Millennial Generation

Tonight: Hais & Winograd on PBS Newshour with Judy Woodruff

Mike and Morley's book launch is off to a great start.  Tonight they'll appear on PBS Newshour with Judy Woodruff.  Be sure to tune in! For those of you who weren't able to join us for our DC launch, Millennial Momentum is available on Amazon.  As the book continues to gain traction, be sure to follow all of their happenings on their website and on their Twitter feed (@MikeandMorley).

 

This Week in The 21st Century America Project

Today, as analysts pore over President Obama's budget proposal, Millennial Generation activists are focusing on what his proposal means for students.  According to a write-up by Reuters:

President Barack Obama's proposed budget for the next fiscal year nips and tucks at individual grants for low-income students but the amount budgeted is twice as high as two years ago because the number of students has grown.

One tuck is a decision to end the year-round Pell which allows students to collect two grants in a calendar year if they attend summer school, which is most likely to be felt by for-profit schools, according to one analyst.

The other tuck is the elimination of interest subsidies for loans to graduate students.

The maximum award for a Pell grant remains $5,550, which more than nine million students expected to benefit from as part of the program.

The New York Time's David Leonhardt delves into the Pell provisions, writing:

When the Pell program recently expanded to include grants for summer classes, the additional cost was not supposed to be very large - roughly 1 percent of Pell's annual $30 billion cost in future years. Instead, many more students than expected have signed up for the program and are receiving federal grants for summer classes. In 2013, summer grants are projected to make up $5 billion of the program's total $36 billion budget - or a whopping 14 percent.

In my earlier post, I asked for evidence that the summer grants did not help lift graduation rates. The administration official preferred to ask a different question: What evidence exists that summer grants, which began last year, have lifted graduation rates? Or, as the official put it, "Is the evidence adequate to justify a $5 billion new entitas lement?"

The administration decided that the answer was no and that eliminating the program was the kind of budget cut that the government should be making, given the deficit. One reason to be skeptical that summer grants are making a big difference is that enrollment in summer classes has risen only marginally in the last year.

By contrast, the Republican plan would offer even sharper cuts.  Nick Anderson at The Washington Post writes:

House Republicans would lower the maximum Pell grant to $4,705 and cut other education spending by $4.9 billion, according to their spending proposal for the rest of the fiscal year that ends Sept. 30.

This narrow but important conversation about educational grants brings into focus an even larger and long over-due conversation about unemployment among young Americans.  University of Massachusetts Amherst Economics Professor Nancy Folbre explores this issue on today's New York Times Economix blog.  As she writes,

Neither lofty rhetoric surrounding a new "competitiveness agenda" nor bipartisan invocations of the importance of public investments in human capital can conceal the emerging reality.

Apart from the American Opportunity Tax Credit and modest increases in financial aid, public policy is not doing much to help young people from moderate- and low-income families who can't find a job or afford the education they need to improve their chances of finding one.

When last reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in August, unemployment among those aged 16 to 24 was about 19 percent - unchanged from the previous year. Partly as a result, community college enrollments, already on an upward trend, have grown in the last two years. However, state budgets, already groaning under fiscal pressure, have been unable to provide additional support.

As voters - particularly Millennial voters - begin to compare and contrast the budget proposals, this underlying question about investment in the largest generation in American history offers a stark contrast between the two parties. 

Release of NPI Study on Political Attitudes & Behaviors of Colorado & Florida Millennials

As the Director of the 21st Century America Project, I am proud to announce a new body of work that continues our tradition of tracking the evolving attitudes of the Millennial Generation.  As the largest, most diverse and most progressive generation in American history, we continue to analyze their place in the 21st Century Electorate. 

Today, our sister organization, the New Policy Institute, released two reports by 21st Century America Fellow and Millennial expert Mike Hais.  Both reports examine the results of two polls focusing on the political attitudes and behaviors of Colorado and Florida Millennials. 

Young voters were a key component of the voter coalition that won Colorado and Florida for Barack Obama and the Democrats in 2008. These new reports find that two years later, solid pluralities of Colorado and Florida Millennials (18-29 year olds) intend to vote for Democratic gubernatorial, U.S. Senate, and Congressional candidates in this year’s midterm elections. The Democratic vote intentions of Colorado Millennials are based on the continued identification of a majority of them with the Democratic Party, and of the greatest number as liberal or progressive. Finally, most continue to hold favorable attitudes toward the Democratic Party and to approve of Barack Obama’s performance as president.

At the same time, the extent to which these young Coloradans and Floridians turn out at the polls this fall is a major concern. Political participation, and the extent to which the political parties and other organizations attempt to enhance it, is the overriding issue in Colorado and Florida youth politics in 2010. 

Both report can be found on the New Policy Institute site: http://www.newpolicyinstitute.org/2010/09/report-the-political-attitudes-behavior-of-colorado-and-florida-millennials/.

For additional background, or to learn more about The 21st Century America Project, please visit our homepage: http://ndn.org/programs/21st-century-america-project.

NDN Fellows Mike Hais & Morley Winograd in The National Journal

Ron Brownstein has a great new piece out in The National Journal that takes a generational snapshot of the recession's impact on the Millennial Generation including their voting behavior and voting potential.  For those of us in the Millennial Generation, it is a surreal look at how our present may shape our future, and for those of us who study generational attitudes, it is as on-the-money as can be.  Be sure to read it and keep your eyes peeled for some awesome graphs from Mike and Morley as well as some quotes. 

Excited for Tomorrow's Presentation by Mike Hais and Morley Winograd on Emerging Political Coalitions

Tomorrow, Thursday March 4th at 12 noon, we're going to be having a great event here at NDN,  a special presentation on a new poll regarding the changing political coalitions of the 21st Century.  I encourage partisans and political idealogues of all stripes, as well as those interested in changing demographics to join us.You can rsvp to jsingleton@ndn.org or by following this link.

Part of what is so great about this presentation is that it takes a look at very important segments of the electorate (Millennials, Unmarried Women, African-Americans and Latinos) and really emphasizes how their power exists in their emergence as a coalition - and how that coalition is growing. 

I know that this is going to be an exciting kickoff for our 21st Century America project.

Center for the Millennial Era

Led by Fellows Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, authors of the critically acclaimed book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, & The Future of American Politics, NDN continues to be a leading voice on the Millennial Generation – those born between 1982 and 2003 -- and the profound attitudinal shifts of this generation, the largest and most progressive in American history.

The Honeymoon Isn't Over Until the Public Sings

While noting that President Barack Obama has higher job approval scores than any president in the past three decades, some in Washington also wonder how long this honeymoon can last and how much Obama can get done before it ends. The answer to those two questions lays in placing both Obama's performance and the questions themselves in historical context. 

As the late V.O. Key, the founder of modern political science research, pointed out in his masterful 1960 book, The Responsible Electorate, voters make their decisions in retrospect. Specifically, the public's judgment about how well a president is doing is based in part on how it evaluates his predecessors, especially the president who immediately preceded the current president. There is no doubt that at least a part of Obama's appeal is simply that he is NOT George W. Bush, the most poorly evaluated president in polling history. Similarly, President Jimmy Carter had slightly higher numbers than Obama at this point in his presidency, presumably because his style was so different than that of Richard Nixon, the only president forced to resign because of his malfeasance in office.

But positive attitudes toward Barack Obama are based on far more than negative attitudes toward his Republican predecessor. Outside of Carter, President Obama's approval score is higher than for any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, two Presidents who served toward the end of the last civic era in American history, a period that ended with the election of Nixon in 1968. In civic eras, Americans have much more positive attitudes toward political institutions than in politically divided and gridlocked idealist eras such as the Baby Boomer-dominated one we just left. In civic eras, the public wants and expects governmental action. By contrast, in idealist eras, presidential approval ratings tend to fall fairly quickly in a President's term, signaling the end of the honeymoon. This happens as soon as the President begins to take action that is bound to offend at least one half of the divided electorate.

Civic eras begin when a generation, such as today’s young Millennials, enters the electorate with an overwhelming preference for one party’s presidential candidate and his policy agenda. This causes the President’s popularity to go up or remain stable at a high level, not down, as the newly elected candidate takes steps to implement his campaign pledges. For example, Franklin Roosevelt, who kicked off America's last previous civic era in 1932, never really did see an end to his honeymoon in terms of decreasing popularity, at least not until well into his second term. FDR's Democrats even gained seats in both the House and Senate in 1934, the only time in U.S. history that the party of a newly elected president has ever gained seats in the mid-term elections that followed his winning the presidency. And, of course FDR won reelection to a second term in 1936 by an even larger margin than he did in 1932.

As long as Democrats in Congress support Obama’s blueprint for change, he should continue to accomplish big things, which will have the effect of reinforcing, not decreasing, his popularity. While many inside the beltway may not recognize that we have entered a new era in American politics, both the President and the public do.  Barack Obama should have the popularity to prove it for some time to come.

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Obama's Millennial Moment: President to Sign National Service Bill Today

In a ceremony fraught with political and generational symbolism, President Barack Obama today will sign the aptly named “Generations Invigorating Volunteerism and Education” (GIVE) Act (now the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act) at the SEED school, a DC public school that caters to underserved children. This ceremony caps his campaign promise to ask Americans to reinvigorate their country through community service. GIVE represents a major redemption of candidate Obama’s promise to offer his most loyal and largest constituency, Millennials, born between 1982 and 2003, a chance to serve their country at the community level and in return earn assistance with the cost of their college education.

Not everyone is ready to join hands and sing the praises of the concept, however. While GIVE enjoyed bipartisan sponsorship in both the Senate and the House, that didn’t prevent a majority of Republicans from voting against the bill on final passage. They complained that the bill was “too expensive” and would crowd out pure volunteer work with program participants receiving a modicum of financial support for their efforts from the federal government. In the House, 149 of 175 Republicans voted “no,” joined by 19 of their colleagues in the Senate, including the party's two top leaders. With all Democrats voting in favor of GIVE, the core of the Republican’s “Just say no” caucus demonstrated how out of touch with the Millennial Generation they are.

Of those Republicans expressing their opposition in the Senate, only one, John Ensign of Nevada, was from a state that Obama carried. Even though both Republican Senators from such bright red states as Utah, Georgia and Mississippi could see the potential value of increasing the number of volunteers and college students in the country’s civic life, both GOP Senators from South Carolina, Kansas, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Idaho made it clear that there were no circumstances under which their hostility to government could be softened by the merits of a patriotic cause.

As Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina put it on his Web site, "We need to recognize that this bill does represent a lot of what's wrong with our federal government today.... civil society works, because it is everything that government is not. It's small, it's personal, it's responsible, it's accountable.” And Louisiana Senator David Vitter spuriously argued, “This new federal bureaucracy would, in effect, politicize charitable activity around the country." Echoing Governor Sarah Palin’s horribly off key comment at her party’s convention last August that “the world isn’t a community and it doesn’t need an organizer,” these Republicans demonstrated just how out of touch they are with Millennial thinking.

Meanwhile, President Obama’s signature initiative is drawing Millennials ever closer to his political agenda. Chris Golden and Nick Troiano, Millennial co-founders of myImpact.org plan on launching a social network designed to connect volunteers and their experiences to others with similar interests as soon as the legislation creates a market for such sharing and support. Two Millennials who served a term in the New Hampshire legislature as they began their college careers, Andrew Edwards and Jeff Fontas, are now anxious to play “a central role in getting a ‘Spirit of Service’ off the ground” as their next step in a career of civic involvement. These are just two examples of Millennials deep desire to serve.

Already the shift toward civic involvement by this new generation, in contrast to its Generation X predecessors, has doubled the proportion of 16-24 year olds serving in the nation’s existing volunteer corps. Ninety-four percent of Millennials believes community service is an effective way to solve problems at the local level and 85 percent thinks that is true for national problems as well. CIRCLE, an organization devoted to tracking the interests of Millennials in serving their country, points out that the second most important factor, other than having time, “in deciding whether or not to get involved in an activity is the impact that they [Millennials] think it will yield.” With the elevated profile such activities will enjoy under provisions of the GIVE Act, it is not too difficult to imagine Millennials taking up over 80,000 of the 250,000 volunteer slots that will be made available under GIVE’s provisions—greater than the number of all Americans currently serving their country’s communities.

At the signing ceremony, the President will be joined by many other equally committed sponsors of the concept of national service, including Senator Ted Kennedy in honor of whom the final legislation was named "The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act,” to celebrate the country’s embrace of this new ethos of service. While Millennials across the country join with them to celebrate this historic change in America’s behavior, Republicans will be left, once again, locked in the dogmas of their past, unable to imagine a country where government encourages private initiative and the nation is far better off for it.

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