The millennial vote
Talk is cheap; if young people really want change, they have to turn out at the polls.
Read the teeth-gnashing social-media complaints from British millennials angry about their elders’ support for Brexit, and you’d think they’re in the market for a modern-day rewrite of Jonathan Swift’s classic essay, “A Modest Proposal.” It was Swift who made the satirical suggestion in 1729 that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic difficulties by selling their children as food for the rich. His suggestion was, of course, outrageous hyperbole for effect.
Nearly three centuries later, disappointed millennials in a perplexed and confused Great Britain seem ready to substitute baby boomers for Irish babies, stark realism for Swiftian satire. The youngsters are not happy.
They have a point. Although 75 percent of voters ages 18 to 24 considered it to their advantage to remain in the European Union, they were outvoted by older voters eager to leave the 28-member bloc. The millennials argue that since they have to live with the referendum decision the longest, it’s unfair that baby boomers should control the nation’s future.
According to a British polling service, the youngsters will have to live with the Brexit decision for 69 years, their older counterparts only 16. That’s nearly seven decades of concern for how last week’s illconsidered decision will affect wages and retirement, education and work opportunities; baby-boomer “leavers” — Brits who, in the youngsters’ view, ought to be concerned about exits of a more permanent nature — seemed little concerned about future generations.
“Decades of uncertainty and political chaos have been unleashed by a generation of voters that barely possesses the digital literacy to use a USB stick properly,” a bitter and resentful young woman from Norwich, England, wrote in The Washington Post. She concludes her screed with a warning: “If the conversations I’ve had today are anything to go by, the next big decision for baby boomers will be how to pay for their pensions when my generation pack up their bags to abandon the sinking ship that the U.K. has just become.”
Ah, but here’s a paradox that might give pause to the young woman from Norwich, that might prompt her to turn down the heat on her baby-boomer stew: Polling and survey data suggest that young people like herself voted in far fewer numbers than baby boomers, even fewer than senior citizens. Areas with the highest youth population also had the lowest turnout.
We shouldn’t be all that surprised. Turnout among younger voters is low in all the world’s democracies. In this country, youth turnout for the 2014 congressional elections was 19.9 percent among 18- to 29-yearolds. That’s a record. A record low.
Millennials in this country are coming up on a “Brexit” vote of their own this fall. The candidacy of Donald Trump is fueled by the same divisive, fear-based rhetoric that preceded the Brexit vote. Most millennials say they reject Trump’s nativist bombast, but talk is cheap. If younger Americans can’t shake their traditional apathy and heedlessness this fall, then, as in Britain, it will be older voters, Trump supporters, who’ll eat their lunch.