More Than a Numbers Game: Explaining the Lack of a Powerful Youth Lobby

Over at the HuffPo this week, Don Tapscott breaks down a recent Harvard poll that finds a majority of 18-29 year olds disagree with Obama’s handling of major issues and that fully 76% of respondents either disapproved of the direction the country was headed in or didn’t know whether things were getting better or worse. What Harvard didn’t ask was what these young voters planned to do about their dissatisfaction. But I’ve got your answer right here -  not a damn thing.

Young voters might have turned out to support Obama in droves (and according to the Harvard poll, most say they’d do it again in 2012), but when it comes to identifying and advocating for their own political hobby horses, Gen Y is asleep at the switch. Mobilizing to lobby for their own interests isn’t on the radar. While I offered tongue-in-cheek reasons in one of my earliest W&W pieces, Notre Dame marketing prof and Millennial issues blogger Carol Phillips discusses the phenomenon with a little more gravity in one of her recent posts. She suggests that it may be the burden of  student loan debt that’s crushing Gen Y’s spirit and sapping their ambition. But if that’s the case, why aren’t we seeing a mass movement of young voters getting behind her  laudable idea of using economic stimulus money to reduce educational debt? Is it the lack of an institutional flag-bearer and champion? The result of coming of age in an era in which the course of our future didn’t strictly require us to be socialized or self-identify as political or social change agents?

I think the lack of a highly visible national youth lobby might have a little something to do with the fact that “youth” is a transient state and therefore not much of a compelling linchpin for identity or interest-driven politics. Being a woman or an evangelical Christian or a large-scale corn farmer is a much more static identity and thus lends itself more readily to an investment of time and energy in pursuing fairly constant long-term interests. Being a young voter, however, is time limited. Today’s 18 – 29 year-olds are tomorrow’s middle-aged suburbanites. Maybe it isn’t so much political apathy  but a canny self-interest and awareness of the sometimes glacial pace of policy change that explains the lack of a Millennial political movement. Why get invested in lobbying on youth issues now when you’re likely to have outgrown them before ever reaping the benefits of your advocacy efforts?

Unless we’re talking about student loan debt. Those tabs are gonna outlast even the cockroaches.