Millennials and voting

Tom Pinney

There are four points that need to be made in this column:

• I will not here, nor will I ever, divulge my personal voting habits, unless for the sake of writing up an endorsement for the newspaper. It’s just a personal preference and a point of pride that no one really knows where I stand.

• That said, I have frequently divulged who I will not be voting for. Mostly as an attempt to keep people in the dark about my personal politics, which is one of the most fun things to do. So you don’t really know if I’m telling the truth.

• For the sake of the argument, all you need to know is that I have considered myself a moderate independent since I left the Republican Party in 2011, and have voted for candidates affiliated with both major parties in the past even as recently as this year, when I voted in one primary in April and the other primary in August.

• I am intentionally being ambiguous about my political opinion. Though this is an opinion editorial, I am keeping my own opinions out of the matter here because I would like to remain an unbiased member of the media.

All that said, you may just want to turn the page if you have no interest and/or are just tired of this election cycle. I got my degree in political science, so I feel you; this year is just kind of depressing.

However, this has to be said: if millennials went to the polls in November, they would be the swing vote and win the election.

Think about it. Millennials have been more socially active than any generation before them, especially this summer.

Rapes committed by Brock Turner and, most recently, David Becker, have been basically let off the hook because of their status within their communities. Riots spawned in Minnesota and Louisiana after two black men were killed by police officers in what looked to be unjust circumstances.

Meanwhile, in nationwide exit polling, a majority of Trump voters claimed they were over the age of 50 and held a high-school diploma at the highest.

This isn’t an indictment of Trump’s voters, so don’t read it that way.

In the primary process, Republican millennials by and large voted for Marco Rubio. That was his biggest, if only, draw, and it’s why he won Minnesota, placed in Iowa, and stayed in as long as he did. Millennial Republicans loved Rubio.

Millennial Democrats, and even millennial independents/moderates, voted for Bernie Sanders.

Cue the groans from the last generation.

But as you groan, you prove my point. That’s the entire problem with the generation gap and voting is that millennials are painted as some sort of villainous or stupid entity because of our political choices.

Well, newsflash: The world is changing, people are waking up to injustices, and millennials are becoming too progressive for the political establishment to keep up. As a result, both major parties are hemorrhaging millennials.

When Trump won, he lost a majority of millennial Republicans with his alt-right views.

When Hillary won, she lost a lot of millennial Democrats because we have no way of trusting who she really is.

While some will bite the bullet and vote for one of those two because they can’t stand the other one, most millennials never supported either one.

Heck, even when the unknown Martin O’Malley was the third man in a two-person race in Iowa, millennials were voting for him more than Clinton. I was present for a caucus event while covering it for Northwest Missouri State University Student Media, and O’Malley actually won that caucus event because of millennials by only a couple of votes over Bernie. Clinton lost that caucus by a ton.

In about 20 years, voters of the previous generations who blindly support the political machine are going to miss us when we’re the majority demographic.

So, maybe instead of seeing us as the enemy, those voters should be trying to convince us why their establishment liar (Clinton) or their unqualified bigot (Trump) is who we should vote for.

Because they aren’t our candidates.