Children of the “Silent Majority”: Richard Nixon’s Young Voters for the President, 1972

During Barack Obama’s presidential campaign in 2008, political observers agreed that youth politics had energized his candidacy. Time Magazine announced the election season as “The Year of the Youth Vote” and claimed Obama could secure a constituency among the new generation of voters: “The graybeards of today’s Democratic Party were once the inspired youth of the New Frontier, or Clean for Gene McCarthy, or bell-bottomed foot soldiers for George McGovern. Scan the crowd at an Obama rally, squint, and you just might see the future.”¹ Despite these lofty expectations, while Obama won 66 percent of the young voters between eighteen and twenty-nine, their share of the electorate totaled only 18 percent, one percent higher than in 2004.²

Even with young voters’ underwhelming contributions at the ballot box, the youth vote has still played an integral role in recent elections. While Obama’s success has reinvigorated the perception of youth as liberal, Richard Nixon established the model youth campaign in 1972, one year after the voting age fell from twenty-one to eighteen. In response to the mobilization of the campus New Left and the ratification of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, Nixon cultivated his own youth group, Young Voters for the President (YVP), and managed to split the youth vote with his antiwar liberal opponent, Senator George McGovern (D-S.D.). Despite the widespread assumption that the vast segment of young voters casting ballots for the first time in 1972 would tilt the electorate to the Democratic Party, this article reveals that the Nixon administration mobilized young Americans not aligned with the left—people Nixon’s staff called the “sons and daughters of the silent majority.” Furthermore, Ronald Reagan built on this strategy to win over 64 percent of the youth vote as the oldest presidential candidate in American history. Thus, the youth vote has played an important role in the GOP as well. With this recent attention on youth politics, it is important to understand the youth vote’s origins and its changing significance.

Scholarship on youth politics during the 1960s and 1970s highlights raucous students and the ones who “dropped out.”³ After the Twentieth-Sixth Amendment lowered the voting age to eighteen, Nixon’s youth organizers for his reelection campaign thought differently; they emphasized that 90 percent of the new voters lived with families—61 percent with their parents. In addition, only 26 percent of the new voters attended college.⁴ Nixon’s effort for first-time voters (under twenty-four) exceeded expectations, as he won 48 percent of these voters, but he won 52 percent of the traditional, under-thirty, youth vote. The student vote went to McGovern, 52 percent to 46 percent, but Nixon won 49 percent of the noncollege first-timers.⁵

In the early stages of Nixon’s reelection campaign, his advisers appreciated that new voters themselves comprised 17 percent of the electorate and agreed that the youth generation stood as a “vocal opponent that needed to be neutralized.” In March 1972, while 30 percent of Americans declared themselves as Republicans, only 22 percent of young voters between eighteen and twenty-four pledged political allegiance to the GOP.⁶ Thus, George McGovern’s “pied piper” image as the college student candidate challenged Nixon in a vulnerable area. Concerning young voters, Nixon supported the YVP, not because he wanted youth votes, but rather “to avoid the effect on older voters of our conceding the youth vote to McGovern.”⁷ Nixon’s “silent majority” demanded that he at least appear to be making an effort. According to Nixon’s early point man on the youth problem, Secretary of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare Robert Finch: “Most people do not object to youth participation in ‘legitimate’ activities,” and “want to feel they are ‘coming into the establishment.’”⁸

Nixon’s in-house public relations team of Madison Avenue’s finest admen, the November Group, feared Nixon’s problem with the young voters. One executive volunteering for the Nixon campaign, Bill Novelli, outlined a youth strategy explicitly suggesting that...