“Voter apathy”—particularly among young people—is a post-midterm election cliché that says more about the audiences the punditry write for than the election results themselves. Following from the already overdetermined master narrative about the entitled millennial, “voter apathy” tells the center-left, median-age white professional exactly what she wants to hear: It’s not your fault we’re stuck with this loathsome legislature; it’s those coddled millennials who couldn’t be bothered to vote.

Millennials, I’ll admit, bear significant responsibility for this impression, not only because our voting turnout is indeed poor, but because our response to poor turnout only reinforces the stereotypes. Mathew Segal and Johanna Berkson’s recent Salon piece, a classic example of the genre of millennial backtalk, argues that poor turnout is the politicians’ fault, because they failed to “inspire” with “bold ideas on some of the most important issues to millennials today.” Segal and Berkson may be right, but perhaps blaming low millennial turnout on the failure of politicians to cater to millennials wasn’t the best rhetorical choice.

So instead of rearticulating the old clichés about voter apathy—a topic that, at best, is more complicated than either “kids these days…” or “old folks just don’t speak to us”—we should consider the impact of voter suppression on young people.

The midterm election results were predictable in large part because of the widespread effort of states to pass “voter ID” laws that target women, minorities and, of course, young voters, all of whom are more likely to vote for Democrats. The 2013 Shelby County v. Holder Supreme Court decision lifted requirements for states with a recent history of race-based voter suppression to get Justice Department approval for voting law changes, which opened the doors for states like Texas and North Carolina (among others) to pass measures that restrict voter registration efforts, voting hours and forms of identification required to vote. In Texas, for example, a concealed handgun license is acceptable ID for voting, but a student ID is not. North Carolina does not accept student IDs either.

Racial demographics also play a key role in determining which young people are more likely to find themselves targeted by voter suppression measures. According to a 2014 poverty report by Half in Ten, a nonprofit campaign launched in 2007 to cut poverty in half within a decade, 22 percent of people ages 18-24 are living in poverty. This demographic includes a disproportionate percentage of young African-Americans and Latinos (by contrast, whites ages 18-24 track the national average poverty rate at around 15 percent).