Like many voters, Addison Smith went to her local polling place to cast a ballot in the upcoming midterm elections.

Unlike most, she had to fly four hours to get there.

A student at Berklee College of Music in Boston, Smith was eager to vote in the competitive Senate race between Democrat James Talarico and Republican Ken Paxton and worried she wouldn’t be able to get a mail ballot in time. So her dad offered to pay for a plane ticket to Houston.

“Kinda chic to fly home to vote in the midterms,” she wrote on TikTok, above the caption “They need me.”

“I just made a little quick TikTok about it because I was like, everyone should go vote, and I think that’s important, especially in states where the registration deadline hasn’t passed or early voting is still open,” Smith told MS NOW.

College students sometimes travel long distances to vote because they live away from home and move frequently, which can complicate voting by mail. In 2024, a University of Miami student flew from Florida to North Carolina to vote. In 2020, two American University students rented a Volkswagen Golf and drove 30 hours from Washington, D.C., to Texas after their mail ballots didn’t arrive. A Johns Hopkins medical student spent $600 on a last-minute flight from Baltimore to Florida to vote.

But those were presidential elections. Midterms typically draw fewer voters, and the president isn’t on the ballot. Still, Democrats appear more motivated this year. A Pew Research Center survey found that supporters of Democratic House candidates were 17 percentage points more likely than Republican supporters to say they were extremely motivated to vote.

Texas is a particular draw this year, with a competitive Senate race and a closely watched governor’s race.

Ella Alvarez, a 19-year-old University of Oklahoma student, drove 4 1/2 hours from campus to her home in Abilene, Texas, to vote last week. A first-time voter, Alvarez described coming home as a no-brainer. She’d been waiting for her chance to vote.

“I’m really soaking it all in, and I’m able to understand on my own for once, like what this really means now, and how lucky are we to have such amazing candidates right now?”Alvarez said. “I can’t imagine why I wouldn’t want to go home and vote for them, and it was too important to me to mail-in.”

Alvarez voted for Democrats “all across” the ballot, including Talarico for Senate and Gina Hinojosa for governor.

“Young Texans aren’t the future of this party, we are the present of this party,” said Kendall Scudder, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party, said in a statement to MS NOW. “Young people understand this isn’t just about one election, it’s about building a Texas Democratic Party ready to win power for the next 30 years and beyond.”

For some young voters, the motivation is opposition to President Donald Trump. In the fall Harvard Youth Poll, 63% of young people who said they would definitely vote described their congressional vote as opposition to Trump and his policies. The poll also found a 16-point gap between young Democrats and Republicans who said they would definitely vote: 50% of young Democrats, compared with 34% of young Republicans.

Jahnavi Rao, who leads the youth voter registration group New Voters, which has run more than 1,300 voter registration drives in high schools around the country, said that social media has played a role in boosting this engagement.

“The last year has been incredibly destabilizing for the country as a whole and globally,” she said. “Young people are more aware of that than anybody due to it being constantly in our faces through social media.”

Still, enthusiasm is only one measure of an election. In 2016, Sen. Bernie Sanders drew 27,000 people to a Manhattan rally before losing the New York primary to Hillary Clinton by 16 points. And in 2022, the final Economist/YouGov poll found Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting — 59% to 48% — but Democrats held the Senate, and the much-hyped “red wave” never materialized.

TikToks like Smith’s suggest that some voters feel intensely about this election — and are eager to turn that feeling into action. But only Tuesday will reveal how many less enthusiastic voters turn out anyway.

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