When Barack Obama was elected our first African-American president, he owed his victory to the under-30 set — which voted for him 66 percent to 32 percent.
Those were the days of the Obama Girl, free Dave Matthews tickets and a social-media campaign led by one of Facebook’s co-founders. Such was the margin and such was the enthusiasm, some predicted a permanent Democratic lock on the young.
These days, all the polls show that enthusiasm has disappeared. Our guess is that much of this decline might be explained by a new press release on unemployment by Generation Opportunity, a national, non-partisan, youth-advocacy group. It adjusted the standard unemployment numbers for those between 18 and 29 to include those who have given up looking for work altogether, and the findings aren’t pretty.
When labor-force participation is factored in, the unemployment rate for millennials jumps to 15.5 percent. For young women, the figure is lower — 13.1 percent — but for Latinos and African-Americans the respective figures are 16.2 percent and 23.6 percent. Altogether, it says we have 1.9 million unemployed young Americans who aren’t even counted in the official jobless rates because they’ve stopped looking for work.
We can’t predict how this will translate on Election Day. We’ll just note that young voters who thought Obama’s election heralded a millennial nirvana now face a reality of crushing student loans, a lackluster economy not producing enough jobs and health-care coverage through age 26 courtesy of mommy and daddy’s policy.
That may be change, but it’s sure not hope.