What Young Voters Care About

NORC, the venerable public affairs research and polling group at the University of Chicago, has published the results of a survey of Americans age 18 to 30 (pdf), breaking them down by race and ethnicity (omitting indigenous people from the groupings). It was written up by Reason and Mother Jones, with different angles on what the numbers mean.

Here's the overall table:


What I get from this table is:

• there are pretty wide swings in what varying groups care about
• black people care a lot more about racism and police brutality than anyone else cares about anything else
• everyone cares about gun control pretty strongly except white people.

Here are the top five issues for each group, in descending order:

• African Americans:
  Racism, police brutality, gun control, unemployment, poverty
• Asian Americans:
  Education, unemployment, health care, racism, gun control
• Latinxs:
  Immigration, terrorism, racism, gun control, education
• Whites:
  Terrorism, health care, education, climate change, national debt

On average for the whole sample, the top five issues are:

• Terrorism (weighted to the top by white people and second by Latinxs),
• Racism
• Education
• Health care
• Gun control

Low or very low on all the lists:

• Abortion
• Military strength
• Social Security (not surprising since young people have given up on that idea)
• Gay rights
• Morality
• Women’s rights
• Foreign policy
• Taxes
• Crime

It's notable that education has gotten almost no coverage in the presidential race. A number of the other top issues haven't been addressed much either, except in Trump howls (anti-gun control, anti- ACA health care, climate change denial).