Millennial Generation

Our Fellows, and co-authors of the new book, Millennial Momentum, have a new op-ed out in The Christian Science Monitor that examines how OWS mirros the Millennial generation.  Take a look:

In our newest book, "Millennial Momentum: How a New Generation is Remaking America," we describe why the leadership of all the nation's institutions will be challenged during this decade by the emerging Millennial Generation, born 1982-2003. These young people believe in individuals taking action as a group at the local level to bring about a more "accessible, equitable, community-driven" world. That closely describes the "Occupy" protests.

Shortly after our book was published, these protests sprung up seemingly spontaneously in more than 1,400 cities across the country, leading one commentator to suggest we should be given "the Nobel Prize for Predictions."

We'll leave that for others to chew on, especially because we are not yet certain that these protests are Millennial enough. If they were, Occupy would have a greater chance of success as a movement. But Millennials clearly sympathize with the fundamental message of Occupy. Beset by more than $1 trillion in college loan debt and high unemployment, they believe the system isn't working for them.

Read the full piece here.

Last night NDN Fellows and authors of the new book Millennial Momentum spoke with Judy Woodruff about the many ways in which the Millennial Generation is remaking America.  You can watch the whole interview here. Although the entire interview is very good, there are two pieces that really spoke to me.  The first is Morley's description of Millennials' belief in bottom-up change:

MORLEY WINOGRAD: The most important thing is this generation's ability to generate change from the bottom up, and to do so with individual action at the local level.

They are absolutely committed to improving the country and perfectly happy with the country setting goals and laying out ambitions of what it wants to accomplish. But when it comes to actually doing those things, millennials will provide the same kind of disruptive energy that we have seen in the Arab spring, that we saw in the Napster revolution of the music industry.

This is a generation that is going to shake up every institution that thinks it can be run top-down.

The second was Mike's description of Millennials' belief in the role of government:

 

MICHAEL HAIS: Well, first of all, with regard to government, they certainly see a role, a major role for government. They believe very strongly -- a majority of millennials believe, for example, in a government that provides important services, that is not withdrawn from the economic system.

But they don't see government providing big, huge bureaucracies. Rather, they see government almost as a parent providing guidance, overall policies, which as millennials, they will work with one another and more at the local level to figure out a way of implementing those policies. So government provides guidelines. It may provide resources, but millennials will work with one another at the local level to implement those policies.

How funny that two of the best spokespeople Millennials have come from the Silent Generation.

Mike and Morley's book launch is off to a great start.  Tonight they'll appear on PBS Newshour with Judy Woodruff.  Be sure to tune in! For those of you who weren't able to join us for our DC launch, Millennial Momentum is available on Amazon.  As the book continues to gain traction, be sure to follow all of their happenings on their website and on their Twitter feed (@MikeandMorley).

Today, as analysts pore over President Obama's budget proposal, Millennial Generation activists are focusing on what his proposal means for students.  According to a write-up by Reuters:

President Barack Obama's proposed budget for the next fiscal year nips and tucks at individual grants for low-income students but the amount budgeted is twice as high as two years ago because the number of students has grown.

One tuck is a decision to end the year-round Pell which allows students to collect two grants in a calendar year if they attend summer school, which is most likely to be felt by for-profit schools, according to one analyst.

The other tuck is the elimination of interest subsidies for loans to graduate students.

The maximum award for a Pell grant remains $5,550, which more than nine million students expected to benefit from as part of the program.

The New York Time's David Leonhardt delves into the Pell provisions, writing:

When the Pell program recently expanded to include grants for summer classes, the additional cost was not supposed to be very large - roughly 1 percent of Pell's annual $30 billion cost in future years. Instead, many more students than expected have signed up for the program and are receiving federal grants for summer classes. In 2013, summer grants are projected to make up $5 billion of the program's total $36 billion budget - or a whopping 14 percent.

In my earlier post, I asked for evidence that the summer grants did not help lift graduation rates. The administration official preferred to ask a different question: What evidence exists that summer grants, which began last year, have lifted graduation rates? Or, as the official put it, "Is the evidence adequate to justify a $5 billion new entitas lement?"

The administration decided that the answer was no and that eliminating the program was the kind of budget cut that the government should be making, given the deficit. One reason to be skeptical that summer grants are making a big difference is that enrollment in summer classes has risen only marginally in the last year.

By contrast, the Republican plan would offer even sharper cuts.  Nick Anderson at The Washington Post writes:

House Republicans would lower the maximum Pell grant to $4,705 and cut other education spending by $4.9 billion, according to their spending proposal for the rest of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

This narrow but important conversation about educational grants brings into focus an even larger and long over-due conversation about unemployment among young Americans.  University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics Professor Nancy Folbre explores this issue on today's New York Times Economix blog.  As she writes,

Neither lofty rhetoric surrounding a new "competitiveness agenda" nor bipartisan invocations of the importance of public investments in human capital can conceal the emerging reality.

Apart from the American Opportunity Tax Credit and modest increases in financial aid, public policy is not doing much to help young people from moderate- and low-income families who can't find a job or afford the education they need to improve their chances of finding one.

When last reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August, unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 was about 19 percent - unchanged from the previous year. Partly as a result, community college enrollments, already on an upward trend, have grown in the last two years. However, state budgets, already groaning under fiscal pressure, have been unable to provide additional support.

As voters - particularly Millennial voters - begin to compare and contrast the budget proposals, this underlying question about investment in the largest generation in American history offers a stark contrast between the two parties. 

As the Director of the 21st Century America Project, I am proud to announce a new body of work that continues our tradition of tracking the evolving attitudes of the Millennial Generation.  As the largest, most diverse and most progressive generation in American history, we continue to analyze their place in the 21st Century Electorate. 

Today, our sister organization, the New Policy Institute, released two reports by 21st Century America Fellow and Millennial expert Mike Hais.  Both reports examine the results of two polls focusing on the political attitudes and behaviors of Colorado and Florida Millennials. 

Young voters were a key component of the voter coalition that won Colorado and Florida for Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008. These new reports find that two years later, solid pluralities of Colorado and Florida Millennials (18-29 year olds) intend to vote for Democratic gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and Congressional candidates in this year’s midterm elections. The Democratic vote intentions of Colorado Millennials are based on the continued identification of a majority of them with the Democratic Party, and of the greatest number as liberal or progressive. Finally, most continue to hold favorable attitudes toward the Democratic Party and to approve of Barack Obama’s performance as president.

At the same time, the extent to which these young Coloradans and Floridians turn out at the polls this fall is a major concern. Political participation, and the extent to which the political parties and other organizations attempt to enhance it, is the overriding issue in Colorado and Florida youth politics in 2010. 

Both report can be found on the New Policy Institute site: http://www.newpolicyinstitute.org/2010/09/report-the-political-attitudes-behavior-of-colorado-and-florida-millennials/.

For additional background, or to learn more about The 21st Century America Project, please visit our homepage: http://ndn.org/programs/21st-century-america-project.

Ron Brownstein has a great new piece out in The National Journal that takes a generational snapshot of the recession's impact on the Millennial Generation including their voting behavior and voting potential.  For those of us in the Millennial Generation, it is a surreal look at how our present may shape our future, and for those of us who study generational attitudes, it is as on-the-money as can be.  Be sure to read it and keep your eyes peeled for some awesome graphs from Mike and Morley as well as some quotes. 

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.