EDITORIAL: Moving the voting age is a really bad idea

For the last several years, folks on the right have been able to make some political hay about college students becoming fragile “snowflakes” in the hands of accommodating, left-leaning instructors and administrators. It seems like so much demagoguery, but they’ve actually made some valid points.
How do “trigger warnings” about potentially problematic literature or art prepare students for the rough-and-tumble of adulthood? Or “safe spaces,” where they can go curl up and not hear any opposing views?
So it seems odd that, at the same time many conservatives believe that college students need a shot of moxie, they also believe those same college students are too young, too naive or too easily gulled to participate in American democracy and the voting age should be changed so they can’t cast a ballot.
At least one right-wing radio personality has suggested raising the minimum voting age to 28, and Brigitte Gabriel, a provocateur on social media, has said it should be shifted back to 21, which it was before the 26th Amendment lowered the voting age to 18 in 1971. More seriously, long-shot Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has proposed that the voting age be adjusted to 25 because, in his words, it would be part of a push to restore “national pride.”
Ramaswamy’s plan would carve out exceptions for 18- to- 25-year-olds who work as firefighters or emergency medical technicians or who pass a civics test. But if you don’t fit into any of these categories, well, you’ll just not have a say in democracy until you hit the quarter-century mark.
Considering that Ramaswamy is but a stripling at age 37, it’s an oddball idea. Or, as Cincinnati Enquirer columnist Kevin S. Aldridge explained, it “seems like a grumpy old man idea.”
The odds of it actually becoming law are vanishingly small. It would take an amendment to the Constitution to change the voting age, and that would require two-thirds of both houses of Congress signing on, or two-thirds of states seeking such an amendment. Then, three-fourths of the states would have to approve it. In today’s highly polarized, red-and-blue politics, reaching that kind of consensus would be impossible.
The reality, though, is that Ramaswamy and other advocates of raising the voting age are almost certainly not fretting about national pride or any other lofty ideal – they see that young people have largely been stampeding away from the Trumpist Republican Party, and rather than try to modulate their policies or even engage in more vigorous outreach, they’ve decided their electoral fortunes are better served by cutting young people out of the electorate entirely.
Aside from being profoundly unfair – 18-year-olds were given the vote, in part, because all too many of them were dying in the Vietnam War without having any say at the ballot box – it’s also extraordinarily short-sighted. Ronald Reagan won 18- to- 24-year-olds in landslide numbers in the 1984 presidential election, and George H.W. Bush won a comfortable majority of that cohort four years later. Who’s to say a Republican Party a couple of decades down the road wouldn’t benefit from the votes of college students?
The United States has been called the world’s greatest democracy. In order to live up to that designation, stripping away voting rights from anyone is a proposition that shouldn’t even be on the table.