Millennials Have the Most to Lose If They Don't Vote

I grew up in a politically engaged family - family gatherings often ended up in running political discussions and debates - and, as a result I and my siblings (and my children) have always voted and often become involved in campaigns. Thus, I find it maddening that Millennials - the group that will suffer the most from reverse Robin Hood policies of the GOP and the racist agenda of the Trump/Pence regime - are among those least likely to vote. Yes, America's political system is seriously f*cked up, but not voting only makes the situation worse.  Indeed, if Millennials, blacks and Hispanics would vote in force, the GOP would likely be forced into a permanent minority position.  A piece in New York Magazine makes the case as to why Millennials need to bestir themselves and get out in vote.  Here are article highlights (share the piece with Millennial friends and family members):

The American political system has given young people plenty of cause for deleting its number from our phones, unfriending it on Facebook, and cutting it out of our lives completely in a fit of self-care.

Electoral politics promised us a democracy, then let the Supreme Court pick our president; vowed to protect us from terror, then sent our friends to die for the cause of birthing ISIS; seduced us with sweet nothings about upward mobility and “the knowledge economy,” then buried us in our parents’ basements under a pile of student debt; gave us hope that an audacious young president would make change we could believe in — then bailed out the banks, foreclosed on our families, and delivered us into a nightmare parody of all that he was supposed to save us from. And now this sorry excuse for a republic has the temerity to ask us to study its byzantine voting rules, slip out of a job we can’t afford to lose in the middle of a Tuesday, and wait in line for hours to choose between a feckless donkey and a psychopathic elephant.

But unfollowing electoral politics won’t make it disappear. And our political system will only grow more dangerous without your voice in its ear. So if you’re among the 65 percent of those ages 18 to 29 who plan to sit out the midterms, please consider the following five reasons to go to the polls.

1. Playing hard to get will get you nothing.  ➽ If you don’t like how a company does business, boycotting its products can (sometimes) be an effective means of forcing change, because corporations need your money to survive. But if you don’t like how politicians govern, boycotting elections will change nothing because the government doesn’t need your ballot to stay afloat. When left-wing millennials sit out elections, they don’t force Democrats to pay more attention to their interests; they make it easier for the entire political system to ignore their wishes by ensuring that no one in power will be worried about losing their support.
 2. The size of your voting bloc matters.  ➽ There are few things the GOP isn’t willing to do to please its donor class, but cutting boomers’ beloved benefits is one. AARP members owe this immense clout not to the militancy of their street protests or the wit of their Twitter owns, but to their singular propensity for showing up at the polls. If we followed their example, we’d have the numbers to make student-debt relief, public day-care, and any of our generation’s other policy priorities into a source of bipartisan consensus.

3. Voting for the lesser of two evils is great — that way you get less evil.  ➽ The Democratic Party is a deeply flawed institution, complicit in economic inequality in the U.S. and in unjust wars overseas. But if millennials had voted at the same rate as our parents in 2016, in all probability hundreds of thousands of longtime legal U.S. residents wouldn’t be in danger of losing the right to live here, thousands of child migrants wouldn’t have suffered the trauma of “family separation,” the Supreme Court wouldn’t have approved Republican efforts to disenfranchise nonwhite voters in Ohio and Texas or undermined reproductive rights in California, the Education Department would not be restricting access to federal-student-loan forgiveness while relaxing oversight of predatory for-profit colleges, the EPA would not be comporting itself as a lobbying arm of the fossil-fuel industry, the Treasury would not have forfeited hundreds of billions of dollars to America’s wealthiest taxpayers, and everyone the world over would have been able to continue ignoring the existence of the American president’s Twitter account.

4. You’re (probably) better informed about politics than the average American voter.  ➽ Many young people say they don’t “know enough about the issues” to vote. But we’re still far more in touch with reality than our elders. Millennials are more likely to accept that climate change is man-made, less likely to endorse prejudicial views of racial minorities and Islam, and far more liable to recognize Donald Trump’s unfitness for high office than any other generation of Americans. . . . . if more millennials voted, it would likely increase the salience of renters’ interests in U.S. politics. Similarly, the existing electorate is much less likely to comprehend the broader material challenges younger Americans face: Despite the U.S. doing far less for its young people (in subsidizing education, job training, housing, and child care) than just about any other advanced democracy, a majority of boomers say the government “does enough for young people” (but still needs to do more for older folks).

5. If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal — and they are. ➽ In 2008, young voters helped deliver North Carolina to Barack Obama. Shortly thereafter, Republicans in the Tar Heel State’s government revised voter-ID law to exclude student-ID cards. Eight other states have adopted similar restrictions. Just this year, New Hampshire passed a law that effectively imposes a poll tax on college students who wish to vote in the state, Florida’s Republican governor (and Senate candidate) Rick Scott tried to block early voting on university campuses, and state legislators in North Dakota have disenfranchised just about everyone who lives on a Native American reservation. Millennials may doubt their ability to effect change at the ballot box, but the powers that be sure don’t.

Please!  Encourage all of your Millennials friends and family members to go to the polls and vote DEMOCRAT. 

Democrats Seem Set to Equal or Exceed Republicans in Turnout

One of the most maddening things to me is the fact that Millennials and minority voters - those most likely to be harmed by the Trump/Pence/GOP agenda in the long term - do not vote and, as a result, contribute to self-harm.   Voting may not halt the regressive, racist GOP agenda, but not voting definitely furthers the agenda that seeks to take from the poor and give to the rich and restore white/Christofascist privilege not seen in decades (indeed, they Jim Crow laws would be restored if the federal courts would allow it - one reason Trump is packing the courts with reactionaries).  Polls indicate that Democrats may be poised to vote in record numbers for a midterm election, but Millennial and minority voters remain less likely to vote than their self-interest should dictate.  A piece in the New York Times looks at surging Democrat turn out in white suburban districts that may match or exceed Republican turn out levels.  Here are article highlights:

A wide range of evidence indicates that Democratic voters are poised to vote in numbers unseen in a midterm election in at least a decade.

Democrats have largely erased the turnout deficit that hobbled them during the Obama presidency, according to results from more than 50 New York Times Upshot/Siena College polls of the most competitive House battleground districts.

Democrats may even be poised to post higher turnout than Republicans, a rarity, in many relatively white suburban districts on Nov. 6.

But it’s not clear if this blue turnout surge will extend much further, particularly among young and nonwhite voters. Whether Democrats turn out broadly could make the difference between a fairly close fight for control of the House and sweeping Democratic gains of 40 or more seats.

Across the Times/Siena polls, Republicans have a six-point lead among voters who turned out in 2014. But Democrats counter with a 10-point advantage among voters who didn’t turn out in that election. Those voters are poised to represent more than one-third of the electorate, enough to essentially eliminate the Republican turnout advantage of the last decade.

A Democratic turnout surge would be consistent with the long history of midterm elections. When Democrats hold the presidency, Republicans generally have a big midterm turnout edge, based on voter file and survey data stretching back to the 1970s. And when Republicans hold the presidency, Democrats fight back to parity.

A similar pattern has played out in the special and general elections during the Trump presidency: Democratic turnout has surged over 2014 levels to essentially match that of Republicans.

Over the last two years, 60 percent of Democrats (defined by either party registration or primary vote history) voted compared with 58 percent of Republicans in the New Jersey and Virginia general elections, along with the special congressional elections in Kansas’ Fourth District, Pennsylvania’s 18th, Ohio’s 12th, Georgia’s Sixth and Arizona’s Eighth. In these same jurisdictions in 2014, Republicans had an eight-point edge, with 62 percent voting versus 54 percent of Democrats.

[T]urnout among young and nonwhite voters always trailing older and white turnout by a wide margin. That tends to cut against Democratic strengths. Across our polls, 58 percent of white registered voters say they’re “almost certain” to vote, compared with 50 percent of black registered voters and 43 percent of Hispanic voters. These figures are somewhat lower than in other surveys, in part because the Times/Siena surveys make a considerable effort to reach lower-turnout voters who respond to polls in low numbers. And just 38 percent of registered voters who are 18 to 34 years say they’re almost certain to vote, compared with 62 percent of those over age 65. It is entirely possible that these generational and racial turnout gaps will narrow over the election’s final weeks, as the campaigns work to mobilize irregular voters. There may also be individual races or states, like Georgia, where black voters turn out in large numbers. But there is no historical precedent for those gaps to close to the extent they do in a presidential election, at least not nationwide. Yet Democrats have still managed to fare extremely well in Trump-era special and general elections, in no small part because of a surge in well-educated voters. That’s what the Times/Siena polling shows as well. Over all, college-educated Americans represent 47 percent of likely voters in the districts we’ve polled, well above their 38 percent share of registered voters. And white voters without a degree — the president’s base — slip to 41 percent of the likely electorate, down from their 45 percent share of registered voters. The diverse districts in Arizona, California, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, New Mexico and Virginia include more than one-third of the tossup districts. If Democratic turnout remains somewhat depressed, these districts could help the Republicans fend off a blue wave and at least keep them in striking distance of retaining their majority. Democrats, though, can regard the districts as offering plenty of opportunities heading into the final stretch. The Democrats there are saying they’re less likely to vote and are likelier to be undecided, reflecting low political engagement.

If Democrats can lure additional young and nonwhite voters off the sidelines and out of the undecided column, the party could be poised to break through in many of the districts where they’ve struggled the most to this point.

If you have Millennial or minority family members of friends, stress to them the importance of voting and of thwarting the GOP agenda that is decidedly against their best interests. 

Millennials Need to Kill Politics as We Know It

Among the biggest losers under the Trump/Pence regime and Republican Party is the Millennial generation.  Soon to be the largest voting block generation, to date they have surrendered their own best interests by failing to vote against politicians who are their enemies when it comes to economic benefits, environmental policies, and resisting discrimination.  Had Millennials turned out in the 2016 presidential election, the foul Cheetos colored occupant of the White House would have remained a reality TV character with no ability to harm the nation at large.  A piece at CNN looks at how the Millenials could upend conventional politics and send many toxic politicians into retirement.  Here are highlights:

Millennials could be one of the biggest political forces in America today, if they wanted.

Defined by Pew as those born between 1981 to 1996, millennials make up about 22% of the US population, and at some point between November's midterms and the 2020 election, they're expected to surpass baby boomers as America's largest living generation. They're a massive voting bloc, capable of setting policy priorities and swinging elections.  They're also grossly underrepresented in American politics.

They are "highly idealistic young people," he said, and their political rise coincides with "our country's worsening polarization and political dysfunction."  Millennials are drawn into politics over issues that affect them, like student debt, the economy, the environment, and health care, said Erin Loos Cutraro founder of She Should Run, a nonpartisan group that helps women run for office.

"Millennials especially want to put their time toward something they know they can change," she said.

That millennial attitude showed up in an Instagram post Wednesday by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who was photographed for Vanity Fair. In the caption for the photo, she sounded more like a social media influencer than a typical politician, writing that she felt anxious and overwhelmed by her sudden fame after winning her New York primary.

Though millennials' experience varies widely by demographics, geography, and politics, they're a generation shaped by experiences like the Great Recession, high levels of student debt, and the rise of social media.

They are the most racially diverse generation and the most likely to live in metro areas. They're more likely to be unmoored from social institutions -- the most likely to be religiously unaffiliated and the least likely to be married. They're the least trusting of others. They're the most likely to live with their parents and not be in the workforce. They've been mocked in the culture for being given participation trophies they never asked for, and many feel as if they're inheriting a mess they didn't make.

Politically, millennials are the most independent generation. They're the least likely to see big differences between the Democratic and Republican parties, and a March Pew poll found 44% of millennials identify as independent, while 35% identify as Democrats and 17% as Republican.

Millennials are "rejecting the old partisan boxes, they're rejecting the old binary choices," Olikara, of the Millennial Action Project, said.

Once derided for their hashtag "slacktivism," movements powered in large part by millennials on social media have directed political action and activism towards causes like #LoveWins, #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo. It's perhaps an omen of what's to come.

Once millennials become a majority in Congress, Olikara said, "I think it's very likely that partisan identity will not be the driving force in American politics." Instead, he hopes, politics will be "more issue focused."

"We have a huge opportunity," he said.

  Let's hope they turnout in a major way next month and help flip control of Congress.

Will Millennials Finally Destroy the Political Status Quo?

The majority of the bad decisions and policies of older Americans - especial so-called conservatives and Republicans - will disproportionately harm Millennials and other younger generations.  They are being saddled with the now likely $2.5 trillion increase in the national debt flowing from Trump/GOP tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, they see wages remaining stagnating while their counterparts in Europe have better chances of upward social mobility, and they far too many older voters clinging to their guns and bibles as they push an agenda that is the antithesis to the gospel message. Indeed, one-third of those under 30 are now "Nones" who have walked away from organized religion and one truly cannot blame them.  Now, in the wake of the Parkland school massacre, just maybe Millenials are on the point of saying "no more!"   An op-ed in the New York Times looks at how, if the nation is lucky, the Millenials will rise up and over turn the current corrupt political scene.  Here are highlights:

As with all historic tipping points, it seems inevitable in retrospect: Of course it was the young people, the actual victims of the slaughter, who have finally begun to turn the tide against guns in this country. Kids don’t have money and can’t vote, and until now burying a few dozen a year has apparently been a price that lots of Americans were willing to pay to hold onto the props of their pathetic role-playing fantasies. But they forgot what adults always forget: that our children grow up, and remember everything, and forgive nothing.

Those kids have suddenly understood how little their lives were ever worth to the people in power. And they’ll soon begin to realize how efficient and endless are the mechanisms of governance intended to deflect their appeals, exhaust their energy, deplete their passion and defeat them. But anyone who has ever tried to argue with adolescents knows that in the end they will have a thousand times more energy for that fight than you and a bottomless reservoir of moral rage that you burned out long ago.

The young — and the young at mind — tend to be uncompromising absolutists. They haven’t yet faced life’s heartless compromises and forfeitures, its countless trials by boredom and ethical Kobayashi Marus, or glumly watched themselves do everything they ever disapproved of. Yet this uprising of the young against the ossified, monolithic power of the National Rifle Association has reminded me that the flaws of youth — its ignorance, naïveté and passionate, Manichaean idealism — are also its strengths. Young people have only just learned that the world is an unfair hierarchy of cruelty and greed, and it still shocks and outrages them. They don’t understand how vast and intractable the forces that have shaped this world really are and still think they can change it. Revolutions have always been driven by the young. To those of us who have lived with certain grim realities our whole adult lives — the widening moat between the rich and the rest of us, the sclerotic influence of money on politics, the N.R.A.’s unassailable coalition of greed and fear — they seem like facts of life as unalterable as death itself. . . . We spend $60 billion a year on pets but won’t go to any inconvenience to keep second graders from getting slaughtered. Despite all our competitive parenting and mommy machismo and trophy kids, we don’t really give a damn about our children — by which I mean, about one another’s. When a race stops caring for its young, its extinction is not only imminent but well deserved. But maybe my bitter complacence about our civilization’s irreversible decline is just a projection of my feelings about my own. Harvey Weinstein ultimately wasn’t the one enforcing the code of silence around his predations: It was all the agents and managers and friends and colleagues who warned actresses that he was too powerful to accuse.  Once people stopped believing in his invulnerability, his destruction was as instantaneous as the middle school queen being made a pariah. Watch: As soon as the first N.R.A. A-rated congressman loses an election, other politicians’ deeply held convictions about Second Amendment rights will start rapidly evolving.

The students of Parkland are like veterans coming home from the bloody front of the N.R.A.’s de facto war on children. They’ve seen their friends, teachers and coaches gunned down in the halls. To them, powerful Washington lobbyists and United States senators suddenly look like what they are: cheesy TV spokesmodels for murder weapons. It has been inspiring and thrilling to watch furious, cleareyed teenagers shame and vilify gutless politicians and soul-dead lobbyists for their complicity in the murders of their friends.

One of my students once asked me, when I was teaching the writing of political op-ed essays, why adults should listen to anything young people had to say about the world. My answer: because they’re afraid of you. They don’t understand you. And they know you’re going to replace them.

My message, as an aging Gen X-er to millennials and those coming after them, is: Go get us. Take us down — all those cringing provincials who still think climate change is a hoax, that being transgender is a fad or that “socialism” means purges and re-education camps. Rid the world of all our outmoded opinions, vestigial prejudices and rotten institutions. . . . — rip it all to the ground.

Perhaps I've always been an idealist, but one with a large dose of pragmatism.  Between our children and our large circle of friends that includes many of younger generations, I like to think I have not become ossified and willing to settle for the status quo.  All Millennial need to do to make a true political revolution happen is get out in mass and vote.  They are now the largest generation.  They can start by voting against every politician (generally Republicans) who continues to cower before the NRA and/or take its money. 

Trump's War on Millennials

Donald Trump - Der Trumpenführer on this blog - and his Republican sycophants are waging war on many elements of society that range from women, to gays, to racial minorities to non-Christians, with Muslims bear much of the brunt in the latter category.  But, as a column in the Washington Post argues, the Trump/GOP policies are also waging war on Millennials. The weapons range from tax plans that will shift billions in tax cuts to older, wealthy citizens, to allowing loan shark like student loan lenders to again rapaciously prey on college students, to trashing the environment in ways that will long haunt younger Americans which will be stuck with a more polluted, less healthy country.  Like so much of the Trump/GOP agenda, the war on Millennials is short sighted and hopefully will convince Millennial voters that they need to truly get out and vote in force to remove hostile Republicans from office.  Staying home on election day only enables your enemies. Here are column highlights:

Trumpcare is, on the whole, terrible. But if you’re a millennial, it does have one thing going for it: It’s virtually the only piece of the Trump platform that advantages the young at the expense of the old.

The rest of the Trump agenda could be broadly characterized as full-on generational warfare against the young. If enacted, it will rob millennials and subsequent generations of earnings, benefits, consumer protections and even — if you look far enough into the future — a habitable place to live.

Let’s start with the Trump tax plan.

But based on proposals President Trump released during the campaign, and comments made in recent weeks by both administration officials and Republican legislators, the coming overhaul will almost certainly be heavily weighted toward the wealthy. An earlier version of the plan directed about half the value of tax cuts to the top 1 percent of earners, according to a Tax Policy Center analysis.

These tax cuts also look likely to add trillions to the debt, again based on analyses of earlier plan versions. (Despite administration promises, virtually no serious economistsbelieve the plan would “pay for itself” through additional economic growth.)
All this amounts to a massive intergenerational transfer of wealth, one that hits millennials in at least two ways. The first has to do with who benefits most from a top-heavy tax cut.

A marginal rate cut is most valuable when you’re in your peak earning years, which tend to come around middle age. That’s because when your income is highest, so is your tax liability.

Millennials are at the beginning of their careers, and both their wages and taxes are low relative to what they will earn, and remit to Uncle Sam, as they gain work experience. All this means that a tax cut today, particularly one tilted toward the highest earners, would not help young people as much as it would mid-career people in their 40s and 50s.

The second is that an unfunded tax cut — like anything else that increases the federal debt — is not free. Eventually someone has to pay for it.

[Y]ounger Americans will pick up the tab, through higher taxes, fewer government services or both. Already millennials worry that their entitlements have been irreparably endangered by fiscal profligacy; a 2014 Pew Research Center survey found that half believe there won’t be anything left in the Social Security system by the time they retire.

Taxes are hardly the only way the Trump administration is giving millennials the shaft. A host of changes to the student lending industry are doing the same.

But perhaps the Trump agenda plank that harms the largest swath of millennials is the administration’s climate change policy. Or lack thereof.

 The White House is weighing whether to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, which requires the United States to sharply reduce its carbon output by 2025. In the meantime, the Trump administration has already been undermining climate policy by disappearing public data, firing academic scientistsand rewriting rules designed to curb emissions.

If you take the long view, even the Trumpcare proposal doesn’t truly promote millennials’ interests. Yes, it allows insurers to vary their premiums by a factor of 5 to 1 due to age, which helps today’s young (at least, today’s young and healthy). But it doesn’t shield us from rate hikes as we ourselves age.

Not voting has serious negative consequences as Millennials are hopefully coming to realize.  You may not have a dream candidate to support, but you need to always vote for the less toxic candidate no matter what.  That did not happen in 2016 and we are all now paying the price.