At the Hill, "Millennial voters a new worry for Dems":
Disenchantment among millennial voters is the latest worry for Democrats fighting to hold their Senate majority.Well, Republicans shouldn't get cocky. It's a pox on both houses, as far as I'm concerned. But the fault lies with young voters themselves.
Young voters rallied to President Obama’s side when he first ran for the White House in 2008, and then defied predictions that their enthusiasm would drop off in 2012.
But there is no guarantee they will turn out for Democrats at the polls next month.
Plagued by unemployment and economic anxiety, 18- to 34-year-olds feel a sense of disappointment in the party it helped boost in previous elections, political observers say.
Jim Manley, a Democratic strategist and former spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), said the promise of “hope and change millennials invested in has hit a brick wall.”
Manley said that this in turn has made young voters “very cynical about the political process and less likely to vote than they had in the past.”
Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, agreed that winning over young voters is an issue for Democrats.
“Obama in 2008 had been successful at exciting millennials about political institutions they distrusted and giving them faith in an economy that really wasn’t delivering on the American dream,” Zelizer said.
Since then, Zelizer added, Obama “seems like politics as normal while the economy continues to crawl.”
“Democrats have failed to really lock in their support,” he said.
A poll released earlier this year showed a significant decline in the number of Democratic-leaning millennials who planned to vote in the midterm elections.
The survey, conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, found that young voters are increasingly turned off by the political environment.
It revealed that a mere 23 percent of Democratic-leaning millennials said they would vote in the midterm elections. That was down from the 31 percent who said they would vote in the 2010 midterm elections. (Only 24 percent actually showed up at the polls that year.)
At the same time, the poll indicated that 32 percent of conservative-leaning millennials said they would vote in the election.
“We’ve seen a growing disenchantment with Democrats generally,” John Della Volpe, director of polling at the Institute of Politics, said in an interview.
While millennials were an important part of the Democratic coalition in recent election cycles, that same coalition appeared to be “fractured” now — something that should concern Democrats, Della Volpe said.
Sensing a weakness, Republicans have pounced...
Recall, there's no youth movement today to speak of, as I wrote last weekend, "Where Is the Anti-War Movement?" That said, the problems facing young people nowadays are no less daunting than those facing youth in the '60s and '70s, with the obvious exception of the draft. On the economy, for example, there's simply no expectation that today's youth will enjoy a higher standard of living than their parents. Perhaps that's not enough to get voters out in the streets and to the polls, but it's nevertheless going to take major social change to bring about the kind of structural reforms that will trigger lasting improvements in the quality of life for young people. One place to start with be with restoring basic liberty, on the economy in particular. Democrats, of course, won't do that, so Millennials may decide to give the idiot Democrat-progs the boot once and for all. Indeed, that's the gist of it from the Hill article. So continue reading.
