Millennials started getting the vote in 2000. Many crucial elections since then have been extremely close. They had the opportunity to have the decisive say in outcomes. How's their track record of choices working out?
Even now, people 20-40 are a minority of the voting populace.
It is unfair to blame the outcome of all the elections, and hence the policies of the last 20 years, on a minority people eligible to vote.
The presidential election was decided by less than 600 votes.
It's hard to make the case that they've been able to decide any generational issues yet.
We equipped you with the vote starting at age 18. Voting age was lowered from 21 in 1971. So you had a head start on many boomers and all the silent/greatest generations.
> Just be sure to step aside when the time comes so we can actually make some meaningful change in the world.
Oh, how I yearn for that day to come.
The one does not follow from the other. Even assuming that it's reasonable to consider a monolithic Millennial voting bloc, they may have been "extremely closely" outvoted.
"This election [2016] was effectively decided by 107,000 people in these three states [MI, PA, WI]. Trump won the popular vote there by that combined amount. That amounts to 0.09 percent of all votes cast in this election." [2]
[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/05/16/478237882/millennials-now-riv...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/2016-electi...
The presidential election that year was decided by less than 600 votes.
> Why didn't previous generations make the "decisive" vote?
Previous generations did make the decisive vote, in their favor. Millennials turn out to vote at the lowest rate of any age group, and so have missed their chances to be the deciders.
> Also, are millenials supposed to vote as a unit? I thought we were all individuals.
Millennials might be expected to vote their self-interest, in the aggregate. The linked article suggests the possibility that they could have done a better job at that.
Probably not any more, since the subsequent generation can now vote and is fully within, while leading edge Millenials are out of, the 18-29 age group that has consistently been the lowest turnout age group. People are so used to conflating “Millenial” and “young adult”...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/05/16/478237882/millennials-now-riv...
This is just restating the long established trend, true across generations, that the youngest-voting age group turns out at the lowest rates (it would be interesting, perhaps, to compare Millenials against other generations voting patterns at the same age to separate out generational from age trends, but this is just misattributing a consistent age trend to the generation that happens to be in an age category at the time of the analysis.)
1964, actually, but only in Georgia. (Georgia lowered voting age to 18 in 1943, well ahead of the 26th Amendment.)
> Turnout among 18-24 year-olds was over 50%.
There were like four states with a voting age lower than 21, and only one with 18. And it was the height of the Vietnam draft (hence the renewed push for lowering voting age, which had its first big—but nationally unsuccessful—push during WWII.)
So, you've got both external conditions motivating elevated youth vote and stats skewed so that the youngest part of the 18-24 range is underepresented in eligible pool, so it's mostly reflecting the 21-24 subset. But even with all that, and it may not be a big distortion: it's still the worst age group for turnout in those elections, and the movement between and immediately after those years follows general turnout the same way it does through the Gen X periods to the (relative) youth voting surge in 2004-2008, which seems to have subsided in 2012.