President Obama is holding a town hall meeting Thursday in California with a group he wants to mobilize for the midterm elections: millennial entrepreneurs. Millennials — young people ages 18-34 — are a key part of the Democratic coalition.
In just a few years, millennials will become the biggest demographic bulge in the electorate. For a very long time, young people’s partisan preferences looked pretty much like everyone else’s — they divided their votes between the two parties. After 2004 that changed, and they swung very heavily to the Democrats. But they’re not the Obama-adoring college students of 2008 anymore. They’re the generation hard-hit by the economy.
“Democrats have an advantage with them at this moment, but the one presidential candidate they really have voted for overwhelmingly is Barack Obama,” says Peter Levine, who studies young people’s civic participation at Tufts University. “And he’s not gonna be available anymore. … I think the Democrats have a job to shift the allegiance to the party. Quite a tough job … Republicans should make an active play for them.”
via Millennials Are Blue Now, But Party Allegiance Could Be Up For Grabs : NPR.
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