Check out this must read piece by New York Times writer Timothy Egan about Millennial voters. Egan turns the unfounded conventional wisdom that says young people don’t vote on it’s head and says, not only do young people vote, but even though we grew up in times of terrorism and war, we’re still optimistic. We’re the most optimistic group of all the groups.
We’ve been led to believe that the grumpy, the cranky and the bitter will drive the midterm elections in the fall. You would never know, with nightly images of jowly Tea Partiers and their inchoate discontents, that people ages 18 to 29 years old made up a larger percentage of the 2008 electorate than those over 65.
Because they gave their hearts to Obama, by an overwhelming margin, the young have a proprietary interest in this president. And now, at Obama’s moment of peril, when people who are losing their heads want him to lose his, we need the cooler minds of a generation that grew up with endless wars and color-coded terrorist alerts.
If anyone should be complaining about deficits, it should be the 20-somethings who will have to pay for all those meds-popping boomers moving into the comfort of Medicare and Social Security.
If anyone should be upset over two long wars that were put on the credit card, it should be the generation shedding the most blood in those conflicts.
And if anyone should take personally the poisoning of a vast ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico, it should the one cohort of the electorate that showed the most skepticism of oil companies and the strongest desire for a new green economy.
We, the Millennial generation, aren’t afraid of anything. We welcome the future.
Nor are the millennials afraid of immigration — in part because it’s a family issue. Nearly one in four Americans under the age of 18 have at least one immigrant parent, according to a recent national portrait put out by the Brookings Institution.
“This is the most diverse generation in history,” said Heather Smith, the president of Rock the Vote, a nonpartisan youth political advocacy group. “They’re also optimistic, and don’t participate in the all the fear-mongering.”
Rock the Vote has been saying this for years, we vote, we matter and when candidates pay attention to issues that effect us, we will vote for them. When the politicians live up to those promises made, we most likely vote for them again.
Engage program was walking through the Smithsonian’ s National Museum of American History on the National Mall recently. As she was checking out the exhibition on voting and democracy, she came across something that we at Rock the Vote hold dear to our hearts. She came across a classic Rock the Vote poster. Now, we have this poster here in our office, but the Smithsonian has it in a much nicer frame. Maybe we need to upgrade.
