'Old Enough to Fight, Old Enough to Vote': The 26th Amendment's Mixed Legacy

In the spring of 1972, Mike McCurry was a high school senior in suburban San Francisco and an active, budding political junkie – governor of California's model-government Junior State and former junior-high volunteer for Bobby Kennedy's fateful 1968 White House campaign – when he tried to vote in the Golden State's presidential primary.

"I had showed up at the Democratic caucuses – I believe they were in May or June 1972 – to support John Lindsay," says McCurry, a longtime Democratic Party activist and former press secretary for President Bill Clinton. "I was enthralled by Lindsay," the idealistic New York mayor and liberal Republican-turned-Democrat, he says, "and I showed up to support him."

It didn't happen, though: McCurry was roughly six months shy of 18, too young to vote in the caucus. He was turned away.

Serving in the ongoing Vietnam War, however, was another matter.

"Vietnam was on my mind," McCurry, now a public-relations heavyweight and theology professor, says in an email interview. He notes that the odds he would spend his 18th year, and perhaps beyond, in a war zone were slightly better than even: "I was the last year of the lottery draft for Vietnam, and had a mid-ranking number."

That would all change with ratification of the 26th Amendment, lowering the voting age from 21 to 18 – a groundbreaking change that ended often-violent street demonstrations and fundamentally altered the electorate. It empowered young people like McCurry, who'd been old enough to fight in a war, but too young to elect the commander-in-chief who could send them there.

Although the nation's founding document has been successfully amended just 27 times out of more than 11,000 attempts in its 229-year history, the constitutional change lowering the voting age, which marks its 45th anniversary on July 1, is somewhat of a political paradox.

Unlike, say, the 2nd Amendment guaranteeing the right to own guns, the 13th Amendment effectively prohibiting slavery or the 21st Amendment repealing Prohibition, the 26th Amendment is rarely embraced by politicians, almost never held up as a democratic ideal, and largely taken for granted by the general public. Yet it ushered teenagers into the national conversation and thrust their issues on the political agenda, from war in the 1970s to college affordability in 2016.

Ratified in 1971 in a record 100 days – "lightning speed in the constitutional world," says Christine Blackerby, a National Archives historian – liberals like Sen. Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts rejoiced at the passage of the 26th Amendment. Conservatives, however, worried it would hand control of government to impetuous, long-haired kids who lacked adult judgment and experience.

Instead of steering the nation to the left, however, the 26th Amendment helped President Richard Nixon – who pushed for its ratification – win re-election in a landslide, trouncing George McGovern, the liberal anti-war senator most thought would benefit from an influx of new young voters. However, Nixon resigned in disgrace over the Watergate scandal in August 1974.

More recently, the youth vote helped sweep President Barack Obama, the nation's first black president, into office for two terms, and fueled Democratic presidential hopeful Bernie Sanders' rise from a little-known Senate backbencher into a political phenomenon. However, the proportion of young voters heading to the polls has declined since 1972 and they all but vanish in off-year and local elections, as politicians, more often than not, give them short shrift.

"The potential the 26th Amendment could have achieved really hasn't come to fruition," says Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, director of Tufts University's Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, or CIRCLE, which specializes in analyzing political trends among young people.

Yet as the first generation of teenage voters head toward retirement, and current voting trends among the young are uneven at best, McCurry and a handful of liberal politicians – including House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi – believe the voting age should come down even further. Their logic: even younger voters will inject energy into the electorate and help them build a lifetime routine, strengthening the body politic.

Though the 26th Amendment was bestowed upon the first generation of baby boomers in the early '70s, historians say it was actually conceived by their fathers: American GIs conscripted to fight in World War II. The Greatest Generation objected when President Franklin D. Roosevelt lowered the minimum military-draft age from 21 to 18 but most states, which had the right to determine voting age, kept it at 21.

Their rallying cry: "Old enough to fight, old enough to vote."

"There were some attempts to lower the voting age, but none of those got quite enough support," says Blackerby, curator of "Amending America," a National Archives exhibit on constitutional amendments. "After the war ended, support faded even more – until Vietnam."

Upset at being forced to fight a highly unpopular, high-casualty war without a political say in the matter, young people in the 1960s and 1970s hit the streets, clashed with police "and the drive to lower the voting age really gathers support," Blackerby says. The Voting Rights Act of 1970 lowered the voting age to 18, she says, but because states still could set their own voting age limits, the new law "was widely seen by some people as unconstitutional."

A challenge, Oregon v. Mitchell, went before the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 1970 ruled that Congress had the right to regulate the minimum age in federal elections, but not at the state and local levels, Blackerby says. The split decision required state registrars to keep two sets of records for local and national elections.

That led Nixon to call for a constitutional amendment. Congress quickly passed a draft, two-thirds majority of states ratified it in less than four months, and Nixon signed it into law in July 1971.

"The reason I believe that your generation, the 11 million new voters, will do so much for America at home is that you will infuse into this nation some idealism, some courage, some stamina, some high moral purpose, that this country always needs," the president said in a White House ceremony certifying the amendment before 500 invited 18-year-old prospective voters.

The new amendment produced a boom of young voters in the fall of 1972, but the outcome – Nixon's decisive win – was a surprise, says Tufts University's Kawashima-Ginsberg.

"Nixon, for whatever reason, understood that the young people in the electorate weren't made up of only college students," the most vocal group demanding the vote, Kawashima-Ginsberg says. The president's support, she says, came from the "silent majority" of younger people who hadn't gone to college and leaned to the right about the war.

"He made an effort to really reach those people," Kawashima-Ginsberg says. "He was essentially able to unearth the conservative base that wasn't going to the campus rallies."

At the same time, the voting pool expansion the 26th Amendment brought was relatively shallow, she says: College students make up only about 17 million people, and "that still continues to be relevant today."

Since 1972 election, however, Kawashima-Ginsberg says, the participation rate of young voters has fallen.

"Campaigns only reach out to high-propensity voters, because of the cost of outreach," she says. However, newly eligible voters "often have no voting history, no money and no college degree; [therefore] almost no young people get outreach by campaigns."

Research by CIRCLE confirms the decline.

In 2008, when Obama was first on the presidential ballot, 83 percent of registered voters between 18 and 24 surged to the polls, but among all potential voters in that age range turnout was only 48.5 percent, according to CIRCLE research. The voting rates plunged, however, during the 2010 midterm elections: Just 47 percent of registered young voters went to the polls, and the turnout of all eligible 18- to 24-year-old voters barely cracked 20 percent.

Obama's 2012 re-election saw a further slide in the youth vote, to 77 percent of registered voters and only 41 percent of eligible voters. And in the 2014 midterm congressional elections, Kawashima-Ginsberg says, just 1 in 5 eligible voters between 18 and 24 went to the polls.

The young people who took a pass said they didn't vote because they forgot, were away from home or simply weren't interested, according to CIRCLE's research.

Because campaigns often don't actively court them, young voters "take that as a message their votes don't matter, and they don't come out to vote," particularly in local elections, Kawashima-Ginsberg says. "When they don't vote, then politicians are affirmed in their belief that young people don't care, and they don't have to pay attention to young people's priorities."

But McCurry, the former high-level Democratic Party operative, believes the reported demise of young voters is premature. Voting, he says, is a habit best learned young, and the way to instill it is by dropping the voting age to 16.

"Young people responded to Obama," McCurry says, noting young adults have responsibilities younger teenagers don't. "I think historically youth participation is low but they are on the move – going to college, getting a first job, trying to get away from their parents anyway they can."

Advocates say if young people get excited about voting early in their lives, when there are fewer distractions, they're more likely to continue going to the polls when they become adults.

"When kids are in school, they're so interested, they're so engaged," Pelosi said in 2015; a proposal to lower the voting age is before the San Francisco city council, her home district. "And we'd like them to be at least registered before they leave."

Amen, McCurry says.

"I hope they eventually become faithful voters, and evidence suggests they will," says McCurry, who described his first vote – a California absentee ballot for president, cast from his dorm room at Princeton University during his freshman year – as "almost a religious moment."

He says he hasn't missed a vote since then, including municipal elections in Kensington, Maryland, his current home.

For years, McCurry says, he kept his military draft card in his wallet – "I still stumble when someone asks, 'If you had been drafted, would you have gone?' It haunts me still that I never got to answer that question clearly," he muses – as a reminder of the stakes.

Ultimately, "if we can get young people voting and in the habit before they leave high school," McCurry says, "I think we can fast-forward the time they become faithful and regular voters. And that's a good thing."