Young Voters Made Difference in West

According to a Nov. 27 article by Colorado's Stephen Fenberg and Montana's LaNette Diaz on tompaine.com, young voters "are repainting the West. And they’re painting it deep blue." On election day throughout the West, young voters turned out in force. While 13 percent of the electorate nationwide was in the 18-29-year-old range, 17 percent of the voters in Montana were 18-29 and they broke for Senator-elect Jon Tester by 12 percentage points. They also supported Democratic Governor Brian Schweitzer by 11 percent.

The Wyoming numbers were equally impressive: "Wyoming is blood red, but if young voters had their way, Democrat Gary Trauner would be representing the state in the U.S. Congress. Young voters went for Trauner by an astounding 16 percent" over incumbent Barbara Cubin. The generational effect was obvious in the Trauner-Cubin race. According to exit poll data, Trauner got 51 percent of the 30-44 age group and my fellow travelers in the 44-59 age group split their vote 50-50. People over 60 went for Cubin by an 8-percent margin and those over 65 voted 59-41 percent for Cubin.

Young people voted for Democrats throughout the West, even in Idaho where "all indications are that the state’s surprisingly strong Democratic showing in a governor’s race and U.S. House race – Idaho is even more Republican than Wyoming – came again from a groundswell of youth support."

The article concludes that to appeal to young voters, "smart Democrats" should do a few things:

"Warm Up the Crowd by Talking Climate Change and Energy: Westerners who see raging forest fires every summer and shorter skiing seasons every winter are attuned to the issue of climate change. Even Republicans in the region have acknowledged the threat of global warming. Want to win the support and votes of young Westerners? Take on the biggest environmental issue of the 21st century and propose a visionary energy policy to tackle it.

"Maintain a Little Libertarian Sensibility: It’s not surprising that the first state in the union to reject a same-sex marriage ban would be a Western state. The live-and-let-live impulse in the West is long held and deeply felt. Medicinal marijuana has also polled extremely well in this "red" territory.

"Not Just Jobs, Ones That Pay Well: Economic populism has delivered major benefits for Western candidates—hardly shocking given the flyaway success of minimum wage initiatives in these states.

"Perhaps most important, though, is getting back down-to-Earth. Successful candidates in the region—from Salazar and Ritter to Schweitzer and Tester—were known as people who had spent their lives working hard and knew the difficulty that sometimes accompanies making it from one paycheck to the next. Find us some more of those candidates and you’ll see young Westerners out in force again—and this time, they just might decide the fate of the entire country."