Environmental issues resonate with younger voters.  Also, I think a big one that the Democrats ought to making a lot of noise about is a free and open Internet.  The free flow of information is a nightmare for the corporate predators and the BushCo fascistas.

it's called law school.

I'm in my mid-20s, and all my 20s friends are very concerned about health care, especially when they lose their jobs.

I'd also add student loan stuff to the list -- a few of my friends are in/were in AmeriCorps, and maybe expanding that would be useful.

Also: Democrats that speak up (liberals AND moderates) are good too -- even my right-leaning friends respect the more vocal of the Democrats, and those who I watched the Presidential debates with really enjoyed the few times where Kerry actually nailed Bush.

Strong stands against "evil" Hollywood media that's "corrupting" kids do not work well, and probably reverse a lot of goodwill that these politicians gain in other areas.  It seems tool-ish to nail the content producers, when it's really the parents' responsibility to watch their kids.  If Dems did want to take a stand in that area, focusing on work/life balance and allowing parents time to be good parents would work well.

For starters, I would draft a program to do the one thing you took off the table, namely, addressing the burden of student loans.

I'm well past being a young anything, but I work with a lot of twenty-somethings daily, and the debt incurred for college is one of the most frequently discussed topics among the youngsters when I overhear them talking about the future. So, here's what I think Democrats should do ...

Adopt a program of college tuition credits to be earned by students from grades 1-12.

The idea would be to have every student enrolled in a federal education account the day they are enrolled in first grade. Tuition credits would be earned by passing courses. More could be earned by making good grades. Upon graduation, the student could use the tuition credits for traditional college or vocational training. The program would be designed so that an average student would accumulate enough tuition credit to be able to attend a state college for 4 years.

What about those who are already enrolled in school, or who have graduated from college or vocational school and have loans? The program would be retroactive and would include those who are already enrolled in primary or secondary school, and those who already have student loans.

I know this would be an expensive program at first, but I think it would eventually pay for itself by making primary and secondary education more immediately purposeful to students and parents, and by making post-high school education universal for all Americans.

So, I would tackle the problem of student loans by making college free for everyone who earned it from childhood, including those who are already in the system. This would definitely make the Democratic Party the Education Party, and it would build on our tradition of securing the blessings of America for all.

I'm a twenty-something, so while I don't know if these issues are necessarily big twenty-something issues, I'll list them because I can.

1. For national security reasons, end the reliance on foreign oil.  And no, that does not mean drilling in America.  Let's put some real resources towards making solar, wind, hydrogen, and whatever else isn't oil work.  We're not that far off.  We need to start pushing for real change now (none of this "let's make 3% of all cars hybrids by 2030 crap") if we're going to avert the serious problems we're heading towards.  And those problems need to be framed as security problems--we cannot deal with Middle Eastern countries as we do with other nations because we would die a quick death without them.

2. Corporate ties to the government (i.e. corruption).  It seems to me that a serious reform movement to stop the outright bribery that passes for government these days could gain some steam.  Corporations make huge profits while the middle class continues to get squeezed.  Lawmakers continue to propose and pass legislation that benefits corporations and the very rich.  Coincidence?  Of course not.  So bring it to the people.  An argument like, "The rich are getting richer at your expense and it needs to stop" is not a difficult cause to get people behind.

These are issues that young people will get behind. Hopefully, these are issues that old people will believe in as well.  The Republicans are corrupt, and their corruption ties them so strongly to oil companies that our national security is threatened.  And while we're at it, let's not just run campaigns on this.  Let's actually follow through once we're in office.

First off, I have to make the fundamental caution against chasing down issues for every conceivable demographic group.  Things that are good ideas are good ideas for everyone.  (Oh, and I'm 29, so I guess I still qualify.)

 That said, here's a couple of ideas:

National service: I think a call to service would go over very well, particularly if it were associated with student loan forgiveness.  Go beyond just the uniformed services, Peace Corps, Americorps, and Teach for America.  Institute a Corps of public safety officers, with pay similar to entry-level military enlistees, to be allocated around the country to help out understaffed police departments.

Health care:  Millions of twenty-somethings are constantly going in and out of various health insurance programs as we move between jobs, graduate school, unemployment, and addresses.  When we take (yet another) shot at a health care plan, Democrats need to keep twenty-somethings in mind.  Some kind of safety net here would be much appreciated by many.

Public transportation:  Many young adults live in cities and like to travel, but may have any number of reasons not to want to drive, including the cost of buying and insuring a car, gas prices, and traffic and congestion (not to mention the general desire of many young adults to want to drink heavily).  Let's find ways to increase funding for both local public transit and for larger projects, like national high-speed rail.

Personal privacy: My generation almost uniformly hates the Patriot Act, largely because of the invasion of privacy concerns.  Taking a principled stand here on personal privacy in a way that did not compromise national security would resonate very well.

How about recognizing that higher education is a key to the future and deserves public support. Yes, expanded student loan programs are good, but how about expanded scholarship programs, better funding from state legislatures and the federal government? A highly educated population is the route we must take to have any chance of maintaining our standard of living.

Environment.  I don't have any statistics to support this though.  It just seems to me that people in their 20s are more inclined to be early adopters of new, improved clean technologies hybrid vehicles and solar panels.

I'm a little on the far side of 20 - well, quite a little - but I would expect from what I hear and read that we need to address that generation's belief that the train has passed them by. No Social Security when they will need it. No good paying jobs after 4 years of college. No affordable health care. Etc. So, we should emphasize for them and everyone else, that honest work needs to be rewarded much more than the investment of inherited wealth is rewarded. That our country offers good jobs in many fields and does not simply send the jobs to India where people work cheaper. That the government will make sure everyone can afford health care insurance. etc.

I think it's time Progressive Democrats created an ideological framework that supports and affirms our beliefs. I don't just think this will appeal to 20-somethings, but to people like me, too (40-somethings)...

Ideology helps you do a couple of things.  First of all, it allows you to focus on the positive outcomes of the policies. And it allows people to feel connected emotionally to the ideology. Because after the 3rd or 4th plank, you've sort out outlined what kind of person is going to vote for you... It's like painting an emotional picture that people can aspire to...

If you can create that ideology frame on all the major issues - Terrorism, Iraq, Social Security, Energy, Judicial independence, free press...

It's finding the positive way to articulate the message quickly... that's the key I think to exciting people, and motivating them emotionally, which is what we want to do.

Intellectual motivation doesn't work.

Create the perfect progressive Democrat, then 'reverse engineer' them to express their most idealistic, heartfelt beliefs on each issue - In 10 words or less...

If we can do that, we win.

Health Care. Right out of college we invariably end up in retail jobs with crappy-to-no benefits. However, we are no longer able to be covered by our folks.

Less corruption. The above poster was correct in this. There is already one party that represents the wealthy and greedy. If we wanted to vote for them we would. This means more than campaign finance reform. It means refusing money from industry lobbies as a matter of principle and running middle and working class people as candidates in elections. It means no more fancy dinners with high rollers.

No compromising on Choice. I cannot stress this enough. And no wishy-washy explanations, either. Those who oppose Choice already have a party, and will vote for it.

No more complaining about the media. Nobody really believes that the things that adults watch on TV  are harmful to children who don't even see them. It's not really about the children. Be sure and point that out. We already have a censorous, authoritarian party. And we consume a lot of media.

Support education initiatives that actually result in intelligent people, rather than just slightly below average but not abysmal test scores. And it would help if they were teacher-friendly. If you're going to make someone's life tough in the educational system, have it be school boards.

Most importantly, don't chase votes. It's obvious to everyone. Understand that "bipartisan" usually means Democrats capitulating to Republicans. If you change positions on something, do it on principle, not because you're chasing votes. 

 One more thing: stuff like the bankruptcy bill? Yeah, don't ever do that again.

Heck, as a mid-twenty something I'd LOVE to see my college loans forgiven.  But I don't think that would energize my non-political contemporaries.  It will just be a great benefit.

The return of the draft is the only thing that will energize them, I'm afraid. 

That is what will really hit close to home.  Isn't that what really causes us to move, when our lives are impacted?
 

While I'm well out of my 20s, the younger folks I do talk to have no patience at all for the kind of timid wonkery favored by many of the regular contributors to TPM Cafe.  At least they know (or think they know) what the right stands for.

The moderate Democratic crowd seems so shell-shocked by Republican dominance that they don't notice that they now stand to the right of the mainstream.  Take, for example, the latest Zogby poll, at http://www.zogby.com/news/ReadNews.dbm?ID=1007" : an astounding 42% of the public favor impeachment if it shown that  "if it is found that President Bush did not tell the truth about his reasons for going to war with Iraq, Congress should hold him accountable through impeachment", and only 50% oppose. Bill Clinton's impeachment numbers were never that bad; more than 50% always opposed his impeachment. Bush is now an extremely unpopular president, and the moderate Dems still act like it's too scary to cross him.

Worst of all are the liberal hawks who talk about how a draft will soon be necessary. That's a way to guarantee that the 20-something vote will not come our way; you're talking about sending people to die in a war that should never have been fought. The Republicans, seeing their opening, would just lie and say they can fight the war without a draft.

Let's be the party that's going to end the war. Liberal hawks that feel the need to cover their own butts can talk about how the President lied to them if they like, I don't care.

One thing we might do is recognize the fact that we are living in a global economy. According to a recent Pew poll 68% of people under the age of 30 believe NAFTA and the World trade Organization have been good for the United States. Now I am not arguing that we don't have to reach out to rural voters who tend to feel left out of the New Economy. Mark Warner showed that talking about bringing the internet and better schools etc. into rural areas was great politics. But we can't be a protectionist party, we have to find ways to advance global commerce and uphold our values at the same time. The difficulties of this global era which extend from environmental challenges to terrorism are frame through which progressive policies must be advanced. Lets use the global economy to argue for balanced budgets, universal health care and a new energy policy. Lets argue that this complex interconnected world makes it possible for terrorists to attack us even without the support of rogue states. This means that we must seek true Democratic reform across the Middle East and in Africa. By showing that we understand the world we live in we can get more votes from every type of American.

Here's the thing about twenty-somethings:  we don't know what we want.  Lots of us are working jobs we hate in expensive cities, trying to pay off student loans as we watch home prices grow steadily further out of our reach.  A lot of us never really chose the lives we've fallen into; we ended up here because the circumstances of our growing-up made us painfully risk-averse.  Our educational years, bookended by the Bush I recession and the dot-com bust, prepared us to be flexible professionals with generically marketable skills, but were so time-consuming and expensive that we haven't had the chance to figure out what would make us happy.

Now we can't leave our jobs because we need every penny we can earn to recoup our educational investment while retaining health insurance and paying the rent.  Meanwhile, our hours are so long that we don't have the time to go out and have experiences that might help us figure out what makes us happy.  Our problem is that our lives are expensive to us but cheap to everybody else.  Maybe this is always the lot of the twenty-something, but today it definitely feels like while we were working hard in school like our elders told us to, they were out spending our inheritance, and now they expect us to earn it back.

Education costs too much, the income gap is too wide, and cost of living is too high.  We're running to stand still, and we can't even figure out where we're going.  We are a generation in fear for our standard of living, and those of us on the high end of our twenties are worried for the life we'll be able to provide our kids.  We cannot afford to be bold or daring, and we don't have the luxury of taking up causes other than our own.  Make our lives measurably more secure, give us the mobility to discover who we are, and you'll have our votes for the rest of our lives.

This is one major reason the current "no-brainer" Social Security system is so popular among young people.

Sorry.  I realize this is going to be both a purely anecdotal comment and an unpopular one to make here, but I've yet to meet a single peer of mine (late 20s) who honestly believes Social Security is going to be around when we retire.  And, no, I'm not trolling.  From the Deaniest of Deaniacs to former College Republicans with the nicely coiffed hair, from East- to West- to No-Coasters, I've yet to actually meet someone in the flesh who honestly believes they'll get anything substantial from Social Security when they retire in 40 years.

Don't reply with facts and figures to say I'm wrong; don't tell me if the Bush tax cuts were repealed all would be safe.  That's not the point.  Government has a serious image problem among twenty-somethings, and a big part of it is the honest belief that Uncle Sam will take a chunk of our paychecks for the next 40 years and all we'll get in the end is enough to buy a cup of coffee.  If you don't believe me, ask a twenty-something who's currently investing in some private retirement plan (not all of us are), e.g. a 401(k), what percentage of their retirement income they expect to get from Social Security.

The three big issues I see that are of most interest to twenty-somethings, because they directly affect our day-to-day lives, are:

1) the perception that we're paying into a retirement system we'll never get anything out of,

2) the rising cost of higher education and Congress's seeming lack of interest in the topic (see: Higher Education Act reauthorization monkey business), and

3) predatory lending, particularly relating to credit cards.

The theme here is money: young people don't have any, and we're worried that we're going to have less of it as time goes on.  No money to pay for school.  No money to buy a house.  Did Citibank just call again?  If I were to add another concern, it would be re: health insurance or the lack thereof, but that, too, is about money.   So what does one do?  As the saying goes, I'd write my Congressman, but I forgot my checkbook.

Today's young people want information.  They don't want government to say "trust us; we know the best way".  They don't want election challengers to say "no, trust _me_; I know a _better_ way".  Give us the unfiltered information so we can make our own educated decisions.  Want young people to pay attention?  Tell them not only do you care about education, but here are the numbers that show what X approach will do and why it's better than Y.  Etc.

Again, these are purely anecdotal comments.  But topical nonetheless.

Jeremy, take a hike. I don't mean that sarcastically. I write the guidebook used by most of the people who hike the entire 2174-mile-long Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine or vice versa each year. Such a hike takes about six months, and, for the most part, you are away from the clutter of the workaday world and living carefree in Nature with other like-minded folks who are on the same basic quest. It's a transformational trip for most of the folks who do it, a laboratory where you can meditate on who you are and experiment with who you want to be day after day, and, if you make a mistake or two, no big thing, you just keep on heading up the trail. To use an old cliche, many people find themselves in the process. You are correct, there is more to life than the nine-to-five-to-buy-a-BMW route to happiness. To find that "more", though, you will have to get away from the treadmill for a while and live simply, and that does take daring. Fortunately, it doesn't take much money. Check it out.

It depends which twenty-somethings you're talking about. The current crop includes second wave generation xers (the 24/5-29ers) and first wave millenials (the 20-24ers). Both groups of cohorts have been leaning Democrat, but they have very, very different political orientations and worldviews. Second wave xers (born between about 1972 and 1980/81) lean strongly left-libertarian, and while they (or I should say we) tend to support a level playing field and things like universal health care, they/we are about as distrustful of government and its inherent goodness as the more conservatarian first wave generation xers. You want to warm our hearts? Keep our tax burden low, make deep cuts in the federal bureaucracy (automating and streamlining as much as possible; we don't much care for paper pushers or the unions who protect them at our expense), introduce genuine market forces into health care (as well as bringing universal coverage), ax all ag subsidies, cut corporate welfare, give tax breaks to green businesses, consider school vouchers (which we overwhelmingly support), strongly support civil liberties and criminal justice reform (not to mention an end to drug prohibition), and open markets and free trade. We do have a leftist streak, but we still tend to be diehard believers in what we heard as kids in the 80s, which was that government was the problem, not the solution, and we still want to believe what we heard in the 90s, which was that "the era of big government is over." We are cynics and pragmatists. Our motto is still "don't tread on me" and we mean it.

The first-wave millenials are a whole different ball of wax, and while leaning Democrat like their older (second wave) gen x brothers and sisters have a very different view of the world, and the role of government in particular. They lean liberal populist, or left-communitarian, tend to be much more trusting of government-based solutions to problems (and conversely more skeptical of market-based solutions), are much more accepting of authoritarianism (that recent poll of high school aged kids [who happen to be first wave millenials as well] suggesting a disturbing level of support for the idea that newspapers should have government approval to print stories was not a fluke, and accurately reflects the zeitgeist of these cohorts), and are much more civically engaged than their generation x counterparts. They are remarkably decent kids, and what they appear to want is taxing and spending and taxing and spending. And just in case it needs to be said the needs and aspirations of these two generations are very much at odds.

Health care and work-life-family balance are obviously two good ones.  They also help bridge the various divides that Matthew Yglesias disucsses in his post responing to this quandry -- for instance, "balance" policies should appeal to young parents as well as student-types who want to put off entering the "real world."

But there's two more issues that spring to mind.  The first is progressive taxation.  I happen to think that this a winning issue vis-a-vis all sorts of demographic groups, and that it can be an overall "framework" issue to differentiate progressives from the Right.  But it could have a particular appeal to younger voters.  First, twentysomethings tend to earn less than older voters.  The sales pitch can be, "we want to give you a break when you're just starting out, when you can use it the most."  Second, tax cuts on entry-level salaries can help young workers build assets.  What's worth more: a tax cut in your twenties, that you can invest for forty years before you retire, or a tax cut when you're a high-income earner in the last years of employment?  The latter might be larger in pure dollar terms, but it comes too late to form the bedrock of a nest egg, to go towards the purchase of a first home, or to be the first deposit in the kids' college fund.

The second issue has a narrower appeal: liberalized intellectual property rights.  I'm at the tail end of my twenties, and yet people my age grew up in a world where downloading and copying digital media was simply a part of life.  I'm sure that people ten years my junior feel even stronger about this.  The threat of a summons from the RIAA might not have the mobilizing effect of the threat of a draft notice.  But the issue could work strongly in our favor.

How about something really simple?




Progressives stand for a society which you will be proud to grow with and in which you will be proud to raise your kids. A society with opportunities to let you make the most of yourselves, to find meaningful employment at good pay, or to be able to start your own business, to feel secure about your safety, your health care and your old age. A society that will educate your children and protect your environment.  A society that will further fairness and justice here at home, progress in the world and that will be looked on with admiration by the rest of the family of nations.




Once we get that message across, we can start with specifics. Maybe the twenty-somethings have some specific ideas of their own.