It's A Youthquake!
STOP LOOKING AT THOSE POLLS RIGHT NOW! That shit will make you crazy, and, at this point in the cycle, the numbers are garbage anyway. Instead take a look at these beautiful young people who are showing up where it matters. This is the increase in early voting and absentee ballots [Edit] among 18-29 year olds over 2014.
- Arizona: +217%
- Florida: +131%
- Georgia: +415%
- Kansas: +191%
- Michigan: +128%
- North Carolina: +170%
- Nevada: +364%
- Ohio: +134%
- Pennsylvania: +397%
- Tennessee: +767%
- Texas: +448%
- Virginia: +351%
Nationwide, early voting is up 181 percent among late Millennials and the Gen Z kids old enough to vote. And young people prefer Democrats to Republicans by 34 percent.So maybe it's time to let 2016 go and stop fighting some bullshit battle with our own children. Because they are really, really great! TargetSmart crunched the data on early voting, so check out how awesome the young people in your neck of the woods are.
Harvard's Kennedy School Institute of Politics found that 40 percent of 18-29 year olds "will definitely vote" this year, despite the fact that Republicans are trying their best to disenfranchise them. If even 30 percent of the 18-29 year old cohort showed up, that would blow the previous midterm turnout record of 21 percent in 1994 out of the water. They understand why voting is important, and it sure as hell isn't because they read Atlas Shrugged and it changed their life, bruh!
- 56% support a federal jobs guarantee, with a $15/hour minimum wage and paid family/sick leave, rising to 63% among likely voters
- 55% support Medicare for All, rising to 67% among likely voters
- 56% support free tuition at public universities for students whose families make less than $125,000 per year, rising to 62% of likely voters
These are not selfish priorities. Unlike Paul Ryan, millennials didn't stand around the kegger fantasizing about gutting the social safety net so that rich people could pay lower taxes. They care about climate change,LGBTQ rights, and gun control.
And, by the by, kids who grew up in a digital world are a lot less likely to get taken in by handful of foreign trollbots seeding their media with manipulative horseshit. Probably because they don't spend their entire day camped out on a $70 billion platform colonized by Nazis, hoaxers, and scam artists because LOL, how else will I know if that girl in my math class twenty years ago had a baby? AHEM.
So no more crapping on the millennials! The kids are goddamn terrific, and they are going to save the country!
[TargetSmart / Harvard IOP Youth Poll]
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Liz Dye lives in Baltimore with her wonderful husband and a houseful of teenagers. When she isn't being mad about a thing on the internet, she's hiding in plain sight in the carpool line. She's the one wearing yoga pants glaring at her phone.
