Where Have All The Young Republicans Gone?

There's a funny little story, perhaps apocryphal, about the 1968 election:

An editor at The New Yorker goes in to work the day after Election Day and is shocked by the Nixon victory. "I can't believe he won," the editor says. "I don't know a single person who voted for him."

I thought my own take on American politics might be similarly skewed. I'm 29 and I can practically count on one hand all the young Republicans I know. I'd always figured that was because of the circles I run in. But at long last some hard survey data is coming out on the subject of young people and politics. And it's confirming my initial hunch: there really are no young Republicans.

Well, almost none. Only 35 percent of young voters consider themselves Republicans. That's down from 55 percent in 1991.

Mainstream pundits tend to attribute this overwhelming anti-Republican shift to the experience of coming of age under George W. Bush, a deeply unpopular Republican president. Some on the right even blame The Daily Show for brainwashing a generation.

But the real reason, I think, for the leftward leanings of today's young people is fear of, and in many cases experience with, downward mobility.

In a recent New York Times/CBS News/MTV poll of 18-29 year olds, 48 percent of respondents said they expected their generation to be worse off than their parents'; only 25 percent who expected it to do better. This is particularly shocking coming from the young. What has drowned the traditional optimism of youth? For many, it is reality. For older Americans, further along in their lives and careers, with homes and even pensions, the retreat of the state and triumph of the market in recent decades hasn't been felt as starkly. But for young people, this harsh new unequal America of "you're-on-your-own economics," as economist (and Huffington Post contributor) Jared Bernstein calls it, is the only America they have ever known.

The social contract has been upended in recent decades and the burden falls squarely on the young. Most young people don't even know what a pension is -- not that they have much time to worry about retirement when facing the more pressing concern of finding healthcare in the here and now. Even for young people with a college degree, health insurance is no longer assured. In 2000, 70 percent of entry-level jobs for recent college graduates included employer-provided health insurance. Today less than 63 percent do. And those college degrees now come with an average of $20,000 worth of debt.

In the face of these new challenges facing young people, the federal government has had almost nothing to say. Federal support for student aid has languished under Bush; universal healthcare is a non-starter with the current administration. In an America in which decades of government inaction on higher education funding and healthcare now means a college degree guarantees five-figures worth of debt but doesn't guarantee a job with health insurance, a shift to the left is a rational response. No surprise then, that The Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found in a March poll that young people hold a more favorable view of government than other Americans. Young people know they need government and want it to act on their behalf.

The Democrats should pay attention. Rather than rest on their laurels, the party would be wise to play up the economic populism in policy, not just rhetoric.

Party identification starts young and rarely changes. Just ask young voters' grandparents: the generation that came of age under the last period of widespread social insecurity remains reliably Democratic to this day. If the Democrats can seal the deal with today's young voters, the American political landscape will shift left for years to come.