Vjordan05's List: Youth & Civic Engagement (Chile 2011)

• Sometime around 2004, though, older voters began moving right, while younger voters shifted left. This year, polls suggest that Mitt Romney will win a landslide among the over-65 crowd and that President Obama will do likewise among those under 40.
• The young not only favor gay marriage and school funding more strongly; they are also notably less religious, more positive toward immigrants, less hostile to Social Security cuts and military cuts and more optimistic about the country’s future.
• Younger adults are faring worse in the private sector and, in large part because they have less political power, have a less generous safety net beneath them.
• And while today’s young are not down-the-line liberal —
• — they certainly lean left.
• Having grown up surrounded by diversity, they are socially liberal, almost unconsciously so.
• “We’ve got a generation of young people who are more socially liberal and more open to activist government,”

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