If you can remember back six years ago, you will recall being told that the Millennial generation — Americans under age 30 — were going to transform America politically and usher in an age of Democratic party domination. Those claims were not implausible if you made straight line extrapolations from the 2008 exit poll. That poll reported that under 30 voted 66 percent to 32 percent for President Obama. Those age 30 and over, one could calculate, voted for Obama by a margin of 50 percent to 49 percent. The only way for Republicans to stay competitive, one might have argued, was to pass a constitutional amendment barring anyone from voting who was born after 1980.
That was then and this is now. The Harvard Institute of Politics has just released its latest survey of Millennials, and reports that among those who say they would definitely vote this year, 51 percent would prefer a Republican-run Congress and 47 percent a Democratic-run Congress. In contrast, in 2010, the IOP poll of Millennials showed that 43 percent favored a Republican-run Congress and 55 percent a Democratic-run Congress.
This poll also showed that Obama’s job approval among Millennials has fallen from 47 percent in April to 43 percent today. This is not statistically distinguishable from the 42 percent Obama job approval in the RealClearPolitics average of recent polls.
There are sharp differences between racial groups: Obama job approval is 31 percent among white Millennials, 49 percent among Hispanic Millennials and 78 percent among black Millennials. Note that the Hispanic number is closer to the white number than to the black number. Analysis based on lumping Hispanics with blacks (and Asians) as “nonwhites” — a favorite device of the otherwise insightful Ron Brownstein — misses the sharp differences registered here between Hispanics and blacks. They ain’t a single cohesive bloc.
In a recent Washington Examiner column and a subsequent blog post, I have examined the evidence that Hispanic voters are souring on Obama. The IOP poll is additional evidence in that direction.
“How did the Democrats and Obama screw this up?” asked Canadian Broadcasting Corporation reporter Megan Fitzpatrick on the IOP conference call about the poll. The poll results don’t provide clear answers, but one can guess at some issues on which Millennials have been disappointed. Jobs. Education. Obamcare (which has them subsidizing the peak-net-worth 50-to-64 age group).
This is an information-age generation that wants to customize its own world, that seeks ways to earn success by drawing on their own particular interests and talents. The Obama Democrats have advanced industrial-age policies that have centralized experts making decisions for large masses of people who are treated as identical and very small cogs in a very large machine. That has seemed to me a bad fit. Evidently many Millennials are starting to feel the same way.
