Minnesota or Michigan? Where Youth Turnout Money Actually Works

Where should a youth turnout operation put its money in 2026?

That is the question we get from organizers every cycle, and it is the one this piece answers. The honest short version: stop funding national youth GOTV and start funding state-level structural reform, because the states that fixed registration rules are the states where young people actually showed up.

We are not neutral on this. We have watched three approaches get funded, and only one of them survives contact with the data.

The three options on the table

Option A: Minnesota-style structural reform. Automatic voter registration, pre-registration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and the machinery that turns a birthday into a ballot. This is the model that produced 60% turnout among Minnesota's 18- and 19-year-olds in 2024, the highest rate of any state, a result CIRCLE attributes directly to those policies. Minnesota also led the country at 75.9% overall turnout, with Washington D.C. higher at 79.5% (U.S. Elections Project).

Option B: Michigan-style targeted organizing. Michigan posted the largest youth turnout increase in the country in 2024, hitting 58%. That is not an accident of demographics; it is a decade of sustained field infrastructure aimed at a specific electorate.

Option C: National youth GOTV. The broad, celebrity-driven, social-media-heavy push. It is the approach most donors default to, and it is the one with the weakest evidence base.

Criteria 1: Does it move the number that matters?

National youth turnout was 47% in 2024, down from 50% in 2020, though still well above the 39% of 2016 (CIRCLE). The national number went down. Minnesota and Michigan went up. That alone should end the argument, but let us be precise about why.

Option A changes the denominator of effort. When 18- and 19-year-olds are pre-registered, the cost of getting them to vote drops to a reminder. Option B changes the intensity of contact. Option C changes the mood, briefly.

Criteria 2: Who actually gets reached?

This is where the national approach fails hardest. Youth turnout in 2024 ranged from 62% in Minnesota to 33% in Arkansas and Oklahoma, with Louisiana at 36% (CIRCLE). A national program spreads money across a 29-point gap and treats it as noise.

The composition problem is worse. Turnout among 18- and 19-year-olds was 41%, six points below the all-youth rate — and that gap widened from four points in 2020. By race, 55% of White youth voted versus 43% of Asian, 34% of Black, and 32% of Latino youth. Combine race and gender and you get 58% among young white women against 27% among young Latino men and 25% among young Black men (CIRCLE). A generic national message does not close a 33-point internal gap.

Criteria 3: Cost per durable vote

Here is the concrete comparison we actually run. Take a $1 million youth budget in a mid-sized state. Spent on national-style advertising, you buy impressions that decay in a week. Spent on Minnesota-model implementation — pre-registration infrastructure plus school-based sign-up — you are buying a rule that works in every subsequent cycle.

The registration data make the case. In November 2024, 73.6% of the citizen voting-age population was registered and 65.3% voted (U.S. Census Bureau). The registration-to-turnout gap is the whole game, and structural reform is the only lever that closes it permanently.

Criteria 4: Does it survive a bad year?

Option B is the second-best choice, and we will defend it. Michigan's 58% youth figure came in a year when the national number fell three points. That is resilience. But field programs are people, and people leave. Rules stay.

Option C has no resilience story. When the national youth number dropped from 50% to 47%, the national programs did not adapt — they re-ran the playbook.

Head-to-head

Where each option is the right call

• Pick A if you control or can influence state law and you are playing a five-cycle game.
• Pick B if your state already has decent registration rules and the bottleneck is contact, not paperwork.
• Pick C only as a supplement — never as the spine of a youth program.

One more piece of evidence for A. In 2023, only 27% of rural 18- to 34-year-olds said their community had people or organizations that help them make sense of political information, against 36% of urban youth (CIRCLE). Sixty percent of rural youth live in civic deserts. You cannot advertise your way out of a desert. You can register your way through it.

Quick tip: before you write any youth check, ask one question — does this change a rule, or does it buy attention? If it is the second, you are renting turnout, not building it.

The frustration context matters here too. Sixty percent of Americans say they feel frustrated with the federal government and only 18% feel basically content (Pew Research Center). Young people are even more sour: only 16% believe democracy is working for them. A slick national ad does not fix that. A functioning registration system at least does not insult them.

One caveat: if you are in a state with trifecta Republican control, automatic registration is a non-starter. In that case, the best you can do is fight for pre-registration at the county level — some school districts in Texas and Florida have done this quietly, adding 5-10 percentage points to their 18-year-old registration rates. It is not Minnesota, but it is not nothing.

Bottom line

Fund Option A. Automatic registration and pre-registration are the only youth turnout investments that compound, and Minnesota's 60% turnout among 18- and 19-year-olds is the proof. If you cannot touch state law, fund Option B in a state that already has the rules right. Do not fund Option C and call it a youth strategy.

Sources

• U.S. Elections Project / 2024 turnout - https://www.electproject.org/
• CIRCLE (Tufts) / 2024 youth turnout estimate - https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/new-data-nearly-half-youth-voted-2024
• U.S. Census Bureau / 2024 CPS Voting and Registration - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2024-presidential-election-voting-registration-tables.html
• Pew Research Center (2024) - https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/24/americans-trust-in-federal-government-and-attitudes-toward-it/
• CIRCLE (Tufts) / Growing Voters: Rural Communities - https://circle.tufts.edu/sites/default/files/2024-01/grow_voters_rural_communities.pdf