Real Clear Politics
Younger Voters Disenchanted With Obama? By Carl M. Cannon - December 16, 2011 It was the first week of February 2007 -- early in the cycle for a presidential event -- and the Johnson Center at George Mason University was in a fervor for a freshman U.S. senator who had been in office all of 25 months. The warm-up speakers were all students; the headliner, Barack Obama. In between the students' introductory speeches, music pulsed through the campus cultural center as young people unveiled clever handmade signs: "Barack the Vote!" and "Barack and Roll." When John Mayer's "Waiting on the World to Change" was piped in, the crowd swayed to the beat in unison. And when Obama took the stage, the shrieks rang out: "I love you!" “There is something happening out there, and it’s big,” Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina said at the time. “I’ve been saying that 2008 is the last election of the ‘old order,’ but maybe we’ve already had that election -- and this is the first year of the new order.” That proved to be the case. Mayer’s song, the unofficial anthem of the Millennial Generation, told the story of a demographic group that had arrived, and wasn’t going to wait on anything. “One day our generation is gonna rule the population,” the song warned, and the 2008 election delivered on that pledge. Accentuating a trend that had started four years before, young voters broke big for the Democratic presidential ticket: Obama and Joe Biden garnered some 66 percent of voters under the age of 30 -- a huge generation -- and the raw number of young voters increased as well. There are many ways to slice the electorate demographically, but one thing seems clear: Had those numbers been reversed, John McCain would be in the Oval Office today. But that was three years ago, and there are any number of signs that the youngest cohort of voting-age Americans are distressed by the direction their nation is heading in and that millions of them are disenchanted with the man they helped into office in 2008. For starters, the dominant political issue in the United States right now is the economy -- and this is especially true for the newest entrants to the workforce. A new national poll of 18- to 29-year-olds by Harvard’s Institute of Politics released Thursday showed that in an open-ended question --- meaning without prompting by the question -- 74 percent of respondents cited the economy as the most important issue. On that issue, only 32 percent approve of the way President Obama is handling the economy. This mirrors a finding in a poll done in April by a group called Generation Opportunity. The Harvard survey is overseen by John Della Volpe, a Democrat; Generation’s Opportunity’s researcher is Kellyanne Conway, a Republican who was retained this week by Newt Gingrich. But both are highly respected professionals -- and their data dovetailed neatly. The upshot is that Obama has work to do among his most loyal generational cohort. In the Harvard poll, under-30s believe by a 4-1 margin that America is headed in the “wrong” direction. This is a number that would spell trouble for any incumbent, and not just one whose candidacy promised “hope” and whose mantra “Change you can believe in” was tailored to young voters. “This demographic is in play for 2012,” Generation Opportunity President Paul T. Conway (no relation to Kellyanne) told RealClearPolitics on Thursday. “This is a generation that believes in aspiration -- they are not well-wired for frustration. They don’t want to settle.” Della Volpe, who called his latest findings “an ominous sign” for the president’s re-election chances, concurs. “Short of a big improvement in the economy, it’s going to be tough,” he said in an interview from Boston. “ Obama won among young people not only because they voted for him, but because they volunteered and spread the word among their generation. They’re not going to want to do that on a lost cause.” In the Harvard poll, a plurality of respondents did indeed indicate pessimism about the president: 36 percent stated that they believe Obama will lose next year, while only 30 percent believe he will win re-election. Although such skepticism doesn’t necessarily correlate to future voting patterns, Della Volpe views it as a potential “leading indicator” of declining support. Other findings in the survey included: - Obama’s job performance rating among America’s 18- to 29-year-olds is at its lowest point since the IOP began polling on the Obama administration in 2009. - The president still leads the generic Republican nominee in a mock matchup by six percentage points, but that lead his shrinking. - Mitt Romney does best among the Republican presidential candidates in a general election matchup against the president, but still trails Obama by 11 points. - Only one-third of 18- to 29-year-olds are closely following Occupy Wall Street, and even fewer -- about one-fifth -- support the movement. This last finding helps explain why the president seems to be distancing himself from the Occupy crowd. Instead, the president’s advisers have him staging frequent “We Can’t Wait” events highlighting executive orders and other actions he’s taking on his own, a strategy designed to draw a contrast with a Congress that often tries to thwart the president’s economic initiatives. On the tactical level, the president’s re-election team is employing next-generation technology in an attempt to reach and re-energize young supporters from four years ago, as well as old-fashioned voting drives to sign up new millennials. “There are 8 million young Americans from 18 to 21 who weren ’t old enough to vote last time,” campaign manager Jim Messina reminded reporters this week. “Their brothers and sisters started this whole thing, and they’re going to finish it.” He’s right about that, and they started it on Facebook: That’s how the boisterous 2007 George Mason University event was organized. Originally, it wasn’t even Obama’s idea -- it was the students’ themselves. But four years later, those in opposition to this president have Facebook pages of their own, and have wised up to the possibilities of marshaling the technology preferred by young Americans. Generation Opportunity, one of the largest of the opposition groups, uses a hybrid of traditional grass-roots tactics and social media, including a Facebook page with some 2 million fans. Since June, it has been using text messages to communicate with its followers. And texting, not television ads or the telephone, is likely to be the preferred get-out-the-vote method in 2012 -- as a survey that Generation Opportunity is releasing next week underscores. Asked which of the following would make them more likely to vote (multiple answers were accepted), the respondents said the following: Facebook Message Reminder: 66 percent Text Message Reminder: 58 percent Email Reminder: 38 percent Public Service Announcement: 28 percent Phone Call: 13 percent None of the Above: 12 percent (Accepted only this response) But reaching young voters is one thing: Recapturing the unbridled optimism of 2008 in the midst of this lengthy economic stagnation and political gridlock is quite another. “The 2008 election was when these [young] people fell in love for the first time, politically,” Della Volpe said. “The analogy I’ve been using is that Obama and the millennials fell in love, and got married. Then they moved into a big house with a mortgage, kids, and all those issues. Things change -- and if you don’t communicate well, there are problems. In the case of Obama and the under-30 generation, I don’t think either side was prepared for the next phase of the relationship. So both are disappointed.” That’s one way to look at it. Here’s another: You often meet your “first love” in high school or perhaps college. But you don’t usually marry that person. You date them. And if things don’t work out, you break up. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
