The voting is almost over, and now the United States presidential election of 2024 is about to enter an uncertain new phase. This will be the last week to respond to the surveys we’ve posted in the Headway Election Challenge, but now that the nation is beginning to look ahead to Inauguration Day, we’d like to invite participants in the challenge to help us with one last project.
Soon, history lessons will be written about this year’s election. All this year, we’ve been processing them alongside a generational cohort that is just coming into its political consciousness. Now we’re inviting the most engaged participants in the challenge to help us answer one big question: What should future students of American democracy know about the 2024 election?
If you’re just catching up, early in 2024, the Headway team at The New York Times joined forces with a team of journalists at the nonprofit newsroom Chalkbeat to engage high school students for their thoughts on the election. Headway focuses on exploring the world’s challenges through the lens of progress. After 2020 — which had the third-highest rate of youth turnout in a presidential election in more than 50 years — we wanted to look closely at America’s deeply divided democracy through the eyes of a generation on the cusp of adulthood.
Even after youth voted at historically high levels, signs were emerging that they were also placing less and less faith in U.S. democracy. In 2022, a Times/Siena poll found that a majority of Americans — 58 percent — felt that the nation’s system of government needed major changes. The percentage of poll respondents who said that U.S. politics was too divided to solve domestic problems had increased to 53 percent from 40 percent just two years prior, and youth were at the forefront of that shift.
“The lack of faith is starkest among the young, who have little to no memory of a time when American politics didn’t function as a zero-sum affair,” Reid Epstein, a politics reporter for the Times, wrote. “Nearly half — 48 percent — of those surveyed between the ages of 18 and 29 said voting did not make a difference in how their government operates.”
The uncertainty that shrouded this election put youth and adults on a somewhat level playing field as 2024 began. No one could predict how the election would go, especially after Jan. 6, 2021, marked the first nonpeaceful transfer of power since the Civil War. A substantial portion of the electorate still refused to accept the outcome of the previous presidential election. At the outset of the year, already-skeptical young voters faced a choice between the two oldest likely presidential contenders ever.
Threats to democracy were mounting even before two assassination attempts against former President Donald J. Trump made clear that political violence was still very much in the air. The uncertainty only multiplied by midsummer, with the Democrats’ historic late change in the ticket. Polling that rested on a fifty-fifty knife edge added to the sense that the election was taking everyone — veteran voters and voters-to-be alike — into deeply unknown territory. Asked to describe the news about the election in one word, the two most common responses from our participants were “interesting” and “chaotic.”
Amid all that drama and chaos, many educators and students around the country tried to make sense of the election together. But many others did not. As our partners at Chalkbeat noted in a story on how the election was being taught across the country, “Fifty-eight percent of K-12 teachers surveyed by the EdWeek Research Center this summer said they do not plan to talk about the election in their classrooms.” Many educators who are avoiding the subject in class said that they feared parental complaints and disrespectful discussions.
We structured this challenge in part to introduce us to young people who — despite the many factors that depress youth participation — are engaging heavily with the election in their states and voting districts — registering voters, canvassing their cities and even crafting legislation. Many of our most engaged participants credited classroom experiences with helping them understand the political system and how they could play a role in shaping it.
Now, as the Election Challenge comes to a close, we’re asking our most engaged participants to help us pay those lessons forward. We are following up with the 80 respondents who have most consistently recorded their insights for us along the way to Election Day. As outcomes from the election take shape, we’ll ask them to revisit their impressions and to guide us through what they’ve learned in hindsight.
Our Election Challenge questionnaires are now closed. But we have one last question you can answer until Inauguration Day: In eight words or fewer, what has the 2024 election taught you?
The post How Should History Books Remember the 2024 Election? appeared first on New York Times.
