Election 2012 and the Missing Millennials
By  Zoë Carpenter, October 17, 2012 for the November edition of The Nation.

[....] his counterpart Matt was drinking beer as he listened to the president’s remarks. “It was a great speech,” he admitted afterward, “but I still don’t know who I’m going to vote for.” He cast his ballot for Obama in 2008, but his political views shifted after the ALEC-induced showdown in his home state of Wisconsin over union rights. Matt said he was primarily concerned with efficiency in government, and he complained that he earned less than public sector workers.

“I mean, I like the guy,” he said more than once about Obama. “I’m not a gun guy, and I don’t care about God. But I trust Romney more on the economy.” Matt represents a splinter group of onetime Obama supporters who are threatening to jump to Romney; they tend to be white, male and focused on economic issues. In the Reuters/Ipsos tracking poll, Obama has opened a sizable lead over Romney among all voters younger than 30, anywhere from seventeen to twenty-nine percentage points since early October. Among minority millennials, his lead over Romney is more than 50 points, but the two are tied among white millennials, and Romney has at times held a slim lead among white millennial men. (In 2008, Obama had a ten-point margin over McCain among white millennials.)

This shift has largely been chalked up to frustration with high unemployment and the slow pace of recovery, but millennials were worried about the economy more than any other issue in 2008, too. The difference then was that they took strikingly progressive and pro-government positions: 69 percent of voters under 30 said that the government should “do more to solve problems,” while only 27 percent said that the government does “too many things better left to businesses and individuals.” Four years later, a mere 19 percent of millennials think that government spending is the way to improve the economy, and 39 percent see cutting taxes as a policy for growth, according to the Harvard Institute of Politics.

Such data suggest that the conservative trend has less to do with Romney’s appeal than with right-wing messaging, which has framed the economic debate as a contest between overregulation and government waste on the one hand, and fiscal discipline and private sector job creation on the other—a message that has resonated among young white voters. At least leading up to the first debate, Obama was competing with this ideology—not with Romney—for Matt’s vote. “If there were another Republican besides Romney, I’d definitely vote for him,” Matt told me. [....]