Millennials Up For Grabs?

[OAM]

Can't believe I missed this topic.  Millennial voting patters are actually shaping up to be my specialty within academia and I recently conducted a survey study and wrote a 50ish page quant thesis using it, regarding issue importance and millennial voters.

Being a bit late to the party in here, there's a bit too much to be to just jump right into, but if there's anything people might be curious with specific questions I might be able to help.  Far from me to claim to be an expert, but it was good enough the university paid to send me to a national research convention and pay for a fancy chart to go with my findings (which, in short, has parts that could point either way.  Personally I wouldn't say a millennial shift is impossible, but the GOP would need to shift as well for it to happen)

[OAM]

Eh, I wouldn't exactly say libertarian, though as always "it depends".  There's certainly some things that could point to that, but a lot of it is also in the phraseology.  That would be a topic for another day, however.

In short though, from the questions I asked, in general those under 25 marked general economic issues (for the purposes of this answer represented by traditional welfare) at around 30% of the time.  Of those who marked it important, roughly 30% could be considered pro-Democrat, 45% pro-Republican, and the remaining 25% undecided (but apparently thinking the issue is important.  The option was allowed for participants to admit they did not know enough about an issue to make an informed decision, and it was actually used to a degree).  Of the entire demographic surveyed, roughly 20% could be considered pro-Democrat, 35% pro-Republican, and the remaining 45% undecided.

Granted, this information is likely only valid for the state of Illinois.  My university pulls from all corners of the state and I was able to get roughly 5% of the entire university to participate (because having access to the emailing list is a great tool.  If we're just counting how many people it was sent out to vs responses, I had a 23% response rate which is pretty unheard of in a lot of survey work).

All that being said, at average importance participants put on social issues was around 65%, and most of the time on those issues the overall sample polled at about 70% in the Democrat direction, which is a significant lead.  Furthermore, one metric I performed involved sorting issue importance by self-professed party identification in an effort to judge motivational levels.  Those professing to be Democrats were significantly more likely to mark issues and important (in the instructions, an issue being important was defined to the participants as an issue that would be specifically likely to induce political action at the voter level or greater).  The top five issues for Democrats were all rated between 55% and 62%.  The highest for Republicans was 52% (Immigration Reform), with second place at 43%, then a sharp drop off.  The respondents were actually pretty evenly split between Dem, Rep, and Ind, with Dem pushed out to 38% and the other two more or less splitting the remaining share.

I'll stop blithering on here for the moment.  Trying to retrieve my actual data from the toolset, but the program is a bit buggy, and not working with it since April doesn't help.  Most of my options wouldn't be much use to anyone without SPSS or Stata to display the raw data either, but there could be a few other ways for me to share.

[OAM]

Do you think a pro-SSM candidate like Rob Portman could challenge Hilary for the youth vote in 2016?

Eventually, maybe, but I think by 2020 it's going to be an issue that's over and done with, thanks to a SCOTUS ruling.  It's currently the top issue, but there's many others only a bit behind.

[OAM]

I somewhat suspect that we'll simply end up with a more economically conservative Democratic Party if anything

Maybe less aggressive on gun control?

The polling I've conducted actually showed that Millennials are *more* aggressive on gun control, though unfortunately there weren't any indicators included that would answer the all important *why*.