Never before have young Americans been as depressed and disillusioned as today.
This grim reality has been made abundantly clear by my organization’s battleground state polling in recent months – and was also recognized by an exhaustive piece in this weekend’s Wall Street Journal.
The WSJ authors concluded that “young adults are more skeptical of government and pessimistic about the future than any living generation before them.”
But, why are young adult Americans so morose?
Well, three reasons:
1. They have been utterly failed by us, meaning middle aged and older Americans.
2. Young adults show almost no regard for once revered institutions in America.
3. They foresee little economic opportunity to thrive the way their parents and grandparents did – and Biden greatly exacerbates that pessimism.
On that first point, consider the calamities and policy collapses experienced by Generation Z, the demographic born since 1998 and raised in this century. These young adults – 41 million of whom will be eligible to vote in 2024 – have vivid memories and lived experience of the Great Financial Crisis, intense political and cultural polarization in society, and the tyranny of the unscientific and illogical virus panic starting in 2020.
