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'Youthquake' shakes up electoral politics
Millennials fired up over jobs, health care, and debt
 Jennifer S. Altman Marijka Beauchesne, a 27-year-old New Hampshire resident, supports Barack Obama in part because of his plans for making health care more readily affordable. "I'm hoping that his plan will help protect those whose employers cannot afford to provide health insurance. I don't need someone offering me free health insurance." |
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Earlier than most of his rivals, Barack Obama sensed that a youthquake was rumbling deep inside the American electorate. For months, his campaign has put a premium on reaching out to YouTube disaffecteds. So far the strategy is paying off, helped along, no doubt, by the candidate's hip, un-boomer persona.
The 46-year-old Illinois senator's surprise victory in the Iowa caucuses and close second-place finish to New York Senator Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire Democratic primary were fueled largely by hordes of twentysomethings in hoodies — the oft-pierced-and-tattooed generation that has come to be known as the Millennials, or Gen Y.
No one can predict with certainty how much influence this cohort will have on the coming election. After all, youth-backed candidates have faltered before. (Ask Howard Dean.) But the so-called echo baby boom has size on its side: nearly 43 million people aged 18 to 29, according to the Census Bureau, or 20 percent of registered voters. That and this group's hyperconnectedness (all those Facebook friends and MySpace pages) have convinced many pundits and economists that something seismic could be coming.
Across the political spectrum, they say, Millennials are mobilizing around the idea that the federal government's operating system is in dire need of a sweeping update. Iowa and New Hampshire proved that candidates ignore these voters at their peril. Youth turnout surged by 25 percentage points in the Granite State over 2004, according to the Student Public Interest Research Group, which is dedicated to getting young people to the polls.
John McCain and Clinton attracted most of the 25- to 29-year-olds, while Obama won over those aged 18 to 24. The candidates seem to understand that the Millennials could have a disproportionately loud voice in November and are starting to target them more assiduously. Note the near-comic zigzagging of campaigns after Iowa, when politicians refined their talking points to appeal to Gen Y. Clinton even replaced the oldsters surrounding her on camera during her Iowa concession speech (including a certain former President) with more youthful props at her New Hampshire victory.
‘It's going to be so difficult’
Gen Yers have plenty to be exercised about. They're inheriting an economy in which many of the things their parents took for granted are evaporating: company-provided health insurance, attainable housing, Social Security, affordable education, well-paying jobs. Weaned on self-esteem and jacked up on Digital Age entitlement, they take themselves seriously — and expect their elected representatives to do the same. "I think about the costs of having a family, and it's going to be so difficult," says Edward Summers, 25, an Obama supporter and assistant to the president of Marist College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. "The government needs to intervene to revive the middle class."
At first, the Millennials were the Children of the Rising Dow. They grew up during the greatest period of wealth creation in modern history, but watched their elders consume resources and run up deficits as if the party would never end. Then came the dot-com crash, terrorism, war, climate change. Epic uncertainty informs their worldview. When asked to name the issues they care most deeply about, bread-and-butter concerns such as the economy, health care, and education routinely rank high. In an October Pew Research Center poll, 80 percent of voters aged 18 to 29 cited the economy as a "very important" concern, vs. 61 percent who felt the environment was a major issue — a telling finding given all the campus activism swirling around global warming these days.
Talk of recession, a weak dollar, and rising unemployment all animate Millennials' economic angst. But there's a lot more to it than that. Young people may not know that the inflation-adjusted earnings of new college grads have fallen 8.5 percent since 2000. But they can feel it in the deflated salaries and shriveled benefits they command, even in white-collar jobs. They don't need an economics degree to understand that the middle class is squeezed. This generation has grown up watching parents struggle to stretch a buck. They lived through the mass layoffs during the corporate scandals earlier this century.
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