The increasing youth vote has more to do with the replacement of the older Gen-X or "slacker" generation with the younger Millennial Generation, a post baby-boom cohort that now holds the political reins of the youth voting bloc.
At the 16th Annual California Policy Issues Conference in Los Angeles last week, Heather Smith, executive director of Rock the Vote, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, youth voting initiative that started 18 years ago in Los Angeles, said today's 18-24-year-olds - unlike the Generation X that preceded them - are very motivated to vote. "For the Gen X-ers, politics was so uncool," began Smith. "Now, everyone is talking about politics with friends and family."
This year marked the highest youth vote turnout since 1972, when a record number of young people went to the polls motivated by the Vietnam War and the draft.
I'm not going to falsely claim we were the most politically active generation, because we weren't. Yet to compare the actual voting #'s between generations is a false argument. You see Gen X is a teeny-tiny segment of the population smacked between the 2 largest generations in our country's history (babyboomers and millenials). Even if 75% of GenX voted in 1992 we couldn't have matched the voting #'s of this past year's 20 somethings.
1 comment:
hmmmp. i saw this coming...
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