A Republican pollster, Frank Luntz, says that the GOP has alienated the Millennial Generation. Millennials are the generation born in the ’80s and ’90s.
Luntz had this to say at the Republican Convention yesterday:
“We have lost. It’s not like we are losing, we have lost that generation. And I don’t care if you are a Democrat, Republican, independent, none of the above. The fact that 58 percent [of millennials] say socialism is the better form of economics, that is the damage of academia.”
“The No. 1 priority to me is what happens at universities. And yes, Capitol Hill matters, yes politics matter, but a whole generation is being taught by professors who voted for Bernie Sanders. That’s a problem that begs for a solution.”
As a Millennial, I totally agree with the sentiment. I may be biased, but there is no way that I could ever vote Republican. The GOP is trying to take us back to the ’50s with their anti-woman rhetoric, anti-gay rhetoric, and all of the other things that they are against. As an atheist, the GOP focus on religion has alienated me and many other Millennials. The Right is way too religious for my comfort and for many more people. According to a 2014 survey, 30 percent of adults had doubts about religion.
There are many reasons why my generation is more liberal than the previous generation. We depend on Liberal news sites and Facebook pages for our news. We are more socially liberal than our parents. We are struggling with mountains of student loan debt that our parents didn’t have, and we are not earning as much as previous generations. The average college graduate’s salary is somewhere into the $20,000 to $40,000 range. Around 32 percent of us are stuck living with their parents, and we are likely to be underemployed
Mr. Luntz had it right. The GOP has definitely alienated much of my generation. Here is a clip from the Ring of Fire podcast:
Image via Flickr by Gage Skidmore under The Creative Commons License 2.0.
