Millennials embrace a soft libertarianism

Matt Baauerlein writes that the Democrat

party’s grip on the young may be loosening.

The Senate contests were last fought in 2008, a presidential year, and here the plummet was startling. In North Carolina the rate at which young people voted Democratic fell to 54 percent this year from 71 percent in 2008. Virginia saw it slide to 50 percent from 71 percent. In Arkansas and Alaska, a majority of young voters went Republican.

A Pew Research Center survey released in March found that while 40 percent of millennials in 2006 considered themselves political independents, now 50 percent of them do.

When it comes to young voters, liberal politicians are victims of their culture-war success. They have pressed a laissez-faire posture in moral and private matters, and have won. But millennials have adopted not the posture of their liberal elders that fostered group identity (be it “union member,” “disenfranchised minority” or “F.D.R. Democrat”), but a soft libertarianism that makes individual preference king.

This doesn’t mean that the youth vote is going Republican. Party identity is meaningless to half of them, and that rate will rise. They pose a new kind of constituency, fluctuating and unpredictable, socially liberal but willing to back conservatives now and then, interested less in party ideologies than in actual individuals put forward as candidates, such as the cool young black senator in 2008. They form one-sixth to one-eighth of the electorate. If politicians take anything away from 2014, they must find a way to cultivate these voters that moves beyond party labels — indeed, beyond identity politics entirely.

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