Millennial Generation

Tomorrow, Thursday March 4th at 12 noon, we're going to be having a great event here at NDN,  a special presentation on a new poll regarding the changing political coalitions of the 21st Century.  I encourage partisans and political idealogues of all stripes, as well as those interested in changing demographics to join us.You can rsvp to jsingleton@ndn.org or by following this link.

Part of what is so great about this presentation is that it takes a look at very important segments of the electorate (Millennials, Unmarried Women, African-Americans and Latinos) and really emphasizes how their power exists in their emergence as a coalition - and how that coalition is growing. 

I know that this is going to be an exciting kickoff for our 21st Century America project.

While noting that President Barack Obama has higher job approval scores than any president in the past three decades, some in Washington also wonder how long this honeymoon can last and how much Obama can get done before it ends. The answer to those two questions lays in placing both Obama's performance and the questions themselves in historical context. 

As the late V.O. Key, the founder of modern political science research, pointed out in his masterful 1960 book, The Responsible Electorate, voters make their decisions in retrospect. Specifically, the public's judgment about how well a president is doing is based in part on how it evaluates his predecessors, especially the president who immediately preceded the current president. There is no doubt that at least a part of Obama's appeal is simply that he is NOT George W. Bush, the most poorly evaluated president in polling history. Similarly, President Jimmy Carter had slightly higher numbers than Obama at this point in his presidency, presumably because his style was so different than that of Richard Nixon, the only president forced to resign because of his malfeasance in office.

But positive attitudes toward Barack Obama are based on far more than negative attitudes toward his Republican predecessor. Outside of Carter, President Obama's approval score is higher than for any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, two Presidents who served toward the end of the last civic era in American history, a period that ended with the election of Nixon in 1968. In civic eras, Americans have much more positive attitudes toward political institutions than in politically divided and gridlocked idealist eras such as the Baby Boomer-dominated one we just left. In civic eras, the public wants and expects governmental action. By contrast, in idealist eras, presidential approval ratings tend to fall fairly quickly in a President's term, signaling the end of the honeymoon. This happens as soon as the President begins to take action that is bound to offend at least one half of the divided electorate.

Civic eras begin when a generation, such as today’s young Millennials, enters the electorate with an overwhelming preference for one party’s presidential candidate and his policy agenda. This causes the President’s popularity to go up or remain stable at a high level, not down, as the newly elected candidate takes steps to implement his campaign pledges. For example, Franklin Roosevelt, who kicked off America's last previous civic era in 1932, never really did see an end to his honeymoon in terms of decreasing popularity, at least not until well into his second term. FDR's Democrats even gained seats in both the House and Senate in 1934, the only time in U.S. history that the party of a newly elected president has ever gained seats in the mid-term elections that followed his winning the presidency. And, of course FDR won reelection to a second term in 1936 by an even larger margin than he did in 1932.

As long as Democrats in Congress support Obama’s blueprint for change, he should continue to accomplish big things, which will have the effect of reinforcing, not decreasing, his popularity. While many inside the beltway may not recognize that we have entered a new era in American politics, both the President and the public do.  Barack Obama should have the popularity to prove it for some time to come.

NDN is excited to return to New York City this week and invite you to join us this Thursday, April 23, for an event with Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, NDN's newest Fellows and two of the nation's leading voices on the Millennial Generation, the largest and most progressive American generation yet.

This week is an exciting one for us here at NDN: today, President Barack Obama is signing the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which will dramatically expand the nation's service programs. As Morley and Mike wrote in their critically acclaimed book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics, Millennials are  a "civic" generation, similar to the GI Generation or the "Greatest Generation," and committed to volunteerism and community service. 

Please check out Morley and Mike's new essay on the Serve America Act and be sure to see this special section of the April 14 edition of USA TODAY that features an op-ed by First Lady Michelle Obama and a report on Millennials' commitment to helping others that quotes Morley and Mike.

Millennial Makeover has just been released in paperback with a new afterword on the 2008 election. Millennials voted for Barack Obama by a 2:1 margin, and with close to 94 million Millennials eligible to vote by 2020, the GOP risks decades in the minority if it fails to connect with this demographic.

Please come join us for what promises to be a compelling discussion about Millennials and how their views and values will shape our society and its institutions for decades to come.

The breakfast will start at 8 a.m. at the Yale Club, Saybrook Room, 50 Vanderbilt Ave., on April 23. To RSVP, please click here.

In a ceremony fraught with political and generational symbolism, President Barack Obama today will sign the aptly named “Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education” (GIVE) Act (now the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act) at the SEED school, a DC public school that caters to underserved children. This ceremony caps his campaign promise to ask Americans to reinvigorate their country through community service. GIVE represents a major redemption of candidate Obama’s promise to offer his most loyal and largest constituency, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, a chance to serve their country at the community level and in return earn assistance with the cost of their college education.

Not everyone is ready to join hands and sing the praises of the concept, however. While GIVE enjoyed bipartisan sponsorship in both the Senate and the House, that didn’t prevent a majority of Republicans from voting against the bill on final passage. They complained that the bill was “too expensive” and would crowd out pure volunteer work with program participants receiving a modicum of financial support for their efforts from the federal government. In the House, 149 of 175 Republicans voted “no,” joined by 19 of their colleagues in the Senate, including the party's two top leaders. With all Democrats voting in favor of GIVE, the core of the Republican’s “Just say no” caucus demonstrated how out of touch with the Millennial Generation they are.

Of those Republicans expressing their opposition in the Senate, only one, John Ensign of Nevada, was from a state that Obama carried. Even though both Republican Senators from such bright red states as Utah, Georgia and Mississippi could see the potential value of increasing the number of volunteers and college students in the country’s civic life, both GOP Senators from South Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Idaho made it clear that there were no circumstances under which their hostility to government could be softened by the merits of a patriotic cause.

As Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina put it on his Web site, "We need to recognize that this bill does represent a lot of what's wrong with our federal government today.... civil society works, because it is everything that government is not. It's small, it's personal, it's responsible, it's accountable.” And Louisiana Senator David Vitter spuriously argued, “This new federal bureaucracy would, in effect, politicize charitable activity around the country." Echoing Governor Sarah Palin’s horribly off key comment at her party’s convention last August that “the world isn’t a community and it doesn’t need an organizer,” these Republicans demonstrated just how out of touch they are with Millennial thinking.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s signature initiative is drawing Millennials ever closer to his political agenda. Chris Golden and Nick Troiano, Millennial co-founders of myImpact.org plan on launching a social network designed to connect volunteers and their experiences to others with similar interests as soon as the legislation creates a market for such sharing and support. Two Millennials who served a term in the New Hampshire legislature as they began their college careers, Andrew Edwards and Jeff Fontas, are now anxious to play “a central role in getting a ‘Spirit of Service’ off the ground” as their next step in a career of civic involvement. These are just two examples of Millennials deep desire to serve.

Already the shift toward civic involvement by this new generation, in contrast to its Generation X predecessors, has doubled the proportion of 16-24 year olds serving in the nation’s existing volunteer corps. Ninety-four percent of Millennials believes community service is an effective way to solve problems at the local level and 85 percent thinks that is true for national problems as well. CIRCLE, an organization devoted to tracking the interests of Millennials in serving their country, points out that the second most important factor, other than having time, “in deciding whether or not to get involved in an activity is the impact that they [Millennials] think it will yield.” With the elevated profile such activities will enjoy under provisions of the GIVE Act, it is not too difficult to imagine Millennials taking up over 80,000 of the 250,000 volunteer slots that will be made available under GIVE’s provisions—greater than the number of all Americans currently serving their country’s communities.

At the signing ceremony, the President will be joined by many other equally committed sponsors of the concept of national service, including Senator Ted Kennedy in honor of whom the final legislation was named "The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act,” to celebrate the country’s embrace of this new ethos of service. While Millennials across the country join with them to celebrate this historic change in America’s behavior, Republicans will be left, once again, locked in the dogmas of their past, unable to imagine a country where government encourages private initiative and the nation is far better off for it.

The Great Depression deeply affected the attitudes of the generation that came of age in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, it made the country thriftier and more Democratic. It took two full generations for other social changes to turn us into a society that was more Republican and saved much less -- shifts led, as before, by those who came of age in the bleak times of the 1970s. Our current economic upheavals are the most serious since the 1930s, so it’s appropriate to consider how they may affect American attitudes going forward. And the early surveys suggest that those who came of age during this crisis -- the Millennials born from 1982 to 2000 -- and now America’s largest generation by sheer numbers — already embody distinctive attitudes.

One way to glimpse how these tough times may affect our national psychology is to understand the forces that make times so tough. We’ll start today with an aspect close to people’s sense of themselves: their homes, or more generally, housing. We’ve all now lived through an historic housing bubble which, to begin, was very different socially from most bubbles in history: Unlike tulips, the South Seas, the 1920s stock market or other famous bubbles, this one was not primarily the business of speculators and affluent people. Nearly 70 percent of Americans own their houses, including most middle-class people as well as a broad swath of moderate and even low-income families. So, this bubble’s impact is being felt very broadly. That should be no surprise, since we give home purchases super-sized tax breaks and regulatory subsidies.

The irony is that while we go out of our way to encourage Americans to put their savings in this basket, in the form of home equity, we also encourage them to keep those savings small. First, we provide a large mortgage deduction which encourages people to buy houses -- and to buy way above what they could afford, but for that deduction. That’s one reason why housing prices generally trend upwards. But the way we provide the deduction actually cuts against saving much, since the deduction isn’t for what we “save” by owning our houses -- there’s no tax break for the downpayment, for example. Instead, it effectively encourages people to save relatively little, since they get to deduct only the interest on the mortgage loan, which represents what they don’t own or “save.”  The natural result is that most people borrow 90 or 95 percent of the value of their house --  just as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers did. We also encourage people to keep their “savings” in housing small, by providing tax breaks for them to pull out the equity in their houses in the form of tax-preferred refinancing and home equity loans.

The result is that large numbers of people end up saving relatively little by owning their houses -- and that’s especially the case when a housing bubble creates an illusion of significant savings. Federal Reserve data show that people’s home equity, or what they “save” through their homeownership, as a share of the value of their homes, has been generally falling for 60 years — which happens to be the time period since we enacted the major tax preferences for housing. Moreover, since 1985, that share has fallen from nearly 70 percent to 43 percent. Strikingly, this share remained stable during most of the bubble -- because as housing prices rose, people withdrew more and more of what they had “saved” as equity. And in the two years since the bubble first burst, home-equity savings has fallen by about one-third, from 60 percent to 43 percent.

Today, an estimated 12 million people are under water with their mortgages. Since they owe more than their houses are worth, the bursting bubble wiped out their life savings. Moreover, the data which show that people’s home equity is still equal to 43 percent of the value of their homes combines two very different groups of people: Nearly half of homeowners own their houses free and clear (mainly older people), while the other half has modest or little equity.
All of this could really change American attitudes toward saving. For one thing, the generation that came of age as these developments unfolded, along with everyone who staked their economic futures on ever-rising housing values, are much less likely to see housing as a safe way to save. That attitude correction in itself could provide a long-term drag on rising housing prices. There also are millions of people who counted on bubble-prices to fund their retirements. That’s been especially true of later Baby Boomers and early Baby Busters, the parents and older siblings of those coming of age in this period. A rude attitude adjustment is also coming for those who haven’t bothered to save much because they’ve counted on inheriting the elevated value of their parents’ houses.

The bottom line is that Americans once more may find themselves more inclined to save --  because now they have to -- and less inclined to use housing values to do it. Since stocks don’t seem much more attractive, that could mean more saving in the safest assets, which are Treasury bonds. And that would be just what an Administration and government determined to act big, bold and expensively, will need to carry out those plans.

NDN's two newest Fellows, Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, are on the road again to talk up the paperback release of their critically acclaimed 2008 book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube & the Future of American Politics.

The paperback has a fascinating afterword about the historic 2008 election in which Millennials voted 2:1 for Barack Obama.  

Questions from the 2008 presidential campaign addressed in the new edition include: 

Every 40 years, America experiences a major political makeover during which important new allegiances and behaviors are established by an up and coming large generation. In 2008, it was the first wave of the Millennial Generation, born between 1982 and 2003, which provided the bulk of Barack Obama’s margin and Democratic victories. What are the key attributes of this new generation and how will they impact American society and politics?

The financial system meltdown in September 2008 was characterized by the Wall Street Journal as “the day Wall Street died.” The events of that week also triggered the “millennial makeover” predicted in the first edition of Winograd and Hais' book. Such triggering events usher in a new era in American history marked by profoundly different beliefs on the part of the American public. How will these new realities shape the outlook for investments and the economy in the decades to come?

Web-based social networking technology revolutionized presidential campaigning and fundraising in 2008, displacing television and top down fundraising strategies that have dominated campaigns since the 1960s. What lessons for marketers and brand managers can be drawn from that experience and what will be the future role of traditional advertising and media companies be in the new Millennial World?

Morley and Mike have gotten some great media attention lately, including this op-ed in POLITICO and prominent mention in a special report on national service (Millennials are very civic-oriented) in yesterday's USA TODAY.

Morley and Mike are in Boston and Cambridge today, where they will talk with graduate students at the Kennedy School of Governemnt. Next, they are off to the YouTube and 2008 Election Cycle Conference at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. 

Then it's back to Boston for a full day at Tufts University (Simon's alma mater) and on to New York City, where NDN will be hosting a breakfast forum with Morley and Mike on April 23. If you'd like to come, check for details here.

If you haven't had a chance to pick up Millennial Makeover, you can buy it here. New York Times Pulitzer Prize-winning book critic Michiko Kakutani picked it as one of her top 10 favorite books in 2008, so check it out.

NDN had major essays run in several publications this week. First off, NDN fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais had an ideas piece published in Politico, entitled "A New Generation Shapes a New Era." Here's an excerpt:

...Meanwhile, outside the Beltway, America’s demography is steadily and quietly changing in a way that will fundamentally reshape the country for decades to come. A new generation, the millennial generation (born between 1982 and 2003), is coming of age to make over or realign U.S. politics. The approximately 95 million millennials compose the largest American generation in history. There are now about 17 million more millennials alive than there are baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964), previously the largest generation, and 27 million more millennials than members of generation X (born between 1965 and 1981), the relatively small generation between the boomers and the millennials.

While about 4.5 million millennials have reached voting age every year since 2000, the generation didn’t enter the electorate in large enough numbers to make a real difference until 2008. And make a difference it did. Millennials were decisive in securing the Democratic presidential nomination for Obama. In November, millennials supported Obama over John McCain by a greater-than-2-to-1 ratio, accounting for 80 percent of Obama’s popular vote margin and turning what would have been a squeaker into a decisive victory.

But the 2008 election was barely the tip of the millennial iceberg. Important as they were a year ago, not even half (41 percent) of millennials were eligible to vote, and they accounted for less than one-fifth (17 percent) of the voting-age population in 2008. A bare majority of millennials will be eligible in 2010. Close to two-thirds of them (61 percent), representing a quarter of the electorate, will be able to vote when Obama runs for reelection in 2012. By 2016, eight in 10 millennials will be eligible to vote, and they will account for 30 percent of the electorate. In 2020, when virtually all millennials will be old enough to vote, they will account for more than one-third of the electorate (36 percent). With numbers like these, the millennial generation will be in position to dominate U.S. elections and politics for decades to come...

Morley and Mike were also featured in the front-page story of Saturday's The Globe and Mail (Saturday is the Canadian equivalent of the Sunday paper here). From the Globe and Mail piece:

...The key to this debate may lie in a statistic. There are now more millennials than boomers. To be precise, there are 17 million more people born between 1982 and 2003 living in the United States than there are people who were born between 1946 and 1964. There are 27 million more millennials than there are Gen-Xers, the generation in between. The millennials constitute the largest generation in American history.

Millennials identify as Democrats over Republicans by 55 to 30 per cent; in one poll 80 per cent identified with Mr. Obama, and only 10 per cent identified generically with Republicans.

The boomers, who were raised to believe in ideals — hence the culture wars of the past 50 years — taught their children civic responsibility, says Morley Winograd, co-author of Millennial Makeover, a book that explores the phenomenon.

In the last election, millennials constituted 17 per cent of the electorate. In 2012 they will make up 25 per cent. By 2020, they will make up 36 per cent of the electorate, and will be the dominant demographic for decades to come.

"As long as they hold on to these more politically progressive ideas, which generations tend to hold onto throughout their lives — it's not true that they get more conservative as they get old — it obviously bodes well not just for Democratic politics but for activist government in economic matters, though not in social issues," he says, "which is the reverse of what we've seen."

Morley and Mike also appeared in The Hill talking about Obama's plans for the auto industry.

Next, Rob had a big piece published this week in Roll Call, "The Economy Will Force Quick Action on Climate Change." Here's an excerpt, though the whole essay is really worth reading:

...But with everyone’s attention now fixed on our economic crisis, this process can be accelerated. And as President Barack Obama has suggested many times, rebuilding the economy and dealing with climate change need not be mutually exclusive, if we enact the proper policies.

The proper approach here is a straightforward one.

First, enact a carbon-based tax to move people and firms to prefer and choose less-carbon-intensive fuels and technologies. Second, as we change the relative prices of different forms of energy based on their effects on the climate, protect people’s incomes and the overall economy by returning all or virtually all of the revenues through payroll tax cuts or lump-sum payments to households.

Third, use the certainty of a substantial tax on carbon, along with additional subsidies, to promote the development of new climate-friendly fuels and technologies that can capture a new and fast-growing global market.

Rob was quoted in the Houston Chronicle on climate change as well.

With the unveiling of the Treasury's new plan to rid banks of toxic assets, the economy once again topped the news this week, and NDN was right in the thick of it. Dr. Rob Shapiro, chair of our Globalization Initiative, was featured in a national Associated Press story about President Obama's economic policy. From the AP piece:

Rob Shapiro, a former economic adviser to President Bill Clinton, said the question for the administration is how far it can push the sense of urgency before the public, and by extension Congress, becomes wary of the cost and perceives government intervention as intrusion.

"The hardest problem that they face, and consequently the country," said Shapiro, of NDN, a think tank formerly known as the New Democratic Network, "is the separation between what might be economically necessary and what is politically acceptable."

Rob was also quoted in an excellent story in the Christian Science Monitor about the Geithner plan:

“The only thing that matters here is the judgment of the president,” says Robert Shapiro, who served President Bill Clinton as undersecretary of Commerce for economic affairs, now at NDN, a left-leaning think tank in Washington.

Obama’s own job performance is now tethered closely to the success of his Treasury secretary. He selected Geithner, after all, and has endorsed his latest rescue plans.

For Geithner’s part, his job security hinges on how well his plans work in the months ahead, Mr. Shapiro says.

The Obama administration, however, confronts a risk related to Geithner’s policies, he adds: “The larger issue is whether the administration either has been or will be too deferential to Wall Street.”

Simon and NDN Fellow Morley Winograd were quoted in Talking Points Memo on Obama's virtual town hall last week (which I also wrote about here). Morley and Mike were quoted in a Forbes article about the need for a new WPA. From the Forbes piece:  

Tapping the energies of this new "millennial" generation--those now entering their teens and early 20s--would make enormous sense both for economic and social reasons.

Not only do they need work, but also, as their chroniclers, authors Morley Winograd and Mike Hais have demonstrated, many share an interest in community-building in ways reminiscent of the last "civic generation" in the 1930s.

In contrast, the current stimulus, rather than inspiring a new generation, has focused on bailing out failed corporations, few of which will generate much employment. Many of the "new" jobs will be going to the already entitled: highly paid, big-pension-collecting, unionized government workers and well-educated people working in federal and university laboratories.

Our Preview of the Summit of the Americas last Thursday was featured in the Panamanian paper Hora Cero - check it out. Finally, check out this video of Simon from this year's Progressive Governance Conference in Chile: