President Barack Obama is hitting the commencement trail. He gave a truly inspiring speech last night at Arizona State University and is headed to Notre Dame (a little bit of controversy brewing there) on Sunday.
Atlantic Media's (National Journal, The Atlantic, etc..) powerhouse political director Ron Brownstein has a fantastic piece on these young college graduates and their political preferences. In his report, he extensively quotes NDN Fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, who've just wrapped up the most recent stretch of their book tour for the new paperback edition of Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics.
Brownstein writes about the huge edge Obama and the Democrats have with Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, and the largest and most progressive U.S. generation ever.
"If anything, Obama's position with the Millennial generation appears even stronger today. Apart from African-Americans, these young people have been Obama's most enthusiastic and consistent supporters in office. In the Gallup tracking polling that's been conducted since January, Obama's approval rating among voters younger than 30 has never fallen below 66%. His approval rating among young voters consistently runs somewhere between six and nine points higher than his overall showing: today, Obama receives positive approval ratings from a dizzying 75% of voters under 30, compared to 66% from the country overall.
Another set of numbers Gallup released earlier this month shows how Obama's strength can bolster his party. Gallup cumulated all of its 123,000 interviews this year to examine party identification in the electorate. Among the Millennial generation, it found that just 21% identify as Republicans, compared to 36% as Democrats and 34% as independents. "Republicans, for all practical purposes, aren't even on the radar screen with them," says Michael D. Hais, a fellow at the Democratic advocacy group NDN, and co-author of Millennial Makeover, a recent book on the generation.
The enormous advantage among young people for Obama in particular and Democrats in general matters for two reasons. The more immediate is that this generation, which is generally defined as the 93 million people born between 1983 and 2002, will comprise a rapidly increasing share of voters through the next decade. Hais and his co-author, Morley Winograd, also an NDN fellow, have calculated that in 2008, 41% of Millennials were eligible to vote, and they constituted 17% of the electorate. They project that by 2012, 61% of the Millennials will be eligible, and they'll comprise 24% of the electorate; by 2016, the numbers will reach 80% and 30%. By 2020, virtually all of them will be eligible and they could constitute as much as 36% of all voters. If Obama maintains anything near his current strength among Millennials, they will produce a substantially larger vote surplus for him in 2012 than they did in 2008-leaving Republicans a larger deficit to overcome with older voters."
Morley and Mike have been speaking out on this issue (How to Lose a Generation) quite a bit lately. Last Sunday, the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed by Morley and Mike, "The Republican Party ignores 'millennials' at its peril." Later in the week and further north, the San Francisco Chronicle's Carla Marinucci had a front page story about the GOP's problems with young voters. Her article, "Is Meghan McCain the New Face of the GOP?" was a truly interesting read, with a lot of great quotes from Morley and Mike.
As I noted, the Millennial Generation is the largest ever -- and very engaged, both socially and politically. If I were a Republican, I'd take one look at those numbers and do some very serious "rebranding" -- and soul searching.
For much, much more on Millennials, click here.
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