The Plight of Party Politics: Millennials Aren't Buying In

A recent set of surveys conducted by Pew Research have uncovered some rather interesting facts about Millennials also known as America’s Most Screwed Over Generation Ever.  

For a decade now, Millennials have been asked to serve and die in two undeclared wars, work for free at stingy prestigious companies, and pay double the prime interest rate just to go to school. 

Furthermore, Millennials are at  high risk for chronic homelessness, as profit-driven property management companies drive up rents to take advantage of our nation’s desperate mass transit crisis, and cash in on a generation whose members are unlikely to own a home anytime soon.

But the author digresses; Pew has discovered that while Millennials are likely the most liberal generation in recent history, exactly half are politically unaffiliated.

There are plenty of reasons one could attribute to Millennials for bucking the trend of older generations to be a part of the dual-party system. One reason is the explosion of social media, which has made every political scandal reported in the news more easily accessible by a generation averse to traditional media.  The result is that these scandals are more easily assignable to either party’s elected members, driving up cynicism and distrust of institutional political players.

An aside: that’s why candidates like the youthful Beth Daly are so important to Maryland’s political future. Beth’s entire field operation was driven by Millennials who felt that they could connect and rely on her to look out for their interests.

Another potential reason is the Obama Hangover Effect: young people turned out in record numbers to deliver a message of hope and change at the ballot box in 2008. Six years later, unemployment, job prospects and financial hardship are bywords for the everyday existence of young people in America, and the lack of tangible progress in tackling any of these has left America’s uber-liberal Millennial generation feeling more to the left than Democrats are willing to go, or at least more creative and out of the box in how they would tackle these problems.

Whatever the case may be, for Montgomery County’s newly elected Democratic and Republican Central Committees (the local party affiliates of either national party) will have their work cut out for them: how do you get Millennials to buy back into the dual party system?