A college professor extolls the virtues of her Gen Z students and their engagement in the political process as voters. (Photo by Stephen Maturen/Getty Images)
Voting is no longer a day, it is a season. And every season is accompanied by its own traditions and memories. One of my favorites as a political science professor in the fall has to be canvassing with my students in a nonpartisan effort to register voters in our surrounding neighborhoods. In the last several election cycles, we have walked the streets around the university, visited low-income housing neighborhoods, and been warmly welcomed by HOAs in neighborhoods with large populations of newly naturalized American citizens. There is something truly wholesome about seeing young people excitedly engaged in elections and eager to share that enthusiasm with others. The students vary in partisanship, political exposure, and previous political experience but they bond over the shared experiences in registering voters: fist-bumping when they help someone complete the registration form and cringing then laughing when they get the inevitable door slam.
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Research illustrates the impact of personal conversations, making door-to-door canvassing among the most effective ways to conduct voter outreach. Even so, it is costly, taking what might seem like excessive time to walk from door to door, especially in an era where social media would enable hundreds of views in a matter of seconds on a video it took less than a minute to record. What I cherish most about this experience with my students is how it requires them to learn to talk about politics, in a generally neutral way, but with people who may have little in common with them. We reach prospective voters of different ages, ethnicities, some with different native languages, and some with different SES backgrounds than our own, and some who may loathe politics and anyone who dares knock on their door to speak with them about it.
Invariably, each year, we reach the door of one person who seems less than thrilled at our presence and proceeds to challenge whether students are really engaged. “Sure, you register voters, but do you educate them?” If it isn’t said so bluntly, the vaguely phrased question is meant to imply as much. And it feels pointed to the student voter group specifically of all the voters in our community we aim to engage.
To assume younger voters make poorer decisions than older voters presupposes that limited exposure means a lack of understanding. My own experiences teaching students about the importance of voting and how to register voters, however, fails to support this assumption. When the League of Women Voters and the Marion County Election Board visited my classes, students asked genuinely thoughtful, sometimes complicated questions that illustrated to me more than simply a thorough understanding of the process. It demonstrates respect for the system of elections, reverence for the process, and a recognition of the innate value of free and fair elections in a democratic government.
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There is a bias in my own experience that must be admitted; if a student genuinely has no interest in politics, they may choose not to enroll in my courses. Fair enough. But after over a decade of teaching in higher education and at three vastly different institutions, I can say that I have seen some things change and some stay the same. College students today (the traditional college age 18-24) belong to Generation Z (born 1997-2012); they are digital natives, well-versed and equipped at using social media as an agent for political change. They are politically charged, as a group that came of age during “Me Too,” “Black Lives Matter,” the Trump and Biden presidencies, regular school shootings, the climate crisis, and Dobbs v. Jackson. Perhaps most interestingly, young women in Gen Z are outpacing men in engagement while the generation’s young men are actually more conservative than their Millennial predecessors.
What hasn’t changed? Regardless of their generation, younger voters are consistently underrepresented at the polls (though Gen Z turned out at higher rates in the 2022 congressional midterm relative to Gen X and Millennials at the same age). Politics impact them, of course, they just don’t always realize it yet. While some believe that Gen Z could determine the outcome of this election, early data is less clear about whether their turnout will help the Democrats or Republicans. They are newly registered, excited, engaged, and prepared to play an important role in our democracy by voting.
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