Millennials have a notorious reputation for being apathetic about everything: manners, money, and, yes, politics. We're the generation that is too plugged in to care about what's going on around us. But maybe these perceptions come from traditional news media outlets that are frustrated with low viewership among young people. After all, the average millennial gets 74 percent of their news online. In fact, after checking emails and the weather, keeping up with the news is how millennials spend most of their time online. Therefore, it's safe to say that millennials should be pretty excited about the 2016 election, as it's the first one almost all of them will be able to participate in. So far, however, this primary process just seems to have confirmed our fears that our vote really doesn't matter.
Overall, it appears that millennial voters are wary of what might be considered typical "establishment" candidates and tend to favor outsiders like Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. However, even when we show up in droves at polling locations to support our favorite candidates, it's not good enough, because nominations are based on delegates. In March, Donald Trump received a slightly higher percentage of the vote than Ted Cruz in Louisiana, and they were initially awarded the same number of delegates.
However, because there are five delegates who are unbound to the popular vote, and Marco Rubio's five delegates are now free to vote as they please, it's predicted that Ted Cruz will gain 28 delegates to Trump's 18, despite the latter actually winning more of the vote. Similarly in Wyoming, Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton by 12 points; however, because the super delegates are likely to vote for Clinton, she is expected to receive 11 of the state's delegates to Bernie's seven.
Furthermore, because traditional news media outlets seem determined to either maintain the status quo of establishment politics, cover the election as simply as possible, or both, these delegate-inclusive numbers are usually reported to the public without context, making it seem already impossible for our favored candidates to win.
So what does this mean for young people? It means the realization that, contrary to what we've been taught growing up, we live in a society where not every vote is equal. In order to ensure that parties are able to control their candidates, even at the expense of the people they represent, some people's votes simply count hundreds and even thousands of times more than other people's. And while party leaders might think that this is an effective way to suppress radical change, they don't understand the long-term effects: Our frustration simply galvanizes us even further.
We want a system that truly represents us like it's supposed to. And whether that means flooding the polls at presidential and congressional elections, protesting the systems we view as corrupt, or harassing our politicians until they act in agreement with the people who elected them, the young people of America are determined to make a change.
