Photo credit: Janet Donovan
Pay attention all you Presidential candidates and don’t say we didn’t warn you: The Millennials are coming! “Millennials are likely to make up at least a fifth of the electorate, so in that sense, they’ll have a huge amount of voting power,” Kristen Soltis Anderson, author of The Selfie Vote, told Hollywood on the Potomac. “I think this is also a generation that’s very up for grabs. In recent elections Republicans have done very well with older voters and Democrats have done very well with younger voters.”
“It hasn’t always been the case,” she added. “In the 2000 presidential election, George W. Bush and Al Gore pretty much split the youth vote and they split the senior citizen vote. There was not a big difference when it came to age if you were looking at how people voted. Nowadays, it’s not the case. Older voters lean much more heavily Republican, younger voters lean much more heavily Democratic. But if this persists, there’s a lot of research that shows young voters will stay Democratic over the course of their lifetimes. Some may change, I mean the generation may shift, but overall it creates headwinds for Republicans if young voters break so heavily against them. So in this election, young voters will be really important because Obama’s not on the ticket, so it remains to be seen if young voters will stay voting very heavily Democratic or if Republicans have this opening to try to win them back.”
Soltis was the guest of honor at a Supper party at the Kalorama home of Juleanna Glover and Christopher Reiter where Glover introduced her this way: “I’m delighted to introduce Kristen whom I’ve been a fan of for many many years. I saw her on television one day, maybe three years ago, and I thought she was (extraordinarily) beautiful, but also stunningly brilliant. So I emailed her and then proceeded to accost her until she agreed to have coffee with me.”
Kristen Soltis Anderson
The dinner:
So what EXACTLY is a Millennial? “Millennials are people who are born between 1980 and 1999. There are about 75 million Millennials in the United States. When I do focus groups and I ask Millennials how they define their own generation, it’s usually two big ideas that define them. The first, as you mentioned, is technology. This is a generation that has come of age in an era where the Internet is standard, taken for granted, it’s the norm.”
“The oldest Millennials, myself included, may remember not having the Internet in elementary school, but by the time we were hitting middle school, we were really needing to write reports and send emails,” she further explained. “The Internet was just there. Then for the youngest Millennials, some of whom are not even voting age adults yet, the idea that they wouldn’t have a cellphone or an email address or Internet access from a very young age is sort of bizarre or a relic of a previous time. So technology is the one aspect of this generation. The other one is this idea of diversity and inclusiveness. This is a generation that is ethically more diverse than any before. Over 40% of this generation is non-white, so they identify as Hispanic, African-American, Latino, mixed race, what have you. And this is a generation that’s also very big on tolerance as a part of that diversity and inclusiveness. There’s data I’ve seen that suggests that’s not the whole story, but it’s certainly a very tolerant generation.”
Explain to me how you think they are of a more heightened sense of ethical responsibility. “Millennials definitely express their political views and civic engagement in different ways. For many of them, unfortunately, they feel that the traditional political process just doesn’t really afford them a great way to make change. So the way they make change instead is by starting non-profits, by doing volunteer work, by launching companies that have a mission – social entrepreneurship is the term for that. A lot of them are looking to make social change, but they’re doing it outside of the political realm. Unfortunately, there’s been a lot of data that have shown young people don’t view, for instance, running for office as being something that is morally a good thing to do. They don’t think that it’s a good choice. So regarding the traditional political world, they’re kind of cynical about it. They’re optimistic about the ability to change the future but are pretty cynical about politics, so they look for other channels rather than engaging in protests and sit-ins and your traditional political protesting or political activism to make their change.”
Kristen Soltis Anderson with former Amb. al-Hajjri of Yemen and friend
How do you think are they going to affect the coming election? “I think that opening would be around this idea of fighting the status quo and looking at what’s new, what’s fresh, and what’s sort of combats the status quo. What I argue in The Selfie Vote is that younger voters are looking for something new; they’re looking for fresh solutions to problems. They’re very pragmatic, they’re not actually very ideological. So when it comes to big social programs, government programs that are supposed to do things like help people go to college of help the poor, it’s usually Democrats that are the biggest defenders of those programs and the status quo is the way those programs function.”
“I think Republicans have the opportunity to be the party of reforming these programs so they work better, so that people aren’t leaving college with huge loads of debt; so that people who do fall on hard times and need the government safety net can bounce back rather than getting tangled up in that safety net finding it hard to get their benefits and even harder to get back on their feet. So I am sure that even though Republicans have the brand of being the grand old party, they really have the chance to be the party of what’s new and of tackling some of these big challenges. But they have to take up that fight, they have to really make it a part of their message. A lot of Republicans may think they can win just by talking to older voters and using kind of the same message that they have in the past. I hope they’ll see that they can’t just do that, that they need to really fight if they want to win the youth vote.“
On The Daily Rundown with Luke Russert
Can you narrow down for me who you think that the Millennial Republicans would choose as their Presidential candidate: “I think most of the Republican candidates have a decent shot of trying to reach the youth vote, but each of them will have a very different pathway there. I am a Floridian and so I confess my bias on that issue. I do think that both Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio have a great opportunity. First of all, both of them can speak to the growing ethnic diversity of this generation. Both of them can speak Spanish fluently and you have such a large and growing Latino population in the Millennial generation that I think that’s a big deal. Rubio represents what’s new in the next generation. You have Jeb Bush that has talked a lot about government reform, things like Uber that young voters really like. Republicans I argue in The Selfie Vote have a chance to champion fresh ideas. Then you also have someone like Scott Walker who’s done pension reform in his state and has governed as a Republican in a very blue state. You have someone like Ryan Paul who has a sort of libertarian streak and I think has the potential for some appeal. So really, there are a number of these candidates who have a chance to win over the youth vote, if they choose to make it a priority for their campaign.”
On State of The Union with Candy Crowley
Okay, we have to do this…..The Trump Factor: “Donald Trump right now I think is doing very well in the polls for two reasons. One, he’s getting 95% of the media attention, so some of it is just voters who aren’t paying as much attention, hearing his name when the pollster calls and says who are you voting for, he’s the last name they remember. But then I think there are others who think he’s somewhat refreshing. A lot of candidates are afraid to say what they’re really thinking, afraid to put it all out there, afraid to, you know, not be politically correct and Donald Trump is not afraid of anything. I think there are a lot of voters who may go, ‘you know what – 90% of what he says is crazy, but 10% of what he says is what I’m thinking’ and so he’s the only one that’s got the guts out there to say it. I don’t he’ll last, I think he’s too inconsistent. I think too many of his beliefs contradict one another or his statements are inconsistent, and I don’t think he represents where the majority of voters are at, but I think what you’re seeing in the polls is people being excited about someone who is, for better or worse, pretty fearless. He’s not afraid to say what he thinks.”
From intern to entrepreneur:
