in this context are voters of Generation Z – who may have to Google “When was the Spokane Coliseum built?” or even “What was the Spokane Coliseum?”

Gen Z, for those unsure of the demarcation lines for the various generations, are those born between 1995 and 2009. They come after Millennials, born between 1980 and 1994, Generation X, born between 1965 and 1979, and Baby Boomers born between 1946 and 1964.

Those born before 1946 are the so-called Silent Generation, preceded by the Greatest Generation that lived through the Great Depression and fought or worked through World War II. They are dwindling at such a rate that they are generally lumped together as “older voters.”

Gen Z is all the rage right now in discussing where candidates might find votes.

A result of this push may be found in recent registration numbers from the Washington Elections Office. Of the 29,610 registrations between July 26 and August 26 – roughly the month after President Joe Biden announced he wasn’t running for re-election through the Democratic National Convention – some 44% were in Generation Z.

This despite the fact that only people from 12 of that generation’s 14 birth years are old enough to vote.

Part of that may be attributed to excitement among those who just turned 18 in the last year, which is by far the single largest total, and those of the next three years who weren’t eligible to vote in the last presidential election. Registrations for those four years all top 1,000 for the month.

But the talk generally moves past the numbers to how candidates might appeal to Gen Z, with caveats these young voters should not be viewed as a monolithic voting bloc and are motivated by many different issues.

It’s good advice, albeit fairly axiomatic, as no generation should be viewed as monolithic or motivated by a single set of issues. What may be bad advice, however, is to put an inordinate amount of time and energy into registering voters and counting on their participation in the election.

That noise you just heard was some Gen Z-er saying “OK, Boomer.” To which I say, with all due respect, this is a quantitative, not a qualitative, analysis.

It’s based partly on a breakdown of the Aug. 6 primary turnout by age, from another set of figures supplied by a request to the state Elections Office.

That data show Gen Z voters are the smallest cohort of voters in the four main age groups, with just under 824,000 registered. Boomers are the largest, with more than 1.34 million, followed by Millennials with about 1.28 million and Gen X with almost 1.11 million. Again, Gen Z is at a slight disadvantage, because two years of their demographic segment is not eligible.

Turnout for Gen Z averaged 19%, compared to 27% for Millennials, 39% for Gen X and 62% for Boomers. Turnout for the older generations was an impressive 68%, although their numbers are down to about 315,000.

Turnout for every group was low, which is usual for a primary. But it increased with age.

This isn’t surprising. All of those previous generations, in their teens and 20s, had low turnout numbers. They began voting in greater numbers when they started getting married, having kids, getting good jobs, going to parent-teacher conferences, buying property and paying taxes – in other words, when they started coming to the conclusion that they had a growing stake in who got elected.

Each of those generations, at some point, was the subject of someone’s political analysis that their votes and issues would be key to deciding an election. Boomers, for example, were supposed to be a force that propelled an anti-war candidate like then-Sen. George McGovern to victory over then-President Richard Nixon.

It rarely worked out that way. In a close election, the youth vote can be critical. But so can the senior vote or the Black vote or the Catholic vote or the women’s vote. The thing about close elections is that all the votes matter, and no one really knows how it breaks down, despite what exit polls might suggest.

So when I hear candidates are courting the youth vote and Gen Z is registering in large numbers, I’m slightly skeptical, because math favors later generations. History suggests they won’t be a major factor, because some of those who register now won’t vote in November and most who have been on the rolls for a couple of years won’t send in their ballot, either.

For those saying, “OK Boomer,” I’d be happy for math, history – and me – to be proven wrong.