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Here’s the Truth About That Millennial Electoral Map You Keep Seeing

You may have seen this map floating around on your social media feeds today. It’s a map of what the electoral votes would have looked like if only millennials voted. 


Many have been posting the image along with a caption that expresses hope for the future.

While this map may give you hope that our generation will make change in the future, there’s something else very important to keep in mind. While this map obviously just shows millennials voting on their own, it doesn’t show how many millennials voted. And it turns out not enough of us turned out to vote.

According to Bustle, there was much lower millennial voter turnout for this election than there was in 2012. And Clinton didn’t do as well with those who did vote as her predecessor. While Obama won 60 percent of the under-30 vote to Mitt Romney’s 37 percent in 2012, Clinton was only able to score 51 percent of the millennial vote.

This doesn’t mean you should lose hope. We still have the power to make the change we want. All together, millennial voters outnumber baby boomer voters, which means that if we all vote, that blue map above is very possible. If all millennials had voted this year, we could have gotten a lot closer to the map we wanted.

Voting is a right and a privilege. Exercise your right to vote in local elections and in the next presidential election in 2020!

Sarah Nelson is senior at the University of Iowa pursuing a Journalism major, English minor, and Fundraising and Philanthropy Communication Certificate. When she's not binge-watching One Tree Hill or Jane the Virgin on Netflix (again), she's is probably rereading the Harry Potter series or writing for her blog, SarahNdipity. With an addiction to books and coffee, Sarah hopes to take the world by storm as a book editor. Or social media marketer. Or blogger. (She hasn't quite made up her mind yet, but that's okay because who says you have to be just one thing?)