Bryan Preston points out what appears to be a very ominous statistic concerning the Millennials:
Millennials are slower to marry than previous generations. They have moved the median marriage age up to 29 for men and 27 for women. They are largely delaying marriage because they are loaded down with massive student debt, and because there are few jobs available to them upon which they can build their lives. The current Democratic administration’s anti-jobs policies are largely to blame for the latter. The lack of accountability in university practices and tuition is largely to blame for the former. Millennials are being squeezed by the Obama economy. Yet they remain more likely to vote for Democrats, if they vote.
I’m not here to slam single parenthood, but single parenthood has proven to be a very strong predictor of one’s economic outcome and one’s politics, meaning, one’s relationship to the government and the policies one tends to vote for. Simply put, single adults tend to vote in a certain way, and children of single adults tend to have poorer economic outcomes, which leads to a certain voting pattern. Marriage is a strong predictor of political behavior.
Currently just 26% of millennials — those between age 18 and 33 — are married. At the same age, 36% of GenX and 48% of the Baby Boomers were married. And 69% of millennials say they want to get married, but the lack of jobs is holding them back.
However, one thing that is often left out of the equation is that the racial demographics of the Millennials is very different than those of GenX and the Baby Boomers. It is risky to base too many conclusions on the generational data without first breaking out the various racial sub-groups. For example, I have seen data that suggests white Millennials don’t actually vote very differently than white GenX voters, which, based on the historical age-shift, would tend to indicate that white Millennials are trending to the right of white GenXers.