Research

I just returned from the House Education and Labor Committee hearing on youth unemployment. This hearing is the follow-up to the 80 Million Strong National Jobs Summit, which convened 100 young leaders from 30 states to discuss problems and solutions about youth jobs. Since the Summit, youth unemployment and underemployment have risen. In fact, this past summer, typically the best time for young people to find jobs, was the worst on record. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics summer youth unemployment report:

The youth unemployment rate was 18.5 percent in July 2009, the highest July rate on record for the series, which began in 1948. As with the decline in employment, the increase in youth unemployment in the summer of 2009 reflected a weak job market. The July 2009 unemployment rates for young men (19.7 percent), women (17.3 percent), whites (16.4 percent), blacks (31.2 percent), Asians (16.3 percent), and Hispanics (21.7 percent) increased from a year earlier.

Note that unemployment was up for all young people, not just specific demographics. In his opening remarks, Chairman Miller stated that "young people are the hardest hit". Simple and right to the point.

The first witness to testify, Assistant Secretary of Labor for Employment and Training, Jane Oates, said that the stimulus funds sent to states did create jobs and that a detailed report was still being prepared and actual numbers were not yet available. Anecdotally, she's received positive feedback from young people who got jobs through stimulus funds. She noted that in many of the letters she had received from young workers, there were stories of saving money for college or for helping out the family during hard times. If not for the stimulus funds, it's likely that youth unemployment would have been higher and all the negative externalities bundled with it. Representative Bobby Scott quoted a Los Angeles-based community organization's motto that the best way to stop a bullet is with a job.

Another committee member, Representative Marcia Fudge, explained that her first jobs when she was a young person were important to her, equipping her with the experiences and skills that could, and did, carry her forward. With a passion that seemed to make time stop so that we, the audience, could prepare for what she would say next, she talked about pride. The pride of working and contributing to the community in a positive way. That feeling of pride in work knows no generational boundaries. Matt Segal of 80 Million Strong, a witness at the hearing, testified to that fact when he said that the Millennial generation is enthusiastic about young people doing their part, through hard work, to get this country out of recession. He then presented some of our generation's ideas, collected from the 80MS National Jobs Summit.

Yet, one of the big questions that was not answered directly in the hearing is how to deal effectively with the transition of a fourth generation, Millennials, into the workforce. It's almost like there is an elevator so full that others are left to take the stairs, even though they contributed to the construction of said elevator. So, it sounds like we need a bigger elevator, and luckily there's the spirit to make that happen. In his testimony, Segal noted that young people are increasingly interested in public service careers and in such expanding fields as healthcare, cyber security, green jobs and social entrepreneurship.

Much of the hearing focused specifically on low-income youth and youth of color, but 80MS is talking about a broader, much more comprehensive jobs agenda that aims to incorporate our generation's varied talents and skills towards the construction of a 21st century economy. Poverty and racism are problems not unique to today's young people, but the current state of joblessness, debt and lack of opportunity for young people of all backgrounds are specific to our times; right now, we need a solution for a generational workforce problem that threatens to leave America's youth worse off than their parents.

The Pew Internet and Life Project just released a new report on online civic engagement that has received some big press, including BBC and Associated Press. In short, the Pew's report states that online activism has the same gaps w/r/t income and education that we see with offline activism. Press accounts have focused on the continuing gap in engagement between rich and poor. This thesis isn't as strong when looking only at young people, the age group most likely to engage in what the Pew calls "new" activities such as "making political use of social network sites" See their nifty table below.

When the above findings are analyzed by income status (income seems to be less of a factor in online engagement among 18-24s), there are important caveats mentioned:

It is difficult to measure socio-economic status for the youngest adults, those under 25, because many of them are still students. This group is, in fact, the least-affluent and well-educated age group in the survey. When we look at age groups separately, we find by and large that the association between income and education and online engagement re-emerges -- although this association is somewhat less pronounced than for other forms of online political activism.

The last bit is consistent with what other research in this field has found, specifically that the gap in activism between rich and poor is smaller online than offline. Income is tough to measure, especially in a survey such as this, so I think the focus on the class politics in this study and in the news stories is totally wrong. For one, educational attainment is what we know to be one of the most significant factors in civic engagement (as shown in an academic publication by the authors of the Pew study). It's also a more accurate measure on a survey. Furthermore, the Pew study does not use cell phones; their defense:

In addition, this was the final survey conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project not to include a random sample of respondents contacted on their cell phones. Young adults and minorities are more likely not to have landlines and exclusively use cell phones. A sampling on cell phones would likely have produced more young respondents and more minority respondents. The data here were weighted to reflect the composition of the entire U.S. population and there is evidence in other Pew Research Center surveys that the absence of a cell sample would not substantially change the final results.

The good news is is that it sounds like the next surveys will include cell phones. The troubling thing to me is that it's been 10 years since the last Census and the weighting (statistical way of making the survey sample be representative of the larger universe - the whole U.S.) could change significantly after 2010. All this is to say that not sampling cell phone users in this current Pew survey neglects the activism through mobile phones and omits a significant number of young people that do not have land line phones. It's possible that cell phone only users have difference engagement patterns that those with a land line phone. There are many hypotheticals so feel free to dream up your own.

The focus on online activism and class in recent months, including Danah Boyd's research, put too much emphasis on online activism and class politics in a way that isn't constructive. Facebook and MySpace are social networks that many people are on, but not everyone. Cell phones on the other hand, have penetrated every market and demographic. I understand that we cannot let the digital divide get out of control and that the internet provides a democratizing value. And yes, people act differently on various social networks, but there are like a gazillion social networks, used for a variety of purposes (there is only one SMS). Some social networks are even geared towards specific demographics, tastes and interests. There is nothing wrong with this considering the fact that in- and out-of group dynamics are always at play with humans.

OK, back to cell phones. Studies like these that focus only on online activism take away from the important activism down through phones. It's all digital, it just might not be the internet. Sharing a breaking news alert or reminding a friend to vote via text is a powerful form of one-on-one communication. Building a national broadband network is going to take time, but we already have the mobile communications network to take advantage of. In other countries, citizens use their phones for a variety of business and civic services. In the U.S., businesses are getting smart to using SMS to alert customers about identity fraud. The University of Maryland uses SMS to reach it's student population in the event of an emergency. Advocacy campaigns and all levels of government should think of SMS and cell phones (not necessarily smart phones) as a cheap and direct form of communication. Websites are constantly be upgraded and retrofitted with more and more interactive features, but if they aren't accessible to everyone, specifically poorer Americans, then so what. Innovation is easy when it has no bounds; it's much more challenging when you have to keep it simple (I think Einstein said something along these lines, so there). Companies like CREDO Mobile and The Extraordinaries are built on the power of cell phone activism.

We need to better measure activism with cell phones, as well. Amidst the growing demand for online engagement research, we should be careful to broaden our horizons to think of it as digital engagement. There are so many ways to connect virtually, many of which don't require the web. Word on the DC streets is that the National Conference on Citizenship, the U.S. Census Bureau and others are trying to identify some "e-citizenship indicators" to add to various government surveys. Here's hoping they don't forget to add questions about cell phone use.

Analysts are still trying to measure the impact of social media on the 2008 election. Some are resorting to non-random sampling [gasp!]. The Illinois State University student paper covers one such study.

A Kansas State University study by three graduate students finds that the 18 to 24 year old demographic became increasingly politically active during the 2008 U.S. Election season due to the use of new media, but were not necessarily more politically knowledgeable.

The study surveyed more than 160 undergraduate students, with no indication of their political party, about their use of traditional media as well as new media sources, such as Twitter or YouTube, to obtain information about the presidential campaign.

The sample size is very small here, although the focus of the study is interesting. Political knowledge is a messy metric when it is conflated with current events and we will be unable to gauge the relevance of this measure without the survey instrument.

The study also found that most students were not politically knowledgeable, with no idea of whether or not the student was a Democrat or Republican. Darnisha Monson, junior English education major, found herself to be one of the many students who became actively involved in the 2008 election.

This isn't surprising since young people who are new to the electoral process are still trying to find their way through the political landscape. Thus, it behooves partisans to outreach to youth during this exploratory period - it will be more difficult to persuade them to switch political parties later in life.

Now comes my favorite part of this article: an academic living in the university bubble and seemingly ignorant about it.

"That is the big question," Bradley said, "How do we get [college students] to turn out numbers in an election that is not tied directly to electing a president?"

This is totally not the big question. As we've written about here on FM, and as duly researched by CIRCLE, it's the college students we don't have to worry about. There is something about going to college, whether it be the networks or the the learning that aids these young people in navigating the political process. It doesn't matter that it takes time in some cases; the point is that youth with at least come college experience will be more engaged than those with any college. So, the big question is, if you care about realizing a full, participatory democracy is how do we reach the many young voters who don't attend college at all; they are the most likely to not vote and to not be civically engaged on a range of measures. As for the other part of his question, it is important to think about how to turnout voters during non-presidential cycles (one way might to be encourage more young people to run for elected office, especially the local level, as suggested by Kevin).

Professor Bradley continues to miss the mark with this:

"It is my job as a professor to figure out how to get your generation tuned into local politics, Bradley said.

"College students have a very short attention span so it is my job to keep [college students] interested... you are not going to learn."

Again, see the above retort. Additionally, it shouldn't the job of a professor to teach about civic engagement - it should be done at the high school level. This means we can reach as many young people before they leave mandatory schooling. At the Netroots Nation 2009 youth caucus meeting, I brought up the point that we (youth and civic organizations) are doing the work of the government for them. We educate young people about civic engagement, when that should be the aim of high school curriculum. What makes it so troublesome for us is that we spend time, money and staff on teaching the basics of democracy. If we had comprehensive civic education in high schools, then we could focus on actually persuading and informing citizens about specific issues that take a bit of expertise to understand.

A new report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project shows that mobile internet is closing the digital divide between whites and minority Americans.

African Americans are the most active users of the mobile internet – and their use of it is also growing the fastest. This means the digital divide between African Americans and white Americans diminishes when mobile use is taken into account.

• By a 59% to 45% margin, white Americans are more likely to go online using a computer on a typical day than African Americans.
• When mobile devices are included in the mix, the gap is cut in half; 61% of whites go online on the average day when mobile access is included while 54% of African Americans do.
• Looking across a range of digital activities – some done online typically using a computer and others being non-voice data activities on a mobile device – African American and white Americans, on average, do the same number of activities.

The rising number of relatively affordable internet-capable cell phones, cheap netbook computers, and falling laptop prices seem to have boosted the adoption rate of wireless internet. The trending indicates that the saturation of internet-capable mobile devices will continue to rise dramatically in the next few years.

The report also provides data on wireless usage by the 18-29 demographic:

The 18-29 demographic is still unsurprisingly ahead of the curve when it comes to mobile internet adoption.

The 48-page report has a ton of information in it and is definitely worth checking out.

So, like, surprise! It might not be interesting that young people are moving towards online activism, but just so that the MSM knows what's going on, I will pull out a quote from Pew's latest study, entitled, Internet's Role in Campaign 2008: "Among young voters and those with broadband connections the Internet has eclipsed traditional media like television, radio and newspapers, the survey found." That's right, the Internet has WON! (By being the most democratic, open-source place for news, information and fact-checking.)

* 49% of Obama voters shared text messages related to the campaign with others; 29% of McCain voters did so.
* 17% of Obama supporters and 7% of McCain supporters got text messages directly from a candidate or party.

This makes sense. Businesses like CREDO Mobile, a Working Assets project, link progressive organizers, activists and everyday citizens. Given that young people are the most likely demographic to own only a cell phone, outfits like CREDO and others that connect organizers to mobile phone users should stand to gain a lot as progressive activists build upon the online organizing lessons of 2008. One of those lessons is that online video works! (If you haven't checked it out already, watch FM's own Sarah Burris on why paying taxes is important--the video was picked up live on CNN yesterday.)

Video advocacy is becoming even easier, because you can broadcast from your mobile phone using Qik. The flexibility of broadcasting yourself from your mobile means that folks can spend less time behind a computer, and more time doing advocacy when and where they want. Also, videos are a better medium to reach youth of color and those in low income communities, so 2010 may be the first real test of how Qik and online videos can be used to target younger folks that are generally left out of the political process. (Shana Glickfield over at NextGenWeb.org has a nice summary of how to use video advocacy.)

The Pew study also confirms that young voters are very active politically on social networking sites, and are the most likely age group to "customize political or election news." Young folks understand that you still need to make the Internet personal. Customizing a message for a target audience, whether that be high school students or union members, helps increase the probability that they will read (and possibly re-customize and share) the message.

While many young people are digital collaborators, they still haven't forgot the power of personal communication. The 2008 election wasn't about young voters on Facebook; it was about young voters talking to each other (using any medium) about politics and the election. I'll say it again because it bears repeating if you want to work with the Millennial generation: PEER-TO-PEER works! With all of the information available today, folks need someone they can trust to help them navigate and validate that information. This means that sending a surrogate on behalf of a candidate is probably less likely to win votes than if you were to organize a group of young people to reach out to their friends and peers.

Here's an interesting writeup in the Washington Post of a 2006 Green and Gerber study showing that public shame may be the highest motivator for civic participation. I'm not kidding.

Here are the results of Gerber and Green's experiment, in which a controlled sample of voters were matched up against groups that received four different messages about an upcoming election:

"These were the most homely pieces of direct mail in the history of direct mail," said Green, who works at Yale University. "They were sheets of computer paper. They had no graphics and used block courier type. They are the exact opposite of the slick four-color mailings that campaigns send out."

Homely though they were, the letters had a powerful effect. The control group's turnout rate was slightly less than 30 percent. Among those who received the "civic pride" letter, turnout was 6 percent higher than the control group's. Among those who were told they were being studied, it was 12 percent higher. Among those who were shown whether they had voted in the previous election, the turnout was 16 percent higher.

And telling people what everyone in the neighborhood had done the previous Election Day -- and letting them know that they would be similarly informed about the current election -- boosted turnout by 27 percent.

Shame and publicity - peer pressure - can be a powerful motivator, it seems. And when the government/campaign/party is going to snitch on you, people get their butts out to vote.

The effectiveness of snitching on neighbors exceeded that of live telephone calls and rivaled that of laborious, face-to-face canvassing, the political scientists wrote in an article published in the American Political Science Review this year. Direct mail costs peanuts compared with other techniques.

Interestingly, Green and Gerber trace the decline in voting among Americans of all ages to the rise of the secret ballot. Their theory: voting used to be a very public and social act. Once those social bonds were severed, turnout declined:

Elections in the mid-19th century were festive affairs, and people gathered to carouse, jostle one another and vote. They sometimes cast their ballots on a stage to cheers and jeers. Voting, even their choice of candidates, used to be extremely public.

A series of progressive reforms in the late 19th century turned voting into a private affair. Campaign operatives were kept clear of polling stations. People got to vote in secret, and few knew whether their neighbors voted.

Turnout plummeted.

What this suggests is that, besides civic pride and political conviction, a central reason people vote is that democratic participation is an intensely social act. Politics, candidates and campaigns offer us zones of connection with other citizens -- even our political opponents. It gives millions of people common topics of conversation.

It's too late to really incorporate this kind of messaging into a campaign, but it raises some interesting possibilities for the 2010 midterms.

Late last week, a PR push began for a study coming out of Washington State University's Mass Communication and Society journal. The study made some interesting, if extremely limited, findings about the utility of celebrity GOTV campaigns. The media, however, has jumped ahead of the gun and is using the study to validate a simplistic idea that celebrity endorsements directly caused higher turnout in 2004. Such stories have already run in the Seattle PI and Reuters. These stories go beyond the extremely limited findings of the study.

The study, Celebrity Endorsements and Their Potential to Motivate Young Voters, measures the effects of celebrity promotions on "apathy" and "complacency" in young voters, in which apathy is defined as a total lack of interest and an unwillingess to get involved, whereas complacency is defined as a satisfaction with the current the state of affairs that puts the relevance of political participation at a distance and decreases one's motivation to be civically engaged.

Furthermore, scholars studying social capital raise concerns about young adults’ self-absorption and lack of concern with the larger society (Buckingham, 1997). Complacency, therefore, seems to comprise an important target for GOTV campaigns because the motivation to participate in public affairs derives, in part, from the identification of a public problem that affects the individual or those about whom the individual cares (Delli Carpini, 2000; Holbert, Kwak, & Shah, 2003).

Given that many GOTV promotions have been targeted directly toward energizing young adults, it seems useful to examine whether this type of campaign can provide an opportunity to decrease complacency among young voters. To the extent young adults are receptive to the identification-based appeals of the promotions, the campaigns may encourage them to recognize and develop an understanding of societal issues that previously seemed irrelevant.

The study interestingly suggests that it is in "complacent" youth that celebrity endorsements have the greatest impact. I'm not sure how useful the finding is, given that a field director can't exactly target for "complacent" vs. "apathetic" youth, nor can communications directors buy their ad time to hit the complacent demographic more than that apathetic demographic. Nevertheless, it's an interesting look into why celebrity PSAs might be effective in some instances but not in others.

The results of this study therefore suggest that the celebrity-based promotions seemed to hold more promise for easing involvement through the reduction of complacency than for reducing apathy. Receptivity to promotions predicted lower levels of complacency and reduced complacency associated positively with both involvement and self-efficacy. Although not tested directly in this study, these promotions may have the ability over time to help arrest young citizens’ spiral into disaffection by helping to reduce their complacency, thereby contributing to their heightened public affairs involvement and sense of self-efficacy.

This suggests that celebrities who appeal to youth can help motivate engagement in the civic affairs as their fans emulate attitudes and behaviors supportive of public affairs participation. The results suggest that this process encourages fans to become more aware of the personal relevance of issues, which motivates them to use the media to learn more, thereby further increasing efficacy.

All well and good, but the authors themselves admit that their findings are extremely limited by the scope and makeup of their sample, which consisted of only 305 youth all attending the same 4-year university:

The findings of this study are limited in that the sample was one of convenience and not generalizable to the national population of young adults.These promotions may have had a different effect in other geographic regions, as well as with other segments of young voters. In addition, all participants of the study were enrolled in a 4-year university, which could have implications for their political activity and interest in politics. Education consistently associates with voting behavior in older adults; therefore, college students may be more receptive to voting promotions than others in their age group. In addition, McDevitt and Chaffee (1998) indicated that top-down, GOTV promotions fail to motivate individuals of low socioeconomic status, thereby contributing to the ever widening knowledge gap. To gain a better understanding of mechanisms that can motivate young citizens, future research will require a study utilizing a more diverse sample. In addition, our study is limited by having occurred at a single point in the 2004 election process. Longitudinal data will be required to fully address the extent to which these promotions have lasting influence.

I would also add here that the study made no attempt to control for other factors such as how the celebrities were used. Some groups, like Music for America, Head Count, and Punk Voter, employed a field-based, peer to peer model in their celebrity partnerships. Others like Hip Hop Summit Action Network held massive, educational stadium concerts. MoveOn's Vote for Change primarily used older artists more appealing to Gen X or Boomers, and focused solely on stadium sized shows in swing states. Rock the Vote and Vote or Die ran massive PR campaigns. How a celebrity is utilized in a GOTV campaign could also determine their efficacy.

The study also does not take into account other factors influencing young voter turnout, including field and communications programs of campaigns and nonprofit groups like YDA, College Democrats, the Bus Fed, and The League, who are out there contacting voters on a daily basis.

Ultimately, this study provides some nice, tentative evidence that celebrities can do more than build a brand for an organization; they can actually help drive engagement. But far more work needs to be done before I'm comfortable seeing headlines like Celebrities can coax youth to vote, study shows, or reading interviews like this that play up the importance of celebrity endorsements without any solid data. On that note, it would be very interesting to see the study's authors team up with Music for Democracy to test the efficacy of their Be the Change tool.

Bumped. This post is by Sujatha Jahagirdar of Student PIRGs New Voters Project. —Mike

As registration deadlines pass across the country, the focus of young voter mobilization groups is shifting to ‘get out the vote’ . As with any grassroots mobilization effort, there is a science behind a successful effort to drive young voters to the polls. Below is a listing of various studies done over the past decade that point to the effectiveness of get out the vote tactics such as canvassing, phone banking and text messaging. The Student PIRGs New Voters Project will use these tactics in the largest non-partisan on-the- ground effort to turn out student voters – targeting students on 100 campuses in 17 states.

Pounding the Pavement

Studies conducted by a range of experts indicate that multiple peer-to-peer contacts through canvass, phone-banking and other traditional grassroots organizing methods can significantly increase young voter turnout.

Get out the Vote canvasses and phone banks work. A 2000 Yale University Study found that turnout by individuals canvassed by the Student PIRGs New Voters Project before Election Day was between 10.9 and 12.3 percentage points higher than the control group. A second 2000 Yale University study found that turnout among individuals called by a Student PIRG volunteer before Election Day were 5 percentage points higher than the control group.

Multiple peer-to-peer contact increases an individuals’ likelihood to vote. An additional study of the Student PIRGs New Voters Project by Polimetrix in 2004 found that contacting voters multiple times increases an individual’s likelihood of voting – for example, individuals who were contacted at least three times turned out at a rate of 83.4 percent, compared to a 76.4 percent rate among those contacted just once.

Contacts close to Election Day matter most. The Polimetrix study also found that individuals contacted in the 72 hours before the close of polls turned out at a rate of 81 to 85 percent (depending on the timing of contact) versus 79 percent for those individuals last contacted 4-8 days beforehand, and 69 percent for those last contacted nine or more days beforehand.

Wiring the Web

Technology can also increase young voter turnout. A study released by the Student PIRGs New Voters Project, Credo Mobile and researchers at Princeton University and the University of Michigan found that text message reminders sent the eve of an election can increase youth turnout by four percent.

With this in mind, the Student PIRGs are organizing ‘text out the vote’ tables across the country, where thousands of students will be urged to text their friends ‘get out the vote’ reminders.

A new Facebook application will allow students to send vote reminders to their friend list and set goals to get their friends out to vote.

Over the next twenty days, the Student PIRGs New Voters Project will merge the on-the-ground and on-line tactics described above on one hundred campuses across the country to maximize young voter turnout on Election Day. In the three remaining weeks before Election Day, we will establish 190,000 contacts with young voters, urging them to the polls. A detailed outline of our model is available at www.newvotersproject.org

Stuff you should know and see that I won't be blogging in depth:

• Looks like we have another YEO! John Tyler Hammons, a 17 year old freshman at the University of Oklahoma was elected the mayor of Muskegee, a town of 38,000 people. He ran on a good government platform and won in a run-off against the former mayor, capturing 70% of the vote. Way to go John. - The Politico
• Young evangelicals continue to abandon Bush and the GOP over Iraq and the economy. - Huffington Post
• The Godfathers of GOTV testing and research, Gerber and Green, have a new book out pimping Peer to Peer as the best form of organizing. Direct mail and robo-call consultants everywhere are not happy. - Campaigns and Elections
• Two articles say that Obama will need the "senior vote" if he is to beat McCain. I tend not to agree. There are more voters under 30 than over 65, and in some contests we are already performing on par with their turnout. It all depends on how many new young voters show up in November. - Democratic Strategist
• Obama is the king of voter-generated music tributes. - The Politico
• Republicans held a fashion show on the National Mall to show off their new convention swag. This was my favorite photo. And no, this is not a joke. - Minnesota Monitor

Who at the GOP thought it was a good idea to bring back MC Hammer pants? And I'm pretty sure that if that little girl were a lib'rul, we'd hear wingnuts screaming about flag desecration.

A new report by the PEW Research Center confirms what rising primary turnout is already telling us: there is a huge demographic shift approaching in the electorate in the form of the Millennial Generation, and that shift will largely benefit the Democratic Party.

As the PEW data indicates, this is a shift that is occurring among almost all segments of the Millennial generation, but the shift along gender lines seems to be most significant. Among young voters (18 - 29 year olds), in the last 16 years, young women have moved from a +8 advantage for the Democrats (50 - 42%) to an incredible +35 point advantage (63 - 28%). Among young men, that partisan identification has moved from a 10 point deficit (42 - 52% Republican) to a 14 point advantage (52 - 38%).

These are seismic shifts in the electorate and they are hugely significant.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, it was Generation X and the late Baby Boomers who occupied the 18 - 29 year olds slot in the electorate. They were very conservative as a group and helped elect Reagan and Bush Sr., and usher in the Gingrich Revolution. That laid the groundwork for the Republican majorities we have suffered through these last two decades.

The Millennial Generation is larger than the Baby Boom, and on almost every issue they are vastly more progressive. That fact is starting to come through in their voting habits and party identification. As the PEW data makes clear, Millennials could do for Democrats what the late Boomers and Gen Xers did for the Republicans - forge a new governing majority.

One more item of note in the Pew data. Research tells us that if you can get a voter to cast their ballot for a certain party in their first three major elections, that person tends to become a party voter for life. The PEW data shows that Gen X may be one of the first generations to actually buck that trend:

Apparently the Bush Administration's policies are so toxic that they are driving away one of the Republican Party's most loyal bases.