Voter turnout in the United States presidential elections
Recent decades have seen increasing concern over the fact that youth voting turnout is consistently lower than turnout among older generations. Several programs to increase the rates of voting among young people—such as MTV's "Rock the Vote" (founded in 1990) and the "Vote or Die" initiative (starting in 2012)—may have marginally increased turnouts of those between the ages of 18 and 25 to vote. However, the "Stanford Social Innovation Review" found no evidence of a decline in youth voter turnout. In fact, they argue that "Millennials are turning out at similar rates to the previous two generations when they face their first elections."
Voter turnout in the United States presidential elections
Age difference is associated with youth voter turnout.
Berman and Johnson's (2000) argument affirms that "age is an important factor in understanding voting blocs and differences" on various issues. Young people are typically "plagued" by political apathy and thus do not have strong political opinions (The Economist, 2014). As strong political opinions may be considered one of the reasons behind voting (Munsey, 2008), political apathy among young people is arguably a predictor for low voter turnout. Pomante and Schraufnagel's (2014) research demonstrated that potential young voters are more willing to commit to vote when they see pictures of younger candidates running for elections/office or voting for other candidates, surmising that young Americans are "voting at higher and similar rates to other Americans when there is a candidate under the age of 35 years running". As such, since most candidates running for office are pervasively over the age of 35 years (Struyk, 2017), youth may not be actively voting in these elections because of a lack of representation or visibility in the political process. "Only 30 percent of millennials think it's 'essential' to live in a democracy, compared to 72 percent of those born before World War II" (Gershman, 2018). Considering that one of the critical tenets of liberal democracy is voting, the idea that millennials are denouncing the value of democracy is arguably an indicator of the loss of faith in the importance of voting. Thus, it can be surmised that those of younger ages may not be inclined to vote during elections.