Minding the Gap: Empowering the Millennial a is the Only Way to Move Democrats Left (Patreon)

Co-written by Michael and David Consultor Politico a print publication distributed in Latin America.

Millennials are the future. This truism is repeated almost as much as it is ignored in practice. Brands, marketers, politicos and strategists obsess over appealing to millennials and how to reach them all to often ignoring the most pressing challenges that most millennials face. The Democratic Party with the exception of Bernie Sanders Presidential run is no exception to this rule. Millennials are appealed on narrow grounds, by either awkward cultural outreach.  Any future oriented  center-left politics needs to pursue bold policies on student debt relief, 21st century job security and climate change in order to establish a successful electoral relationship with millennials. Once these policies are established, campaigns will need the cultural intelligence to communicate effectively with a millennial audience-but the policies come first-------policies-communication-delivery. 

The nonpartisan Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement compiled a comprehensive report on the role of millennials in the 2016 election. Their report 2016 showed that Democrats had a huge demographic advantage amongst millennials but have lost their demographic advantage amongst key millennial voting blocks. This advantage was large enough that had millennials been the sole demographic group voting in election Hillary Clinton would have won in a landslide. However, this fact does not tell the whole story, Democrats had less millennial support than in any election since the beginning of the Obama era. While millennial support for Republicans has remained relatively unchanged between 2012 and 2016, Democrats lost 5% of total millennial voters in this time. Democrats lost in each of the subcategories as well losing 5% amongst White millenials, 8% amongst African American millennials, and 4% amongst Latinos. A flurry of opinion pieces have blamed this loss of millennial support on everything from sexism to racism to “fake news. All of these factors played an important part in the loss, but none of these pieces account for the simplest explanation, the Democratic platform did not address the realities of the millennial generation. 

The politics of “good enough” are not enough to win the future. A generation of Democratic politics has been shaped in reaction to an increasingly radicalized right. Even amongst the boldest of boomer generation has been jaded by compromise and the cognitive disenfranchisement of being the party of opposition rather than ideas. This bunker mentality of a generation beaten down by the culture wars has created a world where hope, bravery and vision are the enemy of the preservation of the ever smaller portion of political terrain held by democrats.

Millennials have much more radical conceptions of politics and economics shaped by their experiences. A majority of millennials fear that they will never achieve the American Dream.  A 2016 Harvard IOP Poll found 51 percent of younger millennials oppose capitalism, 64% believe that women are disadvantaged in the workplace, and a plurality believe that they have no voice in government. The most recent poll found that millennials supported more protectionist trade policies. Millennial conceptions of capitalism if left unaddressed will result in more and more radical politics further from the center on both the right and the left. Reclaiming this generation for Democrats and ensuring political stability of our system as a whole  will take more that more than a regurgitation of the existing Democratic platform. Policies that directly address the problems of modern capitalism are the only way to reclaim this generation. Socialism is on the table and the disaster of neoliberalism put it there, now its time to act on that reality.