CHARLEMONT — With all the clamor and divisiveness about the upcoming presidential election, where does the youth vote stand?
Former Pew Research Center executive and author Paul Taylor will discuss this and other generational changes in his talk, “Millennials and The Next America” on Wednesday. This is part of the Charlemont Forum at the Charlemont Federated Church, and the free program begins at 7 p.m.
Taylor says today’s 77 million millennials, ages 18 to 35, are the most liberal generation the country has ever produced. They are also more racially diverse, more accepting of same-sex marriage, immigration and aware of economic inequality. In Pew Research polls, more than half of millennials identify politically as “independent” — which is more than any other generation before them.
Taylor believes it’s unlikely the majority of millennials would vote for Donald Trump, but adds that Hillary Clinton may have to work harder for voter turnout among the millennials.
“Obama and Sanders have been the two candidates who were able to get their message out to millennials — Bernie Sanders with his economic message and Obama with (his message of) hope and change,” Taylor remarked. He said the polls show Hillary doing better than Trump with young voters at this point.
Taylor said Sanders won between 70 to 75 percent of the millennial vote in the primaries because they saw him as “authentic, an outsider, and not tainted by being part of a corrupt system.”
He said Clinton may not have as much appeal as Sanders, but “in Donald Trump, the alternative is so unpalatable.”
Although optimistic about their future, millennials are also the first generation in modern history to have less wealth and more debt than their parents’ generation had at the same stage of life. As a result, millennials are taking longer to reach adult milestones: living at home with parents longer, marrying later and having children at an older age. Only 26 percent of millennials are married, compared to 48 percent of Baby boomers when they were under 35.
“They’re the transitional generation to America’s majority, non-white future,” Taylor wrote in an essay for “The Catalyst,” which is published by the George W. Bush Institute.
He said 44 percent of millennials are “non-white” — Hispanic, black, Asian and mixed-race. About 50 percent polled think interracial marriage is “a good thing for society,” and about 35 percent think children being raised by same-sex couples is a good thing, according to Taylor. In 2013, about 16 percent of all marriages were between spouses of different races or ethnicity, he said.
“Millennials’ liberalism derives largely from something they’ll never age out of — their diversity,” Taylor says. “They’re the transitional generation to America’s majority nonwhite future.”
“If not for the votes of Millennials in 2012, almost certainly this year, the incumbent president running for re-election would have been Mitt Romney,” Taylor said. If the 2012 presidential campaign been held only among voters age 30 and up, Romney would have won by 2 million votes instead of losing by 5 million votes, according to Taylor.
He said Millennial voter turnout for Barack Obama’s re-election bid in 2012 was about 40 percent. But in the 2014 national election, without a presidential race, Millennial turnout was 20 percent.
Taylor’s book, “The Next America: Boomers, Millennials and the Looming Generational Showdown,” draws on his work at Pew Research Center to reflect on the political impact of young voters between the ages of 18 to 35.
Besides serving as the Pew Research Center’s executive vice president, Taylor served as president of the Alliance for Better Campaigns, a public interest group that sought to improve the content of political campaign communication on television. Its honorary co-chairs had been Walter Cronkite and former Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter. Before that, he was a newspaper reporter for 25 years, including at The Washington Post.
The Charlemont Forum is supported by the Cultural Councils of Plainfield, Conway, Charlemont, Hawley, Amherst, Heath, and Shelburne through funding from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.