What are Millennials thinking?

Today, there an estimated 80 million American “Millennials,” the generational cohort comprised of those born between the early 1980s and early 2000s. But, given the current policy debates, you might not even know they exist. Matthew Warshauer, student director of Harvard’s Public Opinion Project, tells the HPR that, “If [Millennials] were more organized, they would be one of the largest voting blocs in the nation.” Unlike the ‘greatest generation’ or ‘baby boomers’, Millennials have not exerted their political power except during the exceptional 2008 election. With Millennial participation likely to recede this fall, political leaders are unlikely to address issues uniquely important to young people.
This is where the Public Opinion Project, known informally as the Harvard Institute of Politics (IOP) Survey, comes into play. The poll, regularly cited by diverse media outlets like the New York Times, MSNBC, and National Journal, sheds light on the dormant demographic that will eventually become the dominant force in American politics. Although no poll is a perfect prognosticator, the project provides a glimpse into future political possibilities, examining issues that will breed either future contention or consensus.
A Decade of Data
The survey began in 2000 as the brainchild of two Harvard sophomores interested in engaging American youth with public service. John Della Volpe, a public opinion professional and the IOP Director of Polling, believes that the students’ interest was piqued by the diminished political participation of youth during the 1996 presidential election. That lethargy threatened to repeat itself during the 2000 election, and the students hoped to gauge whether young peoples’ political apathy was mirrored by similar disengagement in community service.  The survey is now 12 years old and has been published 21 times, once per semester. This track record makes it one of the longest-running surveys specifically focused on American youth.
Frank Newport, Editor-in-Chief of the Gallup Poll, tells the HPR that, “As a rule of thumb, young people are more difficult to poll than old people.”  However, the current IOP version is unique among political surveys: it is conducted online, but uses a careful randomization process based on phone records to construct a “panel” of respondents. The survey, which originally queried only 18 to 24 year-old college students by phone, now draws from the larger pool of all 18 to 29 year olds, including graduates and non-college students. The online design improves upon traditional surveys because as Della Volpe explained, young people are less willing than their elders to respond to phone surveys. Using an online poll makes the survey process less onerous and more accessible for youth.
The past decade’s data from the IOP Survey reveals two macro-facts about Millennial political engagement. First, the engagement of young people in community service at the local level has generally stayed constant, and second, their engagement in electoral politics generally increased after 2000, peaking in 2008. Since then though, youth electoral participation has dropped.
Della Volpe argues that this trend can be explained by 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, which were both formative events for young people that brought home the tangible importance of politics and government. Access to absentee ballots increased for young voters during this timeframe, and the advent of the Internet facilitated campaigns’ efforts to target the youth vote. President Obama’s 2008 election campaign, which effectively targeted young people, was the modern high-water mark for youth involvement, the culmination of eight years of expanded efforts.
However, he says, “reality set in – the market crashed and politics became less relevant.” Since 2008, overall trust in government institutions has declined, dissatisfaction with government is up, and the astronomic expectations of the electorate have receded. During the 2010 midterm elections, youth participation in electoral politics suffered a steep setback, with participation likely to remain low on Election Day. While it is impossible to tell whether the recent decline in participation will continue long term, it is clear that low civic engagement will relegate the interests of Millennials onto the sidelines of critical political debates.
Predictably Unpredictable, Consistently Contradictory
Although Millennials are less inclined to vote this cycle, they still have staunch opinions on important issues. The IOP Survey finds that young Americans are more likely to identify as Democrats than Republicans, a hardly surprising finding. However, breaking the data out into crosstabs reveals that 18 to 24 year olds are more conservative and undecided about the election than the 25 to 29 year old cohort. Still, President Obama maintains a high level of support from young people: 52 percent of respondents approved of his job performance in the latest survey edition. Although Warshauer classified support for the President among Millennials as “ever-shifting,” he noted a majority of Millennials support him and that a plurality expected him to win reelection.
Switching to issues, the poll results illustrate that on many metrics Millennials have policy preferences that do not converge cleanly with their ethical beliefs. For instance, a highly popular position with bipartisan support among Millennials is the view that the U.S. should engage in coalitional foreign policy. But, according to Della Volpe, although about three quarters of young people support this proposition, they are torn between it and the equally widely held belief that the U.S. should always provide moral leadership on the world stage. Millennials’ opinions about abortion follow this contradictory streak.  According to a 2011 Pew Center for Public Religion poll, 60 percent of Millennials supported legal abortion in all or most situations, but only 46 percent thought that actually having an abortion was morally acceptable.
Furthermore, although the economy and depressed labor market weighed most heavily on Millennials’ minds, young people are nowhere near agreement on economic policy priorities. For instance, while pluralities supported the notion that the government should provide basic health care for those who cannot afford it and spend more to reduce poverty, pluralities also believed that tax cuts, rather than government spending, effectively stimulate growth.
One social issue that garners more agreement among youth is gay marriage: in the IOP poll, a strong plurality agreed that homosexuality was morally acceptable. Strong bipartisan support for gay marriage among Millennials has also been documented by many other organizations. A different Pew poll found that 49 percent of Republican Millennials and 44 percent of white evangelical Millennials supported gay marriage, levels of support far higher than found among their older counterparts.
Some Things Never Change
The relative strength of Millennial support for stances opposed by their elders suggests that the national political debate several years from now will be wildly different. Trends suggest that while economic debates will remain highly contentious, liberal social attitudes and policies will become more accepted. Newport however cautioned that these trends may moderate as Millennials age. He pointed specifically to religion: currently, Millennials are far less religious than their parents, but religiosity generally grows after age 24. He commented, “Age 23 is the Death Valley of religion – it’s the lowest point in American religious lives.”
According to Newport, religiosity falls from age 18 to 24, but then reverses course and grows steadily until age 44 because 90 percent of Americans will either get married or have children during that period of their lives. This religiosity is important because it is correlated with conservatism and membership in the Republican Party, and taking this into account, predicting the future of American political debate becomes even more difficult.
A prominent finding that is unlikely to change is that, just like their baby boomer parents, Millennials are willing to engage in cognitive dissonance. For instance, Millennials agree that generous and compassionate government is good, but simultaneously want lower taxes. On foreign policy, Millennials want to increase multilateral cooperation and shed solo interventionism, but yearn to keep America the potent moral force it has become on the world stage. Finally, concerning social issues, Millennials are willing to accept the legality of abortion, but are unwilling to accept its morality. That same contradictory streak has already manifested itself throughout prior generations. Some things never change.