Virginia Millennials Say They Love Libertarian Rob Sarvis, But Will They Show Up on Election Day?

As
Virginia prepares to elect its next U.S. senator, how will the
state’s millennials cast their ballots? A statewide poll released
today finds young people prefer “anyone but Republican Ed
Gillespie.” Bloomberg Politics
reports:

Democratic Senator Mark Warner captured 47 percent in a survey
of voters between the ages of 18 and 35, which was released
Thursday by the Wason Center for Public Policy at Christopher
Newport University in Newport News, Va. The first runner-up
was Libertarian Robert Sarvis with 24 percent. Eighteen
percent said they were undecided, and 11 percent said they will
choose Gillespie. [emphasis added]

In other words, the libertarian candidate appears to
enjoy six times as much support from the millennial
generation as from the electorate at large. (Real Clear Politics’

polling average currently puts Sarvis at just 4 percent.)
However, there are some very good reasons to think that level of
support for Sarvis from young voters might not actually
materialize.

In a
previous post here at Hit & Run, I discussed the phenomenon
of polls tending to overstate third party candidates’ preformance
on election day. But there’s another problem with taking this
finding at face value, which the Bloomberg article itself
points out: It assumes young voters will show up at the polls.

It’s unclear how many millennials will actually go to the
polls. 

“A majority say they are certain to vote, but only 44% say they
are paying close or somewhat close attention, so it’s easy to
imagine many who might intend to vote not actually making it to the
polls on Election Day,” said Wason Center Director Quentin Kidd in
a news release.

Historically, young people cast ballots at far lower rates than
older voters. According to a study from
the U.S. Census Bureau, released in April:

In every presidential election since 1964, young voters between
the ages of 18 through 24 have consistently voted at lower rates
than all other age groups…Overall, America’s youngest voters have
moved towards less engagement over time, as 18- through
24-year-olds’ voting rates dropped from 50.9 percent in 1964 to
38.0 percent in 2012.

But that’s not all—even older voters have a track record of
being, shall we say, overly ambitious when reporting their
likelihood of voting. Consider the Scottish independence referendum
as one high-profile example from this year. An Ipsos MORI poll
taken just before the election found some
95 percent saying they were certain to turn out—a 10
on a 10-point scale. In fact, just under 85 percent of registered
voters actually cast ballots—a “record number,” and no wonder
considering the historic nature of the election. But it still
wasn’t 95 percent.

And the number of people who misrepresent their vote likelihood
is often much larger than that. A 2013
Harvard Kennedy School study looked at a series of races
and found that in all of them, “a sizable fraction of those who
self-predicted that they would vote mispredicted and did not
actually vote.” In one case, more than half of
self-predicted voters failed to turn out.

So while a majority of Virginia millennials might believe
themselves to be certain to vote—and nearly a quarter say they’d
vote for Sarvis—chances are, quite a few of them are mistaken.