Appalachia’s young voters could impact the 2024 election

James Staley, 28, spends evenings knocking on doors and canvassing for Down Home North Carolina. The nonpartisan but left-leaning nonprofit is dedicated to building power among poor and working-class people in the state’s small towns and rural communities.

Staley lives and works in Watauga County, home to Appalachian State University, where the stereotypical student has always been outdoorsy, politically conscious and a little bit “granola.” But even within the past several years, Staley says he’s noticed a change among the students in this western North Carolina town.

“Even the more right-leaning college kids, if you asked them, they’d tell you what they thought. They had no issue doing that,” Staley said. “But now, when I knock on doors at the apartment complexes where I know the college kids mostly live, I’m getting just a lot of empty stares and lack of opinions. And that’s the thing that shocked me the most.”

Multiple young people living in Appalachia told 100 Days that their peers feel apathetic about voting or struggle to access the support and information needed to cast a ballot. But that doesn’t mean the region’s young people don’t have the power to make a difference during November’s elections.

In fact, Appalachia is home to two of the top 30 U.S. House races where youth can shape election results, according to experts at Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE). Voters between the ages of 18 and 29 have high potential to influence U.S. House races in two districts: Pennsylvania’s 17th and New York’s 19th. The 17th covers northern and western Allegheny County, plus Beaver County. The General Election there pits incumbent Democrat Chris Deluzio against Republican challenger Rob Mercuri, a state representative.

Young people in Appalachia are also likely to influence the presidential race in Georgia, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, in addition to Senate races in Ohio and Pennsylvania.

Although youth turnout rates have increased nationwide over the past decade, trends have varied widely between states. The same holds true in Appalachia. In 2022, one Appalachian state, Pennsylvania, had among the nation’s highest rates of youth turnout, with nearly 32% of young voters casting a ballot. Meanwhile, three other Appalachian states — Tennessee, Alabama and West Virginia — had among the nation’s lowest rates of youth turnout, all below 15%.

It’s difficult to pinpoint a single reason behind these differences, but legislation enacted to regulate voting on the state level could play a role. Appalachian states have enacted significant new voting restrictions since 2022.

In Mississippi and Alabama, lawmakers criminalized certain forms of assistance with mail and absentee ballots, burdening young voters without reliable transportation and those with disabilities. Meanwhile, Tennessee lawmakers passed restrictions on who is allowed to assist others with voter registration and shortened the deadline for requesting an absentee ballot.

In North Carolina, lawmakers shortened the deadline for returning mail ballots, eliminated ballot drop boxes and increased the likelihood that voters who use same-day registration won’t have their ballots counted. And in West Virginia, county clerks are now required to cancel the registrations of voters who obtain out-of-state driver’s licenses. This is particularly burdensome to anyone temporarily residing outside of West Virginia — including college students.

In addition to legislation and race competitiveness, access to high-quality civic education and other supportive resources also greatly impacts rates of youth turnout in rural areas throughout Appalachia.

“There are similar levels of access to information amongst rural youth. People in rural and urban areas are talking about seeing information about elections at generally the same amount,” said CIRCLE’s Deputy Director Abby Kiesa. “The levels of support they have to figure out what to do with that information or to navigate what that information means are pretty different.”

For example, CIRCLE found that rural youth were about 10 percentage points less likely to say they knew someone in their community who could help them understand and act on information they were receiving about elections. This could be someone explaining how to register to vote or how to find your polling place.

“We rely on our young people being digital natives a great deal and making assumptions about what information they have access to,” Kiesa said. “But if you’re not someone who’s participated in a system before, like elections, then information isn’t enough, right?”

Having even just one supportive figure can make a lifelong difference for young voters, said Ashley Stewart. A recent graduate of the University of Cincinnati, Stewart grew up in Marietta, a city of roughly 13,000 in Appalachian southeastern Ohio.

Although Stewart said she feels her public school education was not the greatest because her high school was underfunded, she says she had an amazing teacher who always encouraged students to vote in local elections because that’s “where the battle starts.”

An organizer with the Ohio Student Association, Stewart remains politically active to this day. But when abortion rights and marijuana legalization were on the ballot last November in statewide and local elections, she didn’t vote in Cincinnati, despite having classes to attend. She believed her vote would make more of a difference in Marietta, and she didn’t trust that her mail ballot would be properly counted. So, Stewart made the seven-hour round-trip drive to Marietta.

“I spent the whole day driving right after work, right after my class, just to make sure I was back there voting for that election,” Stewart said. “And I know a lot of my classmates did the exact same thing, because they of course put it on the most inconvenient day for college kids. But we didn’t let that stop us.”

Young people like Stewart are the future of Appalachia’s democracy, leading some politicians to focus on accessing their untapped potential as a voting bloc. That’s largely why the Democratic Party in Johnson County, Kentucky, recently picked a fresh, young face as its chair: 19-year-old Nicholas Hazelett.

Older Republicans are often seen as the typical voter in this Appalachian county of nearly 23,000. But Hazelett says he thinks Johnson County’s young people are paying more attention to information about candidates, their platforms and achievements.

“So what we’ve tried to do is to get a better communication strategy that’s appealing to a younger demographic,” Hazelett said. “Not throwing away older voters — because they’re a big voting bloc and an important one — but actually listening to the concerns of young folks … trying to get free education pathways and keep people in the counties they live in, so you don’t have a bunch of kids going to college out of state and never going back.”

This article first appeared on 100 Days in Appalachia and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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