California’s high school pre-registration of 100,000 teens who will be eligible to vote on their 18th birthday has resulted in 38 percent signing up as Democrats.
The California Secretary of State’s office, which manages the state’s elections, has been pushing its “Our Time is Now” initiative, which seeks to sign up students between ages 16 and 18 for automatic eligibility to vote beginning on their 18th birthdays.
According to Democrat Alex Padilla’s office, which launched the program in September 2016, over 100,000 16- and 17-year-olds have completed the pre-registration through the HighSchool.sos.ca.gov site that was aimed at supposedly encouraging civic engagement.
Southern California registrations have been extremely active, with Los Angeles County recording 26,000 teen pre-registrations, plus another 7,300 in Orange County, 5,900 in Riverside County, and over 2,600 in San Bernardino County.
Padilla has been working with the California Campaign for the Civic Mission of Schools, the Constitutional Rights Foundation, and Voice National Student Mock Election to “gain firsthand knowledge of how citizens make their voice heard in our democracy, and experience the power of their votes when they are joined by thousands of California students and millions more across the United States who will vote in student mock elections this year.”
The program eligibility requirements for pre-registration include: being 1) a United States citizen and a resident of California; 2) not currently in prison or on parole for the conviction of a felony; and 3) not currently found mentally incompetent to vote by a court.
Most observers assumed the Democrat Party would cash in on unionized teachers whipping up opposition to President Trump’s immigration and environment policies to register huge numbers of students as Democrats. But in a surprise for the 100,111 pre-registration sign-ups, “No Party Preference” leads among all soon-to-be-voters with 43,148, followed by 38,363 for “Democratic,” 10,082 for “Republican,” 2,321 for “American Independent,” and 2,314 for “Libertarian.”
An even bigger klaxon horn seems to be sounding trouble for the hard-core progressives that now dominate the Democrat Party machinery with the newest Reuters/Ipsos national poll published on April 30 finding that “Democrats Lose Ground with Millennials.”
The online, scientifically structured poll of 16,000 registered millennial voters found that in the last 24 months the Democrat preference among the key demographic has plunged by 9 percentage points, to 46 percent.
Although the same 28 percent of millennials who support the Republican Party is unchanged, younger voters are increasingly identifying as “No Party Preference.”
Columbia University political science professor Donald Green told Reuters that millennials are no longer wedded to the Democrat Party. It is his opinion that it will be easier for Republicans to attract new millennial voters than “your 50- or 60-year-olds who don’t really change their minds very often.”