A new political bloc has taken over the election cycles: the Millenials. Both Democrats and Republicans are fighting to appeal to this generational group, aged 18 to 34. Millennials will be an important voting bloc in swing states in the 2016 presidential election, as they were in 2008 and 2012. In the 2012 election, Millennials played a significant role determining the vote in states such as Florida and Ohio. According to Think Progress, Millennials, who overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in the past two elections, could reach almost 36 percent of the eligible voting pool.
Millennials will have influence over future opinion-making, fundraising and political organizing. Millenials will be the ones writing the political commentary of 2016. For these reasons, the parties are fighting to figure out the secret to winning the voter bloc over to their side. Political leaders of the parties are not talking about the issues that matter to this generation. For many Millennials, the kinds of social and cultural issues that have so animated American politics since the 1980s just don't resonate.
Millennials have grown up in an era of great ethnic and social diversity, the most socially diverse of any generation in American history, and one in which older sexual and gender norms have been shattered. More than 60 percent of Millennials favor same-sex marriage and support legalizing marijuana. Party leaders are divided over these type of issues and so decide to argue over economics and climate change, which to seem to gain some traction in Washington.
This generation has grown up in an economy, where they have to fight for every job they get. They’ve worked for degrees, that may not get them the job they were working for. Millennials see clear inequality between the rich and poor. They are facing more student debt and unemployment than the last two generations before them. Millennials are interested in politics, despite what the media says otherwise.
Courtney Ferrante, 20-year-old student at the University of South Florida says she cares about politics: “I care about politics because as a woman, I don’t have as many rights as men, and I want to be educated enough to fight to have better rights.”
One challenge that politicians face is the basic question of how to reach them. Millennials are not tuning into the networks for their news and they don’t even read the newspaper. Everything they do revolves around the Internet, which is changing every second of every day. They often rely on comedy shows such as “Last Week Tonight” to enlighten them. President Obama has pushed strongly to communicate with this generation in a number of ways.
Obama held interviews with Vox and BuzzFeed. Right now there is a huge void between these voters and the ways in which politicians communicate. It's not simply the mainstream media to which they are disconnected. Many Millennials are also breaking their attachment to other traditional institutions, such as organized religion, that have historically been essential in political communications.
Elected officials also must struggle to reach a generation that fundamentally doesn't trust government. In 2013, a poll by the Harvard Public Opinion Project found that a majority of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 would vote out every member of Congress. Their confidence in the ability of government to solve the smallest of problems, let alone the big challenges, is minuscule. Politicians must also learn to not treat Millennials as a singular group. No one Millennial vote is the same. While there are important shared characteristics that hold them together, effective political outreach will also necessitate shrewd micro-targeting and attention to difference. The party that figures out how to tap Millennials' energy, and overcome the challenges of reaching them, can bring a huge and powerful group of Americans into their coalition.
