Winning the Millennial Vote in the 2012 Presidential Election Will Be …
Millennials aren’t unique. Our adolescence was the same as every other generation before it – full of angst, rebellion, and self-discovery, except instead of Metallica we listened to emo rock. Teenagers don’t like being told what to do, regardless of whether they’re in 1968 or 2012. And therein lies the biggest problem with voting.
People either care or they don’t. If they care who becomes president, they’ll go vote for their party’s nominee and call it a day. If they don’t, they won’t leave work early and wait in line at the polls. If they really care, they’ll donate money or time to a campaign and maybe share some links on their social media to persuade some friends. If they really don’t care, they won’t even watch the returns on election night and will just hear about it when they wake up the next day.
But as millennials we are not real people yet. We’re just graduating from high school or college and we don’t really know what a mortgage is or a 401K, and most of us still have hourly wages and the diminishing, but ever-present, internalized belief that we are invincible. If Generation X’s theme song was “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, and Generation Y’s theme song was “Smells Like Teen Spirit” by Nirvana … all we can hope is that our’s isn’t Ke$ha’s “Tik Tok.” We millennials who grew up with crushes on Zach Morris and Hilary Duff, we who fought over which color Power Ranger we would be and are now fighting for coveted spots in grad schools and top internships. We can relate to our parents perhaps better than our parents could relate to theirs; at the very least most of our parents can text us back.
A key characteristic of a young person is that they will argue where an older person has already tired of arguing. That’s why 2008 was such a big year for the millennials – we could argue all day long about Obama. Was he black, or was he half-black, or was he half-white? Would you seriously not vote for him just because he’s black? He grew up in Kansas, of course he can understand
You can read the rest of this article at:: http://www.policymic.com/articles/6802/winning-the-millennial-vote-in-the-2012-presidential-election-will-be-impossible-if-you-can-t-make-us-care
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Posted by RobertButler
on Jun 8 2012. Filed under 2012 Presidential Campaign.
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