Why Are Millennials Becoming Conservative? Last year studies emerged showing a trend towards traditional values and conservatism. Now we are seeing another survey from Reuters and Ipsos this time saying that young people, millennials, and moving towards the republican party and away from the democratsSUPPORT JOURNALISM. Become a patron athttp://www.patreon.com/TimcastSupport the show (http://timcast.com/donate)
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In March of 2017, a study was published addressing changes in youth gender ideology, showing a trend towards traditionalism.
A few months later, another professor came out saying that Generation Z is more conservative than millennials.
Now a lot of people on the right, they believe this because it favors their ideology.
Some people are suggesting that these are just a couple studies and they might not actually be representative of all Millennials or what the future actually holds because you have to take into consideration much more than just one study or a handful of professors.
But now we have another survey coming out from Reuters, this time an exclusive story, that the Democrats are losing support with Millennials and the Republicans are gaining support.
So if there is a trend towards traditionalism or conservatism, what is causing this?
And does this mean the next generation is going to be less progressive?
VirtualShield is a virtual private network service that can help keep you and your data safe as you browse the web.
Whether it's a hacker, big business, or government actor, your data can be stolen and spied on.
With VirtualShield, you can protect your privacy and add a simple layer of defense to your internet browsing.
Go to virtualshield.com slash timcast and use the promo code TIMCAST to get 20% off and no payments for 30 days.
For those that are interested, I've included the link to VirtualShield below.
A paper from David Cotter, professor of sociology at Union College, and Joanna Pepin, doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, said, This is a briefing paper prepared for the Council on Contemporary Families by Joanna R. Pepin, Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, and David A. Cotter, professor of sociology at Union College.
It starts with the overview.
We often think that each generation becomes more modern, egalitarian, and tolerant than the last.
And frequently this is correct, as it generally has been with changing attitudes about gender, work, and family.
Recently though, our research has shown a surprising twist to that pattern.
Looking at a survey that for nearly 40 years has asked high school seniors a series of questions about how men and women should be treated at work.
We see that on some of those questions, the answers have indeed continued to become more egalitarian.
But on others, what had been a trend towards equality stopped or even reversed in the mid-1990s?
In 1976, 82% of high school seniors already agreed or strongly agreed that women should be considered as seriously as men for jobs as executives or politicians.
By 1994, that had risen to 91%, a high that was sustained for the next two decades.
Similarly, in 1976, 76% agreed that a woman should have exactly the same job opportunities as a man.
This rose to 89% in 1994, and has remained stable through 2014.
Essentially, starting in the mid-1970s, youth's attitudes became more egalitarian and plateaued at a high level of egalitarianism since the mid-1990s.
But a very different and surprising trend is evident in attitudes about gender dynamics in families.
After becoming more egalitarian for almost 20 years, high school seniors thinking about a husband's authority and divisions of labor at home has since become substantially more traditional.
In 1976, when they were asked whether it is usually better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family, fewer than 30% of high school seniors disagreed.
By 1994, Disagreement with the claim that the male-breadwinner-female-homemaker-family-is-the-best-household arrangement has almost doubled, rising to 58%.
By 2014, however, it had fallen back to 42%, a decline of 16 percentage points since its peak in 1994.
Keep in mind, this is just one study.
But this is a study used by a lot of people to make the claim that, yes, young people are becoming more traditional, are becoming more conservative.
But there are other bits of evidence that may suggest this to be true.
July 13, 2017, from CBS Philly, Professor, Generation Z more conservative than millennials.
Jeff Brower, a professor at Keystone College who is studying the political habits of Generation Z, people born after 1996, told Chris Stigle during an interview on talk radio 1210 WPHD that kids and younger adults today have a more favorable
view of Donald Trump and may lean toward the Republican Party because they speak
more to issues that concern them.
The Republican Party in general really has an opportunity here to bring young folks into the
fold which they've had a very difficult time over the last couple decades to do.
They can do it early. Usually, Republicans attract folks as they get older. But Republicans can play
their cards right. Gen Z is primed to go into and embrace the Republican Party.
When I was at the Berkeley free speech event last year, many of the Trump supporters
parroted these statements saying that they genuinely believed Gen Z
is the most conservative generation since World War II.
And they thought that younger generations were trending towards traditionalism.
But keep in mind, as I mentioned just moments ago, people are going to select the studies that benefit their worldview and confirm their bias, and they're going to share those.
But we do have a survey from Reuters.
From this morning.
Exclusive.
Democrats lose ground with Millennials.
Reuters-Ipsos poll.
And it starts, enthusiasm for the Democratic Party is waning among
millennials as its candidates head into the crucial midterm
congressional elections according to the Reuters-Ipsos national opinion poll.
The online survey of more than 16,000 registered voters ages 18 to 34
shows their support for Democrats over Republicans for Congress
slipped by about 9 percentage points over the past two years
to 46% over Reuters.
overall, and they increasingly say the Republican Party is a better steward of the economy.
Millennial support for Democratic congressional candidates has declined over the last two
years, especially among young white people who made up a majority of the millennial vote
in 2016.
So here they have a graph showing the differences between 2016 and 2018.
And you can see from all people ages 18 to 34, support in 2016 was well above 50%, at
around 55% for Democrats and 27% for Republicans.
But in 2018, we can see that Democratic support from 18 to 34 year olds is at 46% and Republicans at 28%.
So it's not a huge gain for Republicans among all Millennials, but a general loss for the Democrats.
Personally, I think this can be explained by Bernie Sanders, and it's possible that many of these people have shifted towards the Democratic Socialists of America, of which I have been hearing a lot about, and hearing a lot of support for.
That is just my opinion based on my own personal experience, and isn't necessarily true, so keep that in mind.
All we can say for sure is that the Democrats have lost a decent amount of support in the last two years, and Republicans have only gained a slight amount among Millennials.
Interestingly enough, though, when we look at 18- to 34-year-old white millennials, we can see that in 2016, the Democrats had 47% support, and Republicans had 33%.
But in 2018, the Democrats fell to 39%, and Republicans increased to 39%.
33%, but in 2018 the Democrats fell to 39% and Republicans increased to 39%, meaning
in 2018 white millennials are now split evenly between Republican and Democrat.
And I would say this is much less surprising, but among 18-34 year old white men, the Democrats
had 48% in 2016 and Republicans had 36%, but in 2018 that has shifted dramatically, with
Democrats having 37% support and the Republicans increasing to 46%, meaning that the majority
of support in 2018 among white male millennials is for the Republican party.
I traveled around covering many of Trump's campaign stops in the election, and when I talked to older Trump supporters, they tended to say that the reason they supported Donald Trump was because of economic issues, trade issues, things like NAFTA or the TPP.
These were free trade agreements with the United States and other countries.
But younger people tended to say to me, They supported Trump because they didn't like political correctness.
They said that if we couldn't address our problems because speaking about it was taboo, how would we actually solve them?
And so they opted for voting for Trump.
To give you a simple understanding of what this graph means, support for the Democrats among all millennial demographics is down.
And among white male millennials, support for the Republicans is now greater.
Then it was for the Democrats in 2016.
And among all white millennials, it is now evenly split between Democrats and Republicans.
And just the other day, BuzzFeed News ran a story called Youth of Today, in which they talk about millennials becoming conservative.
The story titled, Meet the New California Counterculture, College Republicans.
And that's something we've actually heard many times.
Paul Joseph Watson says this, that conservatism is the new counterculture, and now we can see that BuzzFeed is actually parroting that same sentiment.
Now, I don't want to get into too much detail about this story, because it's simply a story about Milo Yiannopoulos and California college Republicans.
But overall, the story talks about how college Republicans exist, and it is a new California counterculture, and it highlights the views of many of those who supported Milo and are, well, California college Republicans.
I'm not going to read through this story as a source, because it's kind of just an anecdotal experience of someone going to one of these conventions, but I think this is another example of this idea that young people really are becoming conservative.
So, why is this relevant?
Well, this is going to mean something serious with the midterm elections coming up.
If the Democrats are losing support for Millennials across the board, and among white Millennials, support for Republicans is going up, that means we might actually see the Republicans retain control.
And this is exactly what Trump would want, because according to Slate, Trump says Democrats will try to impeach him if they take control of Congress.
President Donald Trump appears to be worried that he could face impeachment if Republicans lose the majority in the House of Representatives in a campaign-style rally in Michigan that the president attended Saturday night as an alternative to the White House Correspondents' Dinner.
Trump said it was very important for our supporters to vote in the upcoming midterm elections.
We have to keep the house because if we listen to Maxine Waters, she's going around saying, we will impeach him, we will impeach him, Trump said, as the crowd booed when he mentioned Waters' name.
Then people said, he hasn't done anything wrong.
Oh, that doesn't matter.
We will impeach the president.
Nancy Pelosi, though, has warned fellow party members that impeachment talk would not help them win in the midterms.
I have said over and over again that I don't think we should be talking about impeachment, Pelosi said on Thursday.
I've been very clear right from the start.
The California lawmaker said, all the talk about getting rid of Trump only helps the GOP.
In order to truly know if young people are becoming more conservative, we have to look at many more sources.
But when Reuters puts out a survey that says, according to Reuters and Ipsos, they are seeing a trend towards the Republican Party, I think, in my opinion, it is fair to place that bet that we are seeing young people become more traditional and become more conservative.
Now, if you were to ask me why this is happening, I would say there's a few reasons.
The GOP kind of changed with Donald Trump.
In the 90s and 2000s, they were against gay marriage.
There were a lot of positions that were more focused on religion.
And Donald Trump, at the RNC, actually got the Republicans to cheer for the LGBT community, thus showing that the GOP became more socially liberal than it had been in the past.
And in my opinion, that's going to attract young people who are more tolerant or more socially liberal.
That and the idea of political correctness.
There are a lot of young people who just don't like it, as I mentioned earlier.
But why the Democrats are losing support is simple.
What they did to Bernie Sanders has angered a ton of people who used to be on the left.
Most notably is Cassandra Fairbanks.
who is a well-known Trump-supporting personality.
She used to be a die-hard Bernie supporter, and now she has moved towards the right.
She is a millennial who is now supporting the Republican Party.
And then why I think Democrats are losing support outside of what the Republicans are gaining is simple.
The Democratic Socialists of America, where many Bernie Sanders supporters have gone after the DNC pulled their shenanigans.
So it'll be interesting to see what happens with the midterm elections.
But one thing I think is fair to say is that young people are becoming more conservative, and the Democrats are losing support.
At least, that's what Reuters tells us, and we do have these other studies.
So let me know what you think in the comments below, and we'll keep the conversation going.
Do you trust these studies, or do you think it is just selective confirmation bias, that people who are conservative are choosing to look at these specific studies to support their own worldview?
