US minimum voting age 18 from the beginning

Would the evolution of the US have been different if people ages 18-21 had the right to vote for the first half of the country's existence?
 
Last edited:
Probably not a big change then, because in many other respects practical adulthood (courtship and marriage, leaving home, work, soldiering) began before one was 18 years old anyway.
 
What I was wondering was whether demographics would make a difference. We would be enfranchising a lot of young people, so issues which would have been relatively important to the young would be more influential in elections.
 

jahenders

Banned
At times it certainly would have made a difference one way or the other. For example, it's unclear whether Bill Clinton would have been elected if 18-21 year olds couldn't vote and Obama's percentages would definitely have been lower.

What I was wondering was whether demographics would make a difference. We would be enfranchising a lot of young people, so issues which would have been relatively important to the young would be more influential in elections.
 
At times it certainly would have made a difference one way or the other. For example, it's unclear whether Bill Clinton would have been elected if 18-21 year olds couldn't vote.

It is not unclear at all, at least so far as the general election is concerned.

Clinton won by 5.56 percent of the vote in 1992. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992 Given that 18-21 year old voters are a tiny fraction of the entire electorate (for that matter they are only a small fraction of the *young*, i.e., 18-29 electorate) I don't think it would even be *mathematically* possible for 18-21 year old voters to have supplied Clinton with his margin of victory even if they had voted unanimously for him, which of course they didn't.

The 1992 Voter News Service exit poll given at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_1992#Voter_demographics
has no separate figures for 18-21 year old voters but it does indicate that among 18-29 year olds (17 percent of the electorate--which means that 18-21 year olds could not have amounted to more than about 4 percent) Clinton got 43 percent of the vote to Bush's 34 and Perot's 22---in other words, Clinton did just slightly better among younger voters than among the electorate as a whole. Clinton would have won even if nobody under 30, let alone under 21, had voted.
 
Top