It’s no secret that Donald Trump is falling in the polls, and after attending a Trump rally in Saint Augustine, Florida, I know why. Being a millennial, I fit in to a large demographic of swing voters, given that millennials will count for around 38 percent of the vote this year. In the past, politicians tended to either cater too, or overlook millennials, in their campaigns. However, given that this election is the first time that every single millennial is able to vote, overlooking them entirely is a big mistake.
So how dos this fit into a Trump rally? Well, in order go to a Trump rally, you have to go onto his site and register, in which they reward you with two tickets. Unfortunately, these tickets mean nothing once it comes time for the rally. The rally, it's chaos, there’s people protesting outside, and people treating people disgustingly inside. There are vendors, who are mostly minorities looking to make a buck, selling pro-Trump, anti-Hillary items. You could even by a target with Hillary’s face on it.
Then comes the ticket line, which stretches further than the drive you made to get to the rally. And the line isnt just people who have tickets, it’s everyone; tickets or not it doesn't matter. According to the campaign staff it was a “first come, first serve” basis. In other words, that registration you went through to get the tickets, was only to help Donald Trump's stats in the polls. Once you've waited through the line, the Trump campaign staff stands like bouncers in a club, and if you're a middle aged white man in a “Make America Great Again” hat, your in. However, if you're a 20-something year old millennial, you could wait for two to three hours, and still not get in.
But why wouldn’t Donald Trump want millennials in to attend his rallies? The answer is pretty simple. Even though millennials make up what is now about 38 percent of this years voters, the majority of them have no idea who to vote for in this election, and so many are choosing not to vote. That being said, for every millennial who doesn't vote, it pretty much acts as a vote for Trump. According to David Cahn, author of “When Millennials Rule: The Reshaping of America”, if millennials turn out and vote this year, Clinton will win in a land slide, however, if they chose not to vote, the election will go to Trump.
To sum things up in simplest form, rather than pursuing millennials to vote for him, Donald Trump is pursuing the idea of millennials not voting at all. It is a cheap and easy solution because typically millennials have a stereotype of being lazy, and Trump is taking advantage of that. Why spend money on campaigning towards a group of people who don't want to go out and vote anyways?
The fact is, millennials aren’t really that lazy, we just have a different way of doing things, given the tech bubble we grew up in. It’s pretty obvious that Trump has spent no time getting to know millennials, because if he did, he would know that shutting us out is only going to piss us off.
So if you’re like me, a millennial with no one to vote for this election, don’t just not vote, make your voice be heard. If you really want throw away your vote, vote for a third party like Johnson or Stein, that wont win anyway, but at least it makes a statement that we as a generation hold enough power to bend the mold in which we operate as a nation. Plus, it’s still better than a vote for Hillary, or than giving Trump the satisfaction of being right, by not voting.
As an added note, both the Democratic and Republican parties are merely a shell of what they were a four years ago, or even nine months ago for that matter. People, who should be leading their parties, like Republican speaker of the house Paul Ryan, or former Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, have opted to sit in the back seat for the last few months, and let their parties collapse around them. This election has given America a worse global view than we already had. Rather than making America “great again” it has made America afraid again; it has made the world afraid again. The fact is, we can’t stop this election; no one can, more than likely Trump or Clinton will be sitting in the oval office at this time next year. But we can make ourselves heard, and let the world know, that things wont get this bad again, that as a nation we won’t allow this to happen again. Whether you decide to vote or not, have a voice, because that’s really the only way to “Make America Great Again.”
"We've already changed the world once."
