Election Day! Youth Voting Attitudes

Happy Election Day!  There's been so much talk about Millennials this election season, I couldn't resit taking a quick look at trends in youth attitudes using data from Monitoring the Future, an annual survey of high school seniors' values, attitudes, and behaviors. I mean, the data was just sitting there on my laptop, taunting me.

There were two generalized questions on voting questions I identified:

1. The way people vote has a major impact on how things are run in this country 
2. Have you ever done, or do you plan to do, the following things? Vote in a Public Election
   

Surprisingly (to me) less than 70% of high school seniors think voting has a major impact on this country.  Over time, agreement rose in the early 1980s and then has declined and remained steady.  Despite the seniors' skepticism, over 80% of twelfth graders plan to vote in an election. Although, the proportion of youth who plan to vote has also been trending downwards.

Just out of further curiosity, I took a quick look at differences by race and gender. The graphs are messy and would need some more work to really make sense of it, but they are included below if you are interested.