Fourth-year Glynn Boltman set out to explore why many young Americans intentionally disengage from politics. Her findings, which she turned into a podcast, challenge common assumptions about political disengagement—and suggest a need for more empathy.
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Fewer than a quarter of Americans under age 30 say they follow politics in the United States closely. With that stat often comes the assumption that young people are simply politically unmotivated and uninformed. But what if the story goes deeper?
Fourth-year Glynn Boltman traveled to three swing states—Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada—to have deep conversations about politics with young people in everyday settings.
That’s what School of Arts & Sciences fourth-year Glynn Boltman set out to explore when she interviewed 65 young voters in swing states across the country. Her findings, which she later turned into a podcast series, challenge common assumptions about political disengagement, while suggesting a need for more empathy in how Americans think about participation in politics.
Boltman has been interested in politics since she was young, a fascination she traces, in part, back to growing up in Reno, Nevada, a politically mixed city in a key swing state. Her work on the 2024 presidential election with the Penn Program on Opinion Research and Election Studies gave her a front-row seat to elections analysis in real time.
“Sitting in that room and watching the results come in, it became clear that shifts in the engagement of young voters were having a huge impact on the race,” she says.
But that also raised a critical question: How accurate can election predictions be if surveys aren’t capturing large groups of people, especially young voters? Many surveys struggle to reach that demographic, according to the Brookings Institute, which can make predicting political outcomes in those age groups challenging.
“If a very, very narrow percentage of Americans are actually responding to those polls, then our democracy isn’t working as well as we want it to,” Boltman says. “Only certain people’s voices are being heard.”
With that in mind, Boltman designed a research project that took a different approach than typical polls. Instead of trying to reach thousands of respondents, she traveled to three swing states—Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nevada—and aimed to have deep conversations about politics with young people in everyday settings. She selected politically diverse urban, suburban, and rural areas using precinct-level voting maps, then went to places like grocery stores, gas stations, laundromats, and public transit stops to strike up conversations.
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