Generation Xers are the slowest in American history to rise to positions of national leadership...

Generation Xers, now ranging in age from 23 to 43, are the slowest in American history to rise to positions of national leadership. A typical generation, 42 years after its first birth year, has captured roughly 15 percent of the nation’s Senate seats, House seats, and governorships. No prior generation has captured less than 10 percent. Xers came into this election with 5 percent. Perhaps these numbers befit a free-agent generation of hustlers, temp-workers, entrepreneurs, and (increasingly) married-with-children “nesters” who show cynicism about politicians and civic affairs, distrust ideology, get much of their political news on comedy shows, and vote at record-low rates. The nonvoting reputation will not change with the 2004 election. The 30-44 age bracket is the only group whose voting rate did not rise significantly. Compared with the 2000 election, their share of the total vote dropped from 33 percent to 30 percent.

Among Xer candidates, the winning style is a sort of understated pragmatism. Three new Xers won seats in the Senate (making five Xer Senators total), all born in 1961, the same birthyear as “Generation X” novelist Doug Coupland. One, the rising Democratic star Barack Obama, has been justly highlighted by the media for his plainspoken charisma. Two others, both Republicans, have as yet received little attention--David Vitter, who stunned everyone by winning over 50% of the vote in Louisiana against two Democrats, and John Thune, who unseated a Senate majority leader (Tom Daschle) for the first time in fifty years. The Gen Xer share of leadership will begin to expand at the expense of Boomers after 2010, and this generation can expect to reach its peak of political power around the years 2020-2025.

A huge political chasm separates older, married Gen Xers with children (very conservative voters) from young, single, childless, 20somethings (very liberal voters). Gen Xers over age 30 voted heavily for Bush, attracted by traits that might not persuade older voters—Bush’s sound-bite clarity, the simplicity of his world view, and his decisiveness, right or wrong. Exit-poll results do not enable 20something Gen Xers to be separated from Millennials, but their past voting behavior suggests that they gave Kerry his strongest generational support, in turnouts well below the national average.

The Millennial Generation (born since 1982)--today’s small kids, high school students, collegians, and newly minted 2004 college graduates—show early signs of serious political focus and activism. Throughout America, blue zone or red, colleges have reported a huge new tidal wave of political activism this year on their campuses. Initially, there was a presumption that Kerry could sweep to office on this tide of youth voting. It’s true that, had he won, the youth vote would have been the reason. But when those votes weren’t enough to defeat Bush, the media expressed disappointment in the youth turnout.

These stories got it all wrong. In fact, according to the AP-media exit polls, the presidential-year voting rate among 18- to 29-year-olds has grown from 35 percent in 1996, to 42 percent in 2000, to 52 percent this year. The absolute number of young voters has risen from 14.5 million to 21.0 million in just eight years. The Los Angeles Times exit poll shows, even more dramatically, that the jump in young voting rates since 2000 has outpaced that of every older age bracket. In the ten most closely contested states, according to one analysis, the young-adult voting rate rose to 64%, exceeding the national average in any recent presidential election. It is also widely believed that college-age Millennials drove much of this improvement.

Like late-wave Xers, Millennials voted for Kerry over Bush, by a solid 55 to 45 percent margin. Yet if these two groups voted the same, their reasons were different. The heavily urban late-wave Xers, responding well to “vote or die!” T-shirts and infotainment concerts, tend to dislike Bush for what he does with government. Many are libertarians at heart who want to keep the war on terror and moralizing legislation out of their lives.

Millennials, who take politics more earnestly, tend to dislike Bush for what he does not do with government—on issues ranging from deficits and global warming to health insurance and wage gaps. Sixty percent of voters under age 25, more than voters in any other age bracket, believe that “government should do more to solve problems.” Like the declining senior-citizen G.I.s, the rising “junior-citizen” Millennials are more inclined than other generations to vote for activist government. That’s a cloud on the horizon for today’s GOP, and a silver lining for the Democrats in 2008 and beyond, as more of them reach voting age.

Millennials will be the nation’s largest generational voting bloc by 2020, and will reach their peak of political power around 2040-2045. By then, one of two things will have happened. Either the Boomers’ culture war (and foreign wars) will have ripped the nation apart, and the 2004 election will be viewed as an historic turning point, or else that all will be half-forgotten, like Woodrow Wilson and World War I were for Boomers growing up, deserving of no more than a page or two in high school history texts.

William Strauss and Neil Howe are co-authors of several books about American generations, including the forthcoming “Millennials and the Popular Culture.”
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This post was made on behalf of The Fourth Turning authors, William Strauss and Neil Howe. Visit their web site at http://www.lifecourse.com

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