You may have seen this map floating around on your social media feeds today. It's a map of what the electoral votes would have looked like if only millennials voted.
Many have been posting the image along with a caption that expresses hope for the future.
This is how the millennials voted. Hoping this means the next generation will turn this planet around pic.twitter.com/TZrUv4LEbz
— Theresa Caney (@Theresa_Caney) November 9, 2016
This is how the future voted. This is what people 18-25 said in casting their votes. We must keep this flame alight and nurture this vision. pic.twitter.com/ivuXrar869
— Eliza Byard (@EByard) November 9, 2016
The millennial electoral map doesn't even require a spoiler alert tag, I guess. You knew this was coming. pic.twitter.com/KJXGscnedR
— Kristen S Anderson (@KSoltisAnderson) October 25, 2016
While this map may give you hope that our generation will make change in the future, there's something else very important to keep in mind. While this map obviously just shows millennials voting on their own, it doesn't show how many millennials voted. And it turns out not enough of us turned out to vote.
According to Bustle, there was much lower millennial voter turnout for this election than there was in 2012. And Clinton didn't do as well with those who did vote as her predecessor. While Obama won 60 percent of the under-30 vote to Mitt Romney's 37 percent in 2012, Clinton was only able to score 51 percent of the millennial vote.
This doesn't mean you should lose hope. We still have the power to make the change we want. All together, millennial voters outnumber baby boomer voters, which means that if we all vote, that blue map above is very possible. If all millennials had voted this year, we could have gotten a lot closer to the map we wanted.
Voting is a right and a privilege. Exercise your right to vote in local elections and in the next presidential election in 2020!
