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Did millennials vote at lower rates than baby-boomers?

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    In the United States, presumably? Tagging as such would probably be relevant to narrow down the question. Nov 28, 2018 at 0:37
  • +1 to Mathieu's suggestions, perhaps also rephrasing your question to: In recent US elections, is turnout among millennial voters lower than voters in the baby boomer generation? Nov 28, 2018 at 5:28
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    @AustinConion - I have edited the question based on LearnWorkLearn's suggestion to make it more clear and answerable. Of course, you can roll back it, but in its initial form it was marked as low quality (unclear / too broad).
    – Alexei
    Nov 28, 2018 at 5:38
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    Please consider defining: "recent", "millennial" and "baby boomer" with specific years. Nov 28, 2018 at 8:31

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Yes, turnout among millennials was lower than among baby boombers. Although the exact date ranges for millenials and baby boomers is fuzzy, younger Americans vote at such a smaller rate than older Americans that the exact date range doesn't really matter.


The US Census Bureau has a variety of voting demographic data for the 2016 presidential election, and offers this handy chart about voter turnout among different age groups from 1980 to 2016: US Census Bureau chart of voting rates by age group, showing turnout increases by age

Depending on what definition you use, millenials fall between the second half of the 18-29 group and the first half of the 30-44 group, with voting rates among those groups averaging (very) roughly around 50%.

Baby boomers fall into the second half of the 45-64 group and the 65+ group, and their voting rate is around 68%.


Although the data is only up to 2016, it's safe to assume these patterns have carried over to even more recent elections: it would take an unprecedented rise in turnout among younger people and an unprecedented fall in turnout among older people in order to close the gap between those age groups.

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If Mathieu's assumption above holds true, and you're interested in examining the past few US elections, the answer is Yes.

Pew Research does a lot of work on the topic, I'd highly recommend checking out this article. For data from the 2018 election, we'll have to wait a bit for the voter history data from the various states to be processed.

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