This survey shows there is a large group of voters who support Vote 16 for some offices but not for others.
New Jersey is increasingly at the forefront of Vote 16 organizing in the United States.
New Jersey has had an extraordinary level of Vote 16 activism over the last couple of years. The student-led Vote 16 New Jersey effort has helped spark Vote 16 campaigns in cities across the state. In 2024, Newark passed a Vote 16 policy for school board elections which they implemented in the April 2025 election. Governor Phil Murphy spoke about Vote 16 in his state of the state address and has proposed including $1 million in the state budget to support New Jersey municipalities in implementing Vote 16 policies.
Our new poll provides insights into public opinion about Vote 16 in New Jersey.
In April, our team at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement and Maryland Democracy Initiative fielded a statewide poll of New Jersey voters to better understand public opinion about Vote 16 across the state. The survey was administered between May 27 and June 6, 2025 to 800 New Jersey registered voters age 18+ using a 100% text to web (TTW) approach. The sample was stratified by the 21 counties that make up New Jersey and weighted on age, race, gender, and region. Sampling and data collection were conducted by Braun Research of Princeton, N.J.
Vote 16 for school board elections is popular with key New Jersey constituencies.
Our survey found strong support for school board Vote 16 policies in several key constituencies. These data strongly suggest that there is already majority support for school board Vote 16 policy in many cities and towns in New Jersey. These data suggest that Vote 16 activists looking to build power by seizing opportunities to pass and implement Vote 16 policies have a lot of chances to be successful in places where these constituencies make up a sizable voting block.
There are *a lot* of voters who support Vote 16 for school board elections but not local, state, or federal elections.
In past surveys, we found slightly higher support for Vote 16 policies in local elections as opposed to state and federal elections. In this new statewide poll of New Jersey voters, we asked respondents whether they support Vote 16 for school board elections along with questions asking about support for Vote 16 in local, state, and federal elections. Again, we found higher support for Vote 16 in local elections as opposed to state and federal elections. But even more notably, the survey results suggest there is a huge part of the electorate - 26.8% of New Jersey voters - who support Vote 16 for school board elections but not for other local elections. More research is needed to understand how this group of people understand different proposals to expand the voting age and whether their support for school board Vote 16 reflects an openness to the policy in other parts of government.
Other key findings
Our poll also suggested a number of other interesting insights about patterns of support for Vote 16 in New Jersey.
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A majority of respondents believe that lowering the voting age in school board elections would increase youth turnout (60.7%) and long-term political engagement (55.1%).
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Voters in Essex County are more likely to support lowering the voting age at every level than those from other counties. At 49.9%, almost half of Essex County voters support lowering the voting age to 16 for school board elections.
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Lower-income respondents show higher support for lowering the voting age, particularly at the school board level.
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Support for Vote 16 decreases with age; older respondents are less supportive of lowering the voting age than younger respondents across all levels of government.
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Women show slightly higher levels of support for lowering the voting age compared to men.
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Parents are somewhat more supportive of lowering the voting age than non-parents.
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Respondents most commonly described 16- and 17-year-olds as “immature,” “uninformed,” and “easily influenced” suggesting that widely held negative attitudes about this age group are a barrier to higher levels of support for Vote 16 policy.
The upshot? Voters are most supportive of Vote 16 for school board elections. This is particularly true among certain constituencies. This support is sufficient to pass and implement Vote 16 policies in many cities and towns.
Our 2025 New Jersey poll confirmed many of the findings we established in 2022 when we asked some similar questions in a poll of Maryland voters. We confirmed prior findings about differences in Vote 16 support by race, gender, income, and partisanship. Our 2025 New Jersey poll also broke new ground in learning just how much more popular Vote 16 is for school board elections, highlighting differences between parents and non-parents, and illuminating the negative attitudes many voters have about 16-and-17-year-olds that may explain some opposition to Vote 16 policies. We look forward to looking into these issues in more depth in the months to come! Please reach out to us if you have questions about what these data might mean for your community or if you have ideas about the questions we should try to answer about public opinion on Vote 16 in future studies.
Sam Novey is Chief Strategist at the University of Maryland Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement (CDCE). Isabelle Jensen is a PhD Student studying Disability Politics in the University of Maryland Department of Government and Politics and a CDCE Research Assistant.
