'Youthquake' shakes up electoral politics

"They saw their parents get burned," says Claudia Tattanelli, CEO of Universum Communications, a research firm that specializes in Millennial workplace issues. "They watched 401(k)s that never got paid, parents losing health plans."

As the government and employers shift more responsibility for benefits like health care and retirement onto the shoulders of individuals, many Millennials see themselves as unwitting victims. Although that trend has been building for decades, this may be the first generation to fully feel the great shift of risk in their bones. "This is a group of people who understand what it means to have no safety net," says Elizabeth Warren, a Harvard University School of Law professor and co-author of "The Two-Income Trap".

"Millennials walk the economic high wire. If nothing goes wrong, they will make it safely to the other side. The slightest disruption — a layoff, an illness — and they are off the wire and falling hard," Warren added.

That sense of uncertainty is omnipresent for 22-year-old Tessa Jamison. Growing up, the George Mason University senior took ski trips with her family every winter. But after the dot-com bust, her father's insurance business in Virginia Beach, Va., suffered. The family's financial precariousness seemed compounded by the danger Jamison saw around her. She watched a friend's family struggle to pay the mother's monthly $6,000 chemotherapy bill after insurance wouldn't cover it. She saw her grandmother, a teacher for 30 years, unable to make ends meet on her pension and Social Security benefits. Jamison wants to go to law school but fears taking on the massive student loans that would require.

A more apt name for people like her may be Generation Debt. No group has ever started life so deeply in the hole, due mainly to mounting college costs, dwindling financial aid, and credit-card debt. The average college student now graduates with $20,000 in loans. Drew University sophomore Dominique Wilburn, 20, works three jobs — at a bookstore, as a resident assistant in a dorm, and at the school gym — to support herself and pay off her $41,000 debt. "In today's day and age, you have to have a degree, a graduate degree, to be competitive," says Wilburn.

What Millennials want done about student debt depends on which candidate they support. But Wilburn, a Clinton supporter, speaks for many of her peers when she says: "It's a huge issue for our generation and not enough attention is being paid to it."

Yet even a degree does not insulate twentysomethings from the vagaries of a winner-takes-all society. After graduation, Millennials move on to conduct job searches in what has become the new, global discount labor bazaar, competing against their pennies-on-the-dollar counterparts in China and India. Almost every young person you talk to knows a relative or family friend whose job has been sent overseas. Matthew Kracher, a 26-year-old who works for the Massachusetts state government and is leaning in favor of former Republican Governor Mitt Romney, says his sister lives in constant fear of losing her fashion industry job to outsourcing. "Entire companies get up and leave the U.S.," he says. "That's terrible."

Not counting on Social Security
Millennials also have to contend with the fact that the quality of jobs produced in the U.S. is not what it was. When their parents came of age, the paternalistic corporation was the dominant employer, offering career paths with generous, lifetime benefits and middle-class salaries. Today's biggest job growth is among the service jobs held by the working poor; the largest employer, Wal-Mart. That's a key reason why economist Jared Bernstein sketches out the Millennial plight as "starting lower, growing slower."

No wonder this generation is so obsessed with structure, savings, and security. Job recruiters say these are the primary themes in interviews. When asked about the most desirable attributes in an employer, students listed "good benefits package" far ahead of high salaries or opportunities for advancement, according to the National Association of Colleges & Employers. In part, that's because most expect Social Security to be dead and buried long before they reach retirement age. Dan Burke, a 28-year-old supporter of Representative Ron Paul (R-Tex.) who lives on Long Island and owns a Web retailer, believes it's unfair that he must contribute to Social Security. "We are forced to put our hard-earned money into it," he says. "And yet my generation won't see a penny of it."

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