A.B. Stoddard: Why the youth vote is key

The youth vote isn’t what it used to be, and that could be good news for Republicans in 2016. 

Young voters who supported President Obama in 2008 by more than 60 percent have since struggled with burdensome student debt and to find a job and anchor themselves in the middle class. The millennial generation, ages 18-34, now faces more poverty, unemployment and diminished wealth and income than the two previous generations — an opening for Republicans they are prepared to exploit.

{mosads}Presumed Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton will need an even larger youth vote than Obama because she is unlikely to win the same share of African-American voters as he did, yet her standing with them is weak. An NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll out this month shows her losing them 33 percent to Bernie Sanders’s 48 percent. A recent Economist/YouGov poll showed high negatives for Clinton among young voters, including young women finding her unfavorable 34 percent to 20 percent.

Polling from Harvard in April showed that while younger voters still prefer a Democratic president to a Republican in 2016, liberal millennials only outnumber conservatives 37 percent to 35 percent, and 52 percent of young people disapprove of Obama’s record. The survey found 18 percent are looking for work and 73 percent of them believe they will have difficulty finding employment after graduating. And respondents, long before the Paris attacks, said they disapproved of Obama’s handling of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) by 59 percent.

It’s been a year since the youngest woman ever was elected to Congress, and Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) is working hard to teach her colleagues — most of whom are twice her age, on average — not only how to talk to younger voters but the necessity of it. 

Her data: They will comprise a plurality of voters in next year’s elections, they are the largest generation in our workforce and they will be a majority of the workforce by 2020. Her task force on millennials has already held three hearings, one of which on Monday featured witnesses from Uber, Google and Pricewaterhouse Coopers, on the roll of millennials in the workforce, and plans a report of its findings as well as policy proposals.

“Republicans have an opportunity to make the case to younger voters about how top-down government doesn’t work. Think about how the economy has changed in six years. Uber didn’t exist but it added $3.5 billion just this year,” she said. “We have to talk about how we construct an empowerment economy, and how to make our government more modernized with policies that support entrepreneurs.”

Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.) who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, agrees that a focus on economic policies can help the GOP engage millennial voters, despite the fact that they largely align with Democrats on social issues. 

“They are free market warriors, and they want competition,” said Walden, noting that in major cities run by Democrats, new companies like Uber and Airbnb are being slapped with new regulations and fees. “Our job as a party is to figure out how do we advance technology, competition and innovation?”

Millennials eschew traditional news sources but remain engaged and need to be reached where they are — on social media platforms, says Stefanik, 31. While her generation may have been raised in a time of government gridlock and increased partisanship, “they don’t tune out policy,” she said. “They just don’t see government as the solution.” 

The Republican National Committee’s Campus Captain program, which matches young volunteers with voters in almost every college in almost every battleground state, will be campaigning against Clinton and Democratic candidates next year, knowing that cutting into the millennial voting bloc could alter races often decided on the margins.  

Stoddard is an associate editor of The Hill.