The Facebook Election

With their voices and votes, the under-30s are galvanizing politics. But they're not easy to typecast, as an exclusive RD poll reveals.

Polling Millennials

The rally was held early in the Presidential cycle -- the first week of February 2007, a full 21 months before Election Day -- and its guest of honor wasn't yet an actual candidate. But at the Johnson Center on the Fairfax, Virginia, campus of George Mason University, an electric charge was in the air. When Sen. Barack Obama strode onto the stage, shrieks of "I love you!" rang through the hall.

Via Facebook, the social-networking website invented in 2004 by a Harvard undergraduate, word had already spread among students about the Senator and the issues. The news about this campus event went viral in minutes, relegating leaflets and phone calls to the junk pile.

In January 2007 Farouk Olu Aregbe, a student government coordinator at the University of Missouri, launched a Facebook group, "One Million Strong for Barack." A year later, the group had signed up half a million "friends" (in Facebook lingo) as Obama supporters.

This knack for pairing technology and activism is only one way the Millennials differ from their baby boomer and me generation parents. And with the disaffected Generation Xers now in their 30s, a new group is finding its political voice. Encompassing 47 million young adults between the ages of 18 and 29, the Millennials constitute the first generation to come of age in the 21st century. Ambitious, civic-minded, and socially engaged, they may well decide the next President of the United States.

And the candidates know it. Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy by video on her website. Obama's site went interactive so that supporters could "talk" to each other without a filter. Last March, John McCain invited his website visitors to challenge his NCAA basketball tournament picks on MySpace, another youth-networking site.

"At the risk of sounding self-absorbed, it's not just about Barack Obama -- it's also about us," says Heather Smith, executive director of Rock the Vote, an organization dedicated to registering young voters. "Young people are paying attention to politics at rates we've never seen."

At the College of San Mateo in California, political science professor Frank Damon is struck by how energized his students have become by the current campaign. "I've noticed a lot less apathy this semester than in a long time," he says.

To gauge how this generation will shape our future, starting with a close look at its role in the upcoming election, Reader's Digest commissioned a poll that posed a broad range of questions about Millennials' political and personal views. Our findings revealed widespread disillusionment with the Bush Administration. Even without a military draft -- which galvanized antiwar sentiments during Vietnam -- the war in Iraq has alienated young people. This helps explain why the President's popularity has eroded more among Millennials than among the rest of the public.

Yet Millennials, while more liberal than their elders, are neither monolithic nor easy to typecast. While most Millennials support gay marriage, which puts them at odds with conservative Republicans, they don't share the Democrats' zeal for universal health coverage -- they're more concerned with reducing the costs of medical treatment.

Nor do these young people fit the secular stereotype of older liberals: 67 percent of Millennials say that religion is important to them. And more than a quarter say they've become more religious in recent years. When this concept is expanded by substituting the word spiritual, the figure climbs to 34 percent.

Looking at the poll results through a wider lens, it appears that this generation will alter the shape not just of the current election cycle but of the two major political parties for years to come.

"There is something happening out there, and it's potentially big," says Stanford University political scientist Morris Fiorina. "I've been saying that 2008 is the last election of the old order, but maybe not. Perhaps we held that election in 2004, and this is the first election of a new order."

Millennials cast their first votes in 2000, and the candidate who spoke most directly to them that year was John McCain, with his call for shared sacrifice and community service.

McCain's moment with young voters may have passed -- we will know in November -- but all signs point to continued support for any candidate who emphasizes service.

"We're an action generation," says 26-year-old Christina Gagnier of

mobilize.org, an "all-partisan" grassroots organization, "and we're entrepreneurial, not for the traditional purpose of making money but for doing social good."

Momentous Trends

For political professionals of a certain age, this brand of social awareness is welcome news, and it harks back to the passage of the 26th Amendment, the 1971 measure giving 18-year-olds the vote. Since the Civil War, youth-vote advocates made a simple case: Old enough to fight, old enough to vote. Still, it took another century and the unpopular Vietnam War to lower the voting age.

In 1972 the antiwar liberals who controlled the Democratic Party -- including Presidential nominee George McGovern and his advisors -- believed that the sheer mass of 25 million young voters would push McGovern over the top. It didn't: McGovern carried one state against President Nixon.

In fact, young voters have yet to determine the outcome of a Presidential race. Contrary to lore, the youth movement did not carry over from the '60s. Even in 1972, young people didn't hold Republicans responsible for Vietnam, which was launched, and escalated, under Democratic rule.

After '72, young voters' participation began declining. Their voting patterns weren't appreciably different from the rest of the public's anyway, at least until Ronald Reagan came along, when youths embraced the sunny Republican from California. In the ensuing years, as the numbers of young voters dwindled, their political identity became indistinct.

And that's where things stood -- until the Millennials arrived. They announced themselves in the 2004 contest between Bush and Sen. John Kerry. Although it received little scrutiny in the media, perhaps because it didn't affect the outcome, these results signaled a shifting wind. Not only did young voters go for the Democrat, but their level of participation ticked upward measurably. Both trends are potentially momentous. The new partisan divide is obviously significant. What's more, because this generation is so large, for the first time in U.S. history nearly as many raw votes were cast by those 30 and under as by those over 65.

Thus did the '60s slogan "Don't trust anybody over 30'' take on a new twist: If the only votes in 2004 that counted had been cast by the under-30 set, Kerry would now be President. Four years later, with growing momentum and an even greater sense of urgency, this generation may be able to call the shots in the upcoming election. The RD poll suggests that 2008 may be the year that youth is finally served.

The most eye-opening results of our poll are probably the basic horse race numbers. The RD survey contains great news for Obama, an ambivalent message for Clinton, and troubled tidings for McCain.

Nationally, among all likely voters, McCain entered the spring with a slight edge over both remaining Democratic candidates. Among Millennials, however, the poll shows Clinton with a ten-point lead over McCain -- about the same advantage recorded by Kerry in 2004. That's a bad enough sign for McCain, who did so well with young voters eight years ago. But when he is matched up against Obama, the pot boils over: Obama is well in the lead, with 55 percent to McCain's 33 percent. This is a historically unprecedented generational appeal for a national candidate and shows that an aspirational campaign based on hope and a better future hits the Millennials' sweet spot.

Horse race numbers go up and down, but the poll also shows that Millennials are more oriented to the Democratic Party than their elders, and are more liberal in outlook than previous groups of 18- to 29-year-olds. And they are backing up these ideological inclinations with their votes.

By a 32-point margin, Millennials say they voted in the Democratic rather than Republican primaries in 2008 and chose Obama over Clinton 56 to 36 (57 to 43 in caucus states). Had this trend been replicated by any other age group, Obama would easily have been nominated. For that reason, many pundits predict that the youth vote could evaporate for Democrats if Obama is not nominated. But RD pollster John Della Volpe is skeptical. "For nearly three in five Millennials," he says, "the end of the Bush Presidency is what it's about."

A whopping 94 percent of Millennials say they're likely to vote in future elections for the party they vote for this year. Millennials' leftward drift began in 2004 and continued in 2006. That year, college towns in Virginia and Montana pushed Democrats to narrow victories -- giving their party control of the Senate -- after Republican incumbents ran afoul of student sensibilities. Montana Senator Conrad Burns called his housepainter "a nice little Guatemalan man," while Virginia Senator George Allen called a student of Indian descent "macaca." His opponent's camp posted the slur on YouTube; Allen never recovered.

The 2008 candidates must be wary of similar missteps. Our poll shows that nearly half of young people have attempted to influence the vote of a friend or peer in this election, often by using Facebook, and that one-fourth of Millennials have lobbied one or more of their parents on politics.

All of this suggests that McCain will be carrying not only his own banner in November but also the banner of the GOP and its future.

Previous polling of this generation has unearthed intense interest in global warming, the great environmental issue of the era, and in multinationalism in foreign policy, which clearly reflects disapproval of the Iraq war. Liberals seize on such findings to predict a tidal wave, led by young voters, toward Democrats. It's worth noting, however, that the modern environmental movement was founded by Republicans, that political organizations have ways of adjusting to changing realities, and that both parties harbor strains of isolationism.

For now, we are left with a picture of a generation motivated to improve the world and enthralled by Barack Obama in the way that earlier generations were dazzled by John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Both of those Presidents inspired Americans to unite for the purpose of confronting huge national and global challenges. Not coincidentally, theirs are the names most often invoked on the campaign trail by the 2008 candidates.

JFK and Reagan were charter members of the Greatest Generation. But today's generation may be just as great. These young people think for themselves, are well-grounded, and want to change the world. Kennedy and Reagan would be proud.

Fast Facts

• 19% of Millennials in college are likely to volunteer on a campaign vs. 9% of those not in college.

• 36% say it's important to elect the first black President, almost the same as those (35%) who want to see a woman in office.

Picking the Favorites

• Among Millennials, Obama's "favorable/unfavorable" ratio is 2-1, with half of his favorable rating (32%) from those who view him "very favorably."

• Clinton is treading water with Millennials. Obama's rating is 13 points more positive, 15 points less negative than hers.

• Their feelings are split evenly on McCain, who narrowly trails Clinton.

Tell me: Who do you love?

The candidates' favorable (+) and unfavorable (-) ratings among Millennials

• Barack Obama +63 -31
• Bill Clinton +57 -39
• Al Gore +51 -36
• Hillary Clinton +50 -46
• John McCain +42 -44
• Ralph Nader +17 -43
• George W. Bush +27 -67

Less fickle than their elders

If the candidate they support does not win the nomination, 59% of Millennial Democrats say they'll support the party's nominee. But 16% say they will switch and vote for McCain, while 17% are not sure. These defections could loom large. Our poll found no difference between Clinton and Obama backers on this question-but in a Gallup Poll, 27% of Obama Democrats over 55 say they'd switch to McCain if Clinton is nominated.