“They will vote according to where they came from, where they have lived, what education they have received and, their sense of what is best for the country.”
One of the scariest things for a candidate for one of the national offices at stake in the 2022 election – especially a presidential candidate – is that approximately 50 percent of next year’s electorate will be composed of young voters, i.e., voters between the ages of 18 and 30 years old. The fear arises from the obvious fact that failure to win a majority of the youth vote could well spell the difference between victory and defeat.
Failure to capture a majority of next year’s youth vote is indeed a daunting thought. But the thought becomes far less daunting when the enormous 2022 youth vote is subjected to what economists call disaggregation, on the assumption that next year’s youthful voters will not vote in monolithic fashion. As the word suggests, disaggregation involves breaking down the 2022 youth vote into its likely components. At the end of the disaggregative process, national-office candidates will be thinking not of a “youth vote” but of a number of smaller groups of youthful voters. And they will structure their campaign strategies accordingly.
The process of disaggregating the 2022 youth vote will entail looking at and analyzing factors that largely account for the character, attitudes and caliber of today’s 18-to-30-year-old Filipinos. These factors are birth circumstances, provincial-versus-urban orientation, regional attachment, educational attainment and political discernment.
A young voter who had very humble beginnings and experienced privation and poverty during his or her childhood will look at the candidates – especially the presidential candidates – differently from a young voter who began life under comfortable and financially stable circumstances. The former will be more strongly attracted to Sen. Manny Pacquiao and mayor Isko Moreno than to BBM (Ferdinand Marcos Jr). Young voters who were born in and have lived most of their lives in the provinces will more readily take to Vice-President Leni Robredo and Manny Pacquiao than to Sen. Panfilo Lacson. Young voters who are not from Ilocandia or southern Mindanao will not experience a regional-sentiment pull toward BBM or Manny Pacquiao, respectively; BBM’s being an Ilocano and Manny Pacquiao’s being a Mindanaoan will have little meaning for them at the time they cast their ballots.
A young 2022 voter’s educational attainment will be a great divider among next year’s youthful voters, and the higher the educational attainment, the more likely they will go for educational achievers like VP Leni Robredo and Sen. Lacson, eschewing fake graduates like Mr. Marcos and non-graduates like national boxing icon Sen. Pacquiao.
Allied with educational attainment, a young voter’s level of political discernment will determine who will score heavily with the young electorate in the coming election. Not all young voters are politically discerning, but those who are – and they are very probably in the majority – appreciate the difference between right and wrong, between honesty and corruption and between a solid public record like that of VP Robredo and a tattered public record like that of Mr. Marcos.
The disaggregation process will establish that there is no such thing as a monolithic youth vote. The youth will not vote as a monolith on May 9, 2022. They will vote according to where they came from, where they have lived most of their lives, what education they have received and, last but not the least, their sense of what is best for this country in the next six years.
