Millennials Get Politics - We Told You So

Harvard University’s Institute of Politics Poll Released

Millennials are increasingly engaged and understand that poiltics can effectively solve our problems. In the last two years we’ve seen a 9% increase, according to Harvard University’s Institute of Politics’ latest poll of 18-24 year olds out yesterday.

Among the many results is this one:

“More young people see the effectiveness of political engagement than one year ago. Nearly seven in ten 18-24 year-olds today (69%) say they see political engagement as an effective way of solving our nation’s problems, up six percentage points from fall 2007 (63%) and fall 2006 (60%) IOP polling. Fewer young people today agree that politics is not relevant to their lives (28%) than did one year ago (32%) and fewer believe that elected officials don’t share their
priorities (69%) than did one year ago (71%) or two years ago (75%). In addition, over six in ten young people (68%) say running for office is an honorable thing to do, up from one year ago (67%) and two years ago (66%).”

This is great news, and yet not surprising. It’s great that we have more polling on this. Mobilize.org and many others have been saying this for a long time. It’s shown up in our gut-instinct, anecdotally, and in our own survey of thousands of Millennials that created the Democracy 2.0 Declaration.

The key is for us to support the growing sense of political awareness with opportunities to build more grassroots and netroots action that build Civic Currency. Mobilize.org is working on this and our next Democracy 2.0 Grant Summits focus on just that.

The work enters a new phase on November 5th.