The United States is a Center-Left Nation

The Campaign for America's Future released a report saying the United States is no longer a center-right nation, but has shifted to a center-left nation.

The media still calls America a “center-right” nation, but “center-left” is closer to the truth.

On issues ranging from health care to energy, the public is more progressive than people think. Demographic groups from youth to Hispanics are voting farther left and in larger numbers than ever before. The new report the Campaign for America’s Future is publishing with Media Matters for America—"America: A Center-Left Nation"—documents the trends and challenges the mainstream media to recognize reality.

David Sirota takes a look at what this policy-wise...

The question is no longer whether America is progressive - the question is how that progressive bent can be transformed into policy, and why it isn't being legislated into law already? Why, for instance, with the majority of the public telling pollsters for years that we support single-payer health care, is that concept nonetheless "off the table" in Washington? Why, with most Americans supporting serious trade reform, is our government still considering a push for NAFTA-style trade policies? The list of similar questions is endless.

One obvious answer is the power of money: The interests that support the status quo have lots of cash, and they use the legalized bribery system known as campaign finance to preserve that status quo. Another obvious answer is that corporate conservatives in both parties have dominated Washington for the better part of three decades.

If you look at the political ideologies of the Millennial generation, those 18-30, you see a strong possibility of a progressive majority for years to come.

Millennials Favor Big Government

From Matthew Yglesias...

The left-wing tilt of the under-30 cohort is sometimes glossed as primarily driven by cultural issues. Millenials are, for example, much more favorable to gay rights claims. But as Ruy Teixeira points out it extends considerably beyond that to economic questions as well:

I assume this kind of thing will be pretty heavily shaped by assessments of what actually takes place in the Obama years.

**Update**

This graph shows data for a different question.  Marc Ambinder points out that it's not a 78%-22% split, but instead it's a 60%-27%.  Still a wide margin of millennials in favor of big government solutions.

Republicans Lose Generation Thanks to Bush

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com takes a fascinating look at voting patterns by age groups. Silver took a survey done by Gallup that calculated a partisan advantage by ages. He then looked at who was president when that person turned at 18.


Silver concludes that George W. Bush may have lost Republicans an entire Generation.

It's become common knowledge that the younger generation is highly predisposed toward Democrats. (Actually, that's not quite right -- they're more predisposed against Republicans than they are toward Democrats -- but the net effects on their voting behavior are probably about the same.) What's more remarkable, though, is how sharp the increase in the partisan ID gap becomes at about age 25. People aged 26-34 are pretty Democratic, put people aged 18-25 are really Democratic.

The former group came of age in the Clinton Era. Clinton, in the public's mind, is usually regarded as an average-to-slightly-above-average President, and the voters who came of age during his Presidency are associated with an average-to-slightly-above degree of Democratic affiliation.

The 18-25 year olds, however, came of age in the George W. Bush Era. And Bush, at least the vast majority of us think, was not a good President. In fact, most of us would say, he was a really awful President. And the people who turned 18 during his tenure are associated with extremely low levels of Republican identification.

The reason this is a real worry for the Republicans is because you can still see the echo of past Presidencies on the partisan ID trends today. Popular presidents are associated with above-average levels of party support among the generation that came of age during their time in office, whereas unpopular Presidents are associated with below-average ones.

Republicans are Losing a Generation

Young voters don't like Republicans.

From Political Wire...

A new Democracy Corps poll shows the Republican Party is "growing more and more irrelevant to America's young people. In marked contrast, young people's support for the President has expanded beyond the 66 percent support they gave him last November."

"Republicans struggle among young people for a very specific reason. At a time when young people are paying close attention to politics and when so many are struggling economically, even more so than older generations, the Republicans simply do not speak to the reality of their lives or to the issues important to them. This perception stands in marked contrast to their reaction to Barack Obama."

Century of the Common Iowan Turns 3 Years Old

I glanced at the clock and saw there was just 5 minutes till midnight. I had forgotten that Monday marked the 3rd birthday for Century of the Common Iowan and I only had 5 minutes to put up a post to sum up those 3 years. Yeah right.

Well here's what I got written in an hour...

As I look back, it is interesting how the focus of the blog has evolved over those years. In the blogs first year I wrote a lot about issues such as the rising cost of college tuition and Iowa's Brain Drain, immigration, and the need for a trade policy that protects American jobs. Year two was all about the Iowa caucuses. The following year I was able to sit back and watch the primaries play out and lead up to the general election. With the 2008 elections behind us, I have been able to write more about policies and topics such as the emergence of Millennials, social media, education, and the need to invest in a creative economy.

3 years, 2,226 posts, and over 132,000 visitors later and here we are in the best of times, in the worst of times. Our current economic and political situation find us in a situation where remarkable change can take place (and if it doesn't, it's because we didn't make them do it) . It is time for big ideas. In the coming year I hope to focus on the big ideas that desmoinesdem laid out that I wrote about last month.

• Clean elections
• Promoting clean energy solutions
• Local control of hog confinements
• Passenger rail
  
• Rural broadband.

These are not new issues. Many I have written about since I started this blog, but now is the time to stop talking about these issues and start seeing real action. On the campaign trail, Barack Obama told the story that one voice can change a room, one room can change a city, one city can change a nation. It is my hope that over the past 3 years, I have been able to change 1 person's viewpoint on these key issues and encouraged 1 person to take action on these key issues.

I'd like to end by repeating what Rekha Basu wrote about activism that I posted about earlier today..

Still, it takes courage to be an activist. It requires putting yourself out there in public, daring to take the unpopular position and getting hostile feedback... But those who understand history know well the role activism has played in winning rights and making a more just, humane and accessible America.

Join in. Post comments. Attend your local Democratic central committee meeting. Call your State Legislators. Get active in a community group or city board. Start your own blog. Heck, run for local office.

It's time to make a ruckus. Let's go!

Meet the Millennials

This is a cool site that has a ton of information about the Millennial generation (People age 18-30), how they voted in 2008 (68% for Obama to just 32% for McCain), and their political views (They support progressive issues).

Bipartisanship and Millennials

Eric Greenberg, the author of Generation We, took a look at Obama's attempt of bipartisanship on the Stimulus Bill...

Obama is not going to be a pushover for the Republicans, as his blunt "I won" in response to some of the Republicans' more extreme demands in last week's meeting about the stimulus package demonstrated. But those who want Obama to declare open warfare against the right are missing the point. Obama's conciliatory moves--from selecting Rick Warren, the evangelical pastor of California's Saddleback Church, to deliver the invocation at the inauguration to bending over backward to entertain conservative complaints about details of the stimulus bill--don't indicate weakness or uncertainty on his part. Instead, they reflect his consistent desire to position himself as the first political voice representing post-partisan America.

Like so much of what Obama has done, this strategy has its roots in generational change. In all of his political choices, Obama has his eyes on 95 million young Americans currently aged 9 to 30--the Millennials. The largest generation in history (more numerous even than the Baby Boomers), they played a major role in Obama's election, favoring him by fully two-thirds (66 percent), as compared with the 54 percent majority carried by John Kerry four years earlier. Out of 23 million Millennial votes cast, this produced a seven million vote plurality for Obama--virtually the same as Obama's overall margin of victory.

And as we discovered when we researched the values and attitudes of the Millennials for our book Generation We, for today's youth, the culture wars are over. The Millennials are more accepting of gender equality, gay rights, racial blending, immigration, and divergent political views than any other generation. This is true even of Millennials who consider themselves evangelical Christians (twenty percent of the young people we surveyed--or about 19 million nationwide). [...]

Our guess is that today's young people overwhelmingly like seeing their president extending a hand of cooperation to politicians across the aisle. And if the conservatives respond by biting it off, they will only further discredit themselves in the eyes of tomorrow's biggest and most powerful political bloc--and further solidify the Millennials' attachment to the Obama coalition.

Youth Turnout Numbers

The 2008 election saw an increase in turnout by youth voters (those age 18 - 29) and those voters overwhelming supported Democrats up and down the ballot.

Here are some updated numbers on youth turnout...

• 23 million young voters cast a ballot on Tuesday, an increase of 3.4 million over 2004.


• Youth turnout will likely top off at 52 - 53%. That would rival the 1992 turnout, and fall just short of the all time record of 55.4% set in 1972.


• Young voters accounted for 60% of the overall turnout increase. That for the whole electorate.

Here are a couple maps showing what the election would look like if the election was decided by 18-29 year olds that really show the trend torwards Democrats as more Millennials are becoming old enough to vote...

2004
2008

Millennials Unite: Will You Join Us?

Young Voters Support for Obama is Just the Beginning

Exit polls show that young voters (age 18-29) strongly supported Barack Obama this election. Without that support we would have seen yet another close election..

Exit polling indicates that Mr Obama won two-thirds of those voting under 30 years old against 32 per cent for John McCain. Compare that with a 54-45 margin for John Kerry in 2004 and a 48-46 margin for Al Gore in 2000. Consider this: if young people had voted for Democrats at about the same proportion of the overall electorate (52-46) as they had voted as recently as 2000 for Mr Gore and for many cycles prior, Mr Obama would not have won North Carolina or Indiana. Young voters also provided the margin of victory in key battleground states such as Florida, Virginia and Ohio. The youth vote expanded the map for Mr Obama; it put him over the top in states not won by Democrats in decades.

I am reading the book, Millennial Makeover: MySpace, YouTube, & the Future of American Politics. The books says the Millennials, those who have been in High School in the 2000's, are a civic-minded generation that is more engaged and focused on solving the nation's problems and less interested in partisan bickering.

This strong support for progressives from young voters in the Millennial generation is just beginning.

Less than half of the Millennial generation were eligible to vote yesterday, and all Millennials will not be in the electorate until 2016. We know that partisanship is a loyalty that develops early in life (pdf), usually during the first three major elections in which one participates. What the Obama campaign, and many others, did yesterday was lock in the loyalty of those who first participated in 2004. That's only a small fraction of the Millennials, and we have a long way to go still. I've written about this effect before, calling it the first of many thirds - the idea that engaging youth is a rolling process in which we are always ushering a new generation towards that third election that locks in partisan loyalty.

The 2008 election is just the tip of the iceberg of what could be 40 years of progressive policy reforms.

If You're Out There

There was unprecedented support for Obama by youth voters and Millennials, but we can't let up...

If you hear this message, wherever you stand
I'm calling every woman, calling every man
We're the generation
We can't afford to wait
The future started yesterday and we're already late

Video of Howard Dean at the University of Iowa

Howard Dean stopped at the University of Iowa to register voters on September 5th.

While stressing the importance to vote, Dean shows he understands the difference between the Baby Boom generation and the Millennial generation...

The central message of your generation to my generation is would you please stop fighting about all the things you can't agree and start working on the things you do agree on to make the world a better place.

Now it's just a matter of getting those under 30 to turn and vote.

Greatest Generation 2.0

Richard Doak's column in the Des Moines Register today is about the excitement of young people and their great possibility to influence change throughout the world.

The most fascinating possibility of 2008 is that the next Greatest Generation might be about ready to make its debut.

Hang around a college campus and it becomes easy to believe in the possibility. There's something about today's young people that inspires confidence.

Nationally, young adults are defying past patterns by turning out in record numbers to vote in the caucuses and primaries. They tend to vote differently from their elders, and there is an almost palpable sense among them that a new day is dawning.

These young adults are the leading edge of what has been labeled the Millennial Generation, people born between 1982 and 2003.

Some pop historians see history as being driven by generational change. If they're right, America is approaching a turning point, and it will be the Millennials who determine the new direction.

John Mayer had the hit song Waiting for the World to Change where he talks about how the Millennial Generation is fully aware of the problems the world faces. How can they not be with 9/11, Global Climate Change, Hurricane Katrina, and a misguided war in Iraq weighing so heavily during the time their worldview was being formed?

However before this election, they haven't been compelled to enter the political arena that they viewed as being stale, full of partisan bickering, and influenced by big money. Instead, they have chose to focus their energy on community action, through community involvement, church activities, environmental action, and building communities online.

This diary from Daily Kos that I posted about back in October further explains this...

...we look upon our broken system and choose not to scream at the rubble, but to take it upon ourselves to promote social change in our own way. So we volunteer. We join groups. We organize at the community level. We splinter off into thousands of glittering pockets of political change. We don't mobilize nationalize because there is no call, no sense of need to so.

The 2008 election has called this generation to become involved politically. With no incumbent running for their party's nomination, this election is truly a changing of the guard.

The candidates have called the Millennial Generation to become active in politics. Barack Obama has turned out huge numbers of young adults to support him, as has Hillary Clinton. Ron Paul has had tremendous success fundraising and organizing online. Chris Dodd called for people to get involved in national service. John Edwards started his campaign with the theme Tomorrow Begins Today and held his first event helping rebuild New Orleans.

John Mayer ended his song, saying that one day the Millennial Generation will have the power to change the world.

We keep on waiting waiting on the world to change
One day our generation
Is gonna rule the population
So we keep on waiting
Waiting on the world to change

That day is coming sooner than later.