But will they vote?
In the last midterm election, in 2014, only 16 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18 and 29 bothered.
In midterms over the last two decades, turnout by young people has averaged about 38 points below the turnout rate of people 60 and older. That has given older voters a huge say over where the nation is likely to be by the time those younger people reach middle age and the older voters have passed on.
I’m not criticizing younger non-voters. They have a lot on their minds — starting jobs, careers, families. Voting isn’t likely to be high on their list of priorities.
Also, unlike their grandparents — baby boomers who were involved in civil rights, voting rights, women’s rights, the anti-Vietnam War movement — most young people today don’t remember a time when political action changed America for the better.
Instead, during their lives they’ve watched big money take over Washington and state legislatures — which may explain why only about 30 percent of Americans born in the 1980s think it “essential” to live in a democracy.
Many young people have wondered if their votes count anyway, because so many of them live in congressional districts and states that are predictably red or blue.
Given all this, is there any reason to hope that this huge, diverse, progressive cohort of Americans will vote in the upcoming midterms?
My answer is, yes.
First, the issues up for grabs aren’t ideological abstractions for them. They’re causes in which millennials have direct personal stakes.
Take, for example, gun violence — which some of these young people have experienced firsthand and have taken active roles trying to stop.
Or immigrants’ rights. Over 20 percent of millennials are Latino, and a growing percent are from families that emigrated from Asia. Many have directly experienced the consequences of Donald Trump’s policies.
A woman’s right to choose whether to have a baby, and gays’ or lesbians’ rights to choose marriage — issues to which millennials are also deeply committed — will be front and center if the Supreme Court puts them back into the hands of Congress and state legislatures.
They’ve also learned that their votes count. They saw Hillary Clinton lose by a relative handful of votes in places such as Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
They know the importance of taking back governorships in what are expected to be nail-bitingly close races — in states like Wisconsin, Minnesota and Kansas. They’re aware of the slim but increasingly real possibility of taking back the Senate. (Who knew Ted Cruz would be so vulnerable? Who even knew the name Beto O’Rourke?)
As doubtful as these young people are about politics and the differences between the two parties, they also know that Trump and his Republican enablers want to take the nation backward to an old, white, privileged, isolated America. Most of these younger people don’t.
In my 35 years of teaching college students, I’ve not encountered a generation as dedicated to making the nation better as this one.
So I am betting on them this Nov. 6.
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