Most of us are assuming generation Y, as those born between 1980 and 1995 are known, won’t be a factor in the next federal election. Because, well, you know, the kids are unmotivated, unengaged and too busy tweeting their friends to do elections.
But what if Gen Yers – or the “millennials,” as they’re also known – are not as apathetic as baby boomers think they are. In other words, what if Gen Y is interested in politics but contemptuous of most of those currently elected to practise it.
This was a proposition raised with Barack Obama in 2008, when his campaign team planned his successful run for the U.S. presidency. Instead of waiting for Gen Y to become engaged, Obama went to the millennials, using social media and micro-targeting. Overall, it was a campaign style that caught a generation’s attention, much in the way John F. Kennedy caught a generation’s attention in 1960.
As things turned out, Obama’s campaign team was very astute. Fifty per cent of Americans aged 18 to 29 voted in the 2008 election – an increase of nine percentage points from 2000. Suddenly, the Republicans found themselves on the wrong side of the demographics curve, a disadvantage that lasted through the 2012 presidential election.
In Canada’s 2011 federal election, Canadian millennials may have accounted for 20% of population. But only 35% of that group bothered to vote.
In contrast, older voters accounted for 45% of the 2011 vote. That is why older voters are a key segment to political strategists.
But it would be foolish to ignore younger voters. By 2020, Gen Y will account for 35%-38% of the vote and will rival the baby boomers as a major voting bloc.
But since social trends in Canada usually follow those of the U.S., what if half of the millennials in Canada decided to vote in the next federal election because a candidate they relate to has emerged. This could be a very powerful voting bloc, and it could account for Justin Trudeau’s resilient lead in the opinion polls.
About 17% of Trudeau’s supporters in the polls did not vote in 2011.
Trudeau may not actually be a millennial (he was born in 1972), but he probably is close enough in age to Gen Y to be seen as a surrogate Gen Yer.
This probably explains why Trudeau had more than 100,000 followers on Twitter even before he formally announced that he was entering the Liberal leadership race in 2013.
It also may explain why Trudeau spends as little time in the House of Commons as possible so that he can keep his rock-star tour going across the country. Or why he has been careful to keep to a minimum debate with the baby-boomer leaders of the other parties about policies that resonate with baby-boomer voters.
When Trudeau does pronounce on policy, it usually is on matters that will resonate with Gen Y, such as legalizing marijuana or kicking senators out of his caucus.
Trudeau’s demographic strategy also probably explains why, no matter what gaffes he makes or what the Tories say about him in attack ads, it is all white noise to a segment of the population whose mind is made up.
Justin Trudeau is the anti-Harper to younger voters, and that may be enough to sustain him through the next election, whenever it is.
To those of us old enough to remember the rise of his father in 1968, there were plenty of platitudes and slogans at the time – such as “the state has no business in the bedroom of the nation” – but not many specifics about policy.
To borrow from the words of Forrest Gump: the early years of Trudeau the Elder were like a box of chocolates; you didn’t know what the hell you were going to get.
Then again, we may already be in a Forrest Gump period in Canadian politics, with a temporary foreign workers program that might as well have been designed to put Canadians out of work, an economic growth strategy subject to the whims of commodity prices or a telecommunications policy that has succeeded only in making three dominant players more dominant.
Given the influence of demographic shifts in past elections, it’s surprising that politicians and commentators don’t pay more attention to them.
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