hedge over the last year, but it still stand pretty strong, $22,000. i think that's that's pretty impressive. but you're. right. that the the to me just showed how powerful the federal reserve is like for the global economy that you know any asset turned into a speculative asset in the last ten years especially the last and now feeling the hangover, you know, the alcohol's out of the punchbowl. so, you know, i don't have a good answer in terms like i still think you know, progress because people invent things or discover new things. we knowledge and i think we have to get back to the basics on that that is an excellent place to leave us. thank you for joining us. oh, thanks for having me. go. appreciate it.

yuval levin doing this panel he was talking about how there's panic and then there's worry when it comes to a question of america's to and those type of questions. if you're looking from the voter issue from the republican party's perspective, are you worried or are you panicking? so i guess in some ways been panicking for ten years. and so i'm the i've lost the ability to anymore. so for a little bit of background for those you who aren't as familiar with with my in what i do i am a pollster i have been in the polling industry for over a decade and a half and it was actually around 2008 election when barack obama won over young voters by a 2 to 1 margin. that began going okay. well, on the one hand, very good

that at the time young people were older millennials, that we were getting engaged in politics. this is great. but what's bad all of a sudden, my friends are getting involved in politics and they're saying, how can you be a republican? you seem so nice and normal and that's worrisome to me. but i kept hearing oh, well, it's normal. it's normal for young people to break so heavily for democrats. don't worry it. and at the time i was in graduate school and i looked back at historic data around voting in presidential elections and in midterms and it wasn't always case that young voters broke. so for democratic candidates and what was even more worrisome to the extent anybody was saying, well, this is just a one off because barack obama is appealing to younger voters, things will revert back to the mean eventually is that there's a lot of data that how people think about politics they are young echoes throughout the rest of their lives that we'll probably someone who started off thinking one thing and then had an aha moment and changed their mind. but in aggregate people don't change their minds much once

they get kind of out of their twenties and thirties. and so if republicans kind of make efforts to win those voters back, that could lead this ripple effect that you would see for decades. and that's a little bit of what we're seeing. so if you're just thinking about the millennial generation, they still vote leaning democratic, even though now we're old, we're having 40th birthday parties and you buying homes, having kids, doing all the things that republican strategists said, oh, that'll definitely make them lean right and then when you see for gen z they are in many ways their political views are relatively similar to their millennial brothers and sisters still very skeptical of markets relative early a sort of socially and culturally more progressive. and so for a variety of reasons just not anywhere close to looking like kind of the republican party, particularly the republican party of the sort

of pre donald trump era. so when you're the 28 millennials story through the lens of obama, i'm wondering how much is that about obama and how much of that would have been the same if like let's say hillary clinton wins the democratic primary and more likely than not also beats john mccain, what would you see the millennials story, because you sort of had a 2008 financial crisis, you sort of had the iraq war, the generational. so the way to frame the question is how much of break generational voting choices are due to personalities versus like events and context. sure so some of it is, i think from president obama's was an accelerant but it was not the cause and you can actually look at the exit polls in the 2000 presidential election. young people and their grandparents voted essentially identically young, split evenly between al gore and, george w bush, old people split between al gore and george w bush. and you get to the 2004 election, and at that point you have the iraq war that has begun to disillusion some young

people. and there you see a little bit of a generation gap open up, but young people still break, you know, john kerry by only, i think it was like a roughly a ten point margin, not that big a deal compared to what we see nowadays. but if you actually look at the 2006 midterms, so at that point, barack obama has just arrived in the united states senate, has not announced he's running for president. and in that midterm, young voters broke for democrats by a wider margin than any individual age group had, like for a party. if you look back through like exit polls, just going back and, back and back. so you began to see signs of this breakup between generation and the gop at the time pre barack obama, the are there but the 2008 election certainly didn't help and when you suddenly had a president who at least early in his presidency was very inspirational, appealing to young people. and republicans did not have a great counter to that. you had the problem both of

skepticism of markets stemming from the financial crisis skepticism american engagement overseas as a result of the iraq and afghanistan wars, skepticism the right on social grounds of the sort of culturally conservative of the george w bush era gop, clashing with young people who are moving the country in a different direction on lgbt issues. so you had the issues piece, you had the personality piece as well all coming together to create this perfect storm that made it very hard for republicans to to sort of hold serve. and i think know speaking of millennials like aging just turned 30. so that's meant that i more aware than ever that they're like differences especially the younger like gen z gen z folks. what would you say are the differences millennials and gen z voters? and how much is like maybe confusing or overcome? the two of those like to make a skewed perception in. oh yeah well and so being someone who studied millennials for a long time now often i'm

reluctant when people me tell me a little bit about young voters because a lot of my expertise on that topic 15 years ago had to do with the fact that i was a young voter 15 years ago and now you know my generation is older and i recognize that like i still wear skinny jeans. i get that means that i have less credibility to speak about what gen z says, but do look at the data and. what the data say is different between the two is that for millennials, we came of age in a moment where there was lot of emphasis on bi partizanship let's reach across the aisle. let's try to find common ground. let's be let's put our heads down and let's power through the challenges we are facing and generation z is a little bit different. so for for my generation, the defining thing of our young adulthood was the internet. you know, for the oldest millennials, you might remember time when the internet was not ubiquitous, but the internet's basically been there for gen z. it's smartphones. and so from them, the abc and

social media and the ability to raise your voice, make your voice heard speak your mind any time, any place, any topic and that voice heard by an awful of people, people you might not even know, that's their normal. and so gen z, they're much less interested in let's find common ground, let's try to put our heads down and overcome this challenge that we've been handed, it's let's blow things up because it seems like things are not running very well. and so that's also caused some friction in workplaces where generation z employees come in and they are not in trying to figure how to adapt to or improve move upon systems that are in place in their workplaces. they just want to come in and have and transformation and that causes a lot of that friction even gen z and millennials. i'm curious, do you see that gen z like revolutionary energy, like playing out differently on the right and left? it's a good question. in in in a way, i don't

necessarily i think there's more in common than than is different in that the goals are that there is to an extent a goal of persuasion. but there is a really big focus on sort of organ and being loud and being the squeaky wheel rather than on like let's go try to find people and and convert them, which i think there's there are pluses and minuses to that strategy. but i that is something that unites sort of left and right gen z is total disgust with the systems and the way things are, which is something that millennials had to, but, but even more so turned all the way up to 11 and paired that with just there's been such a decline in trust in institutions even since the millennials first came on the scene, that there's no interest deference to what came before or you those who were, you know, purportedly or so on

and so forth, that has just eroded even further. so then i think the other question would be your 2015 book selfie vote, bought it, read it, enjoyed it. the metaphor is like selfie. so like the selfie is a way of like, you know, kind of like it's like the millennials. they got a selfie. how would you kind of like define a gen z if you wrote the book to like it seems like it probably like like not just like tech talk in terms of the company but short form video attention like seems like that's like a very specific like technological dynamic that wouldn't have existed even when you're coming of age on like facebook and 2008. sure and i'm always reluctant to i mean, i a little bit hesitant to even have the vote as the title of the book because i thought, what, like three years from now, no one's doing this anymore. they still are. so that held. but yeah, there's a chapter in the book called like snapchats from hillary and the other day i was like i wonder how many people you know, i haven't actually looked at the data recently on like usage of snapchat versus versus versus what have you, but things are

always in flux. so i, i'm reluctant to ever define a generation or a group of people by a particular app or what have you, because that can always change. but i do think that the the point in calling the book, the selfie vote was that at the time, back years ago, it was thought of as selfies were like a thing young people did. and my point was, this is not something that i think is just going to be associated with young people moving forward. young people start the trend and then everyone else adopts them. and so that's why getting in on the ground floor and, focusing on young people's political attitudes is important because they tell us where everything headed. if you want to know where the country is going, look at what young people think in corporate. has this figured out political america, much less so. so when someone hasn't figured something out, it's that they have like an incentive not to figure it out. or they either right. or they don't want to figure out. what is the political space left, right and center? like not figuring out of it or gen-z is leading things. so i think the incentives in our

system are such that people mostly focused on the next 2 to 4 years. they are there is no incentive in politics to think long term. so when someone like comes around it in 2009 is panicking republicans, you're losing these young voters. it's very easy. and frankly to say it is much important to me to turn out another percent of voters who are senior than it is for me to focus on trying to persuade young where if i walk into a room of 100 young people, maybe 15, to 20 of them will go out to vote like that's i understand if you're frame of reference and your incentives are i need to win in 18 months why younger voters would fall off your radar. but i think the problem on the right is there really aren't institutions that thinking a lot at least back you know 1520 years ago weren't thinking long term it's just i got to win the next election. and so that means if you have a problem that you need to solve it immediately, you'll be fine.

you'll pass it to someone else to solve the problem. for republican is now is like the bill is starting to come due as millennials have aged. they have held on in way, shape and form to some of those more progressive. and now they're voting more and, more than ever. and it's it's harder to unwind that after someone has cast a ballot for a democratic candidate in election after election after election than it is to try to reach someone when they first enter the political process. it's it's interesting because in your december national review piece on the and young people you are pointing out that like the fake churchill quote about how you know you get older and you become much more conservative just like a rock isn't a real quote. but also it's like not backed up in the social science. but i'm interested in like why we have narrative in the first place. so for example, i think the big honor would be like look at the baby boomers. they might protest the vietnam war, but then they go all in for ronald reagan. so i would love to hear like how i hear this, too, like the 20th

century lens and then here how kind of like the right is responding to this kind of dynamic like now that like you can't resort to okay things. are going to change. sure. so there is a quote that people mis to winston churchill he never said it but the fake quote is if you are young and conservative you have no heart and if you are old and liberal, you have no brain and reason why i hear that comment constantly is when people are trying to say, well, it doesn't matter. the young people progressive because they'll grow up they'll get married, they'll have kids, they'll buy homes they'll pay taxes. the wonder what that fire thing on their pay stub and they'll all magically decide they're conservatives and this hasn't really been the reason why it is so persistent is i think twofold. one, you can imagine how in terms of cultural issues, it's easy to understand why that would be the case. right. that somebody who is younger is going to be more open to society structuring itself in a new way to to changes in, you know, being less beholden to

traditions. and so, you understand why someone who's younger might be more, you know, socially progressive or left the economic piece is a little bit more questionable, but you know, there's an underlying thought process to it that's not crazy. but a lot of it is also to what you mentioned, that it is baby, assuming everyone is like them and there's a ton of data that says that's not the case. back in 20 if leave it was 13 or 14, there was a democratic data firm called catalist and they did a 200,000 person study where they looked at people's political views by birth year over, the course of their lifetimes, and they show that that you just described for baby boomers. right. that back in the 1960s, they you know, there were 70. they first began getting interested in politics, involved in their they're much more progressive. then reagan comes along and they become more conservative. and now they are watching of fox news and what have you and so they may assume well, everyone

will go on this same journey as me that's not necessarily the case gen x they came of age with reagan being that first big memory and actually gen x leans slightly more to the right these days then than even in some cases boomers in part i believe because those memories that were shaped by them coming of age in the reagan presidency and the of the early clinton centrist to democrat moment have have resonated with them. meanwhile for millennials of age during the obama presidency and then you know for z coming of age in the trump presidency those leave a lasting impact on how you view things and that catalyst study said that events that happened to you in your political life when you are 18. i have, i believe three times as much of an effect on your lifetime political behavior as something that happens you when you're 40. so things that happen, you're younger, they shape the way you you look at the world. and that resonates in selfie vote. the example i used of how this

plays out in corporate america is there's a reason mcdonald's wants to sell happy meals and it's not just because they make money off of happy meals, it's because then you have a very young consumer that develops a very positive mental association, your brand. and so when they're no longer six years old, but they're 36 years old and they're going on a road trip and they see the golden arches they have that warm feeling inside that developed from when they were younger politics isn't exactly the same, but it's not completely either. so if we're talking about life events having a huge impact, like the obvious gen z antics, like the money answer is a mix of like 911 to financial crisis. the gen z answer would obviously covid. how is covid playing out? because it seems like depending on where you live, that could go in either direction. sure. so it's because the politics of covid cut against what you might expect, given that for young people, they were not as at risk of the severe threat of covid. as someone who is older and yet

younger people have tended to have more progressive political views. so you would find in some cases older voters being a little more resistant to covid restrictions in some ways, but because they were personal, more under threat from the virus being maybe a little more accepting of it were for young people initially feeling more, you know, to the extent their more progressive. okay well i'm to care for my fellow citizens and do the stuff and then to later sort of push back very vigorously against it. look at what has happened to my generation and you know i still find i did a fellowship on a college campus a year ago and i was you know, we we had to do a lot of things wearing masks or unless you had you could go outside and at the time i thought this seems maybe like it's a little bit of of overkill and i was thinking that the students would be really mad like that their college experience is being taken from them by them not being able to have many events, by them not being able to have social face to face interactions as much. and i didn't as much of that as

i was expecting. now, be that it's a more progressive leaning campus or i was speaking more progressive leaning, but i in some ways saw much less resistance to covid so much less resistance to the sort of covid mandate and regime than i would have expected, considering the cross currents of who's most affected by the disease. you know, hearing that what i immediately kind of wonder is, is a generation more than just something that happens or is it something that you develop a reaction to over time? for example, if we're telling the story of like u.s. foreign policy, we'd say, i look like millennials. gen x, like zoomers. they're responding to like the forever wars and how they were bad. but i'm sure polling is actually towards the start was like much more in favor. so now the generation has a different reaction. so i'm wondering if is there a world where like if you're 23, you're entering the workplace. okay, yeah. there's this year of like covid. are you going to think differently about that when you're 30 to 30, etc.? four entirely possible.

and so think i'm so glad you brought up the example of wars in iraq and afghanistan because again, if you did on this in 2002, shortly in the aftermath september 11th, you would find young people feeling very differently about things than than they did years later or even five years later. so this is constantly and so that's why i am reluctant say, well, here is firmly gen z stands on covid and also it's hard whenever we have these conversations about where does gen z stand on x because generations are not a monolith, right? i find the same thing happens when people ask me about gender. well, tell me. tell me, kristen, what do women voters want? and i'm like, well, you're talking about 52% of the electorate, so we're going to need to a little more specific than that. but i think that the jury is still out on whether young people will come down on something like covid and i think we'll begin to see hints of this. do young people decide that things like remote work are very much how they like to live or do people going, i'm done with this, i want to go back the

office? like those are the sorts of things that aren't related to politics, but i think will give us some clues about how. they will young people will think about the policies were in place in response to covid 19 and i just kind of revised and we were talking about this before we started everything the past 5 minutes were incredibly biased towards people who go to college. so even like i'm like, i'm explaining covid in the context of like, oh, like, remember, like when you're at uchicago, i think that's where fellowship was. and like you couldn't go to your like top tier school class like that's not on 15 different levels. that's not the average experience. same thing is true of like remote work, like white collar employees. so like to what degree is just like and even in corporate america, i'm guessing there'd be like a huge degree extra, almost like structural bias towards this point. so how does the college versus non-college thing skew things? so i'm so glad you brought this up. and we were talking about this a little bit before we came on stage that so many of our conversations about z, we found this with millennials as well like this. we went through this that. the image that comes to mind of

someone when you say the word millennial and now the word gen z is grossly unrepresentative. the millennial example i always used to give was the new york times did this article. the headline was something like millennials are taking over the workplace and what it means for you. it was like, oh, here we go. and the the lead of the story was all about a young man who goes to his and says, you know, i need the week off because i had a friend who just passed away and i'm really going to need some time for me to recover from this and then couple of days later, it turns out he's, been at home building himself a tree house. and this is what the new york times holds up as, like the example of millennials in, the workplace. right? like vaguely duplicitous may have been making up a friend who died. so you can get out of work so that you can go home and instagram yourself doing like a fun crafts project. and i thought, well, this is extremely unrepresentative of what most, you know, millennials are like. and i think gen z, we wind up in the same situation, right? it's easy to look at like insane. that happens on a college campus and go like, oh my gosh, the

children these days, what's happening to them. and like the vast majority of young people are not going. certainly four year residential college. do you find that bias a little bit as in the political space? i because so often jobs in media and in politics are fed from those colleges and universities. but i think for the right it's a huge missed opportunity if think about fighting this battle, the hearts and minds of gen z as a battle primarily being fought on college campuses. there's plenty of effort and resources that go into that. and yet have this huge number of young people are not going to attend a four year college. if they're going to go to college at all. and many of them may be interested in that sort of ways in, which the left is trying to push the conversation. our country, you know, so away, hey, i just need to be able to make a good living, afford the things. i need to afford to get by. you know, i don't have time to

have fights whether we use the word latinxs or not. like that's like a silly example that gets used probably too much, but i think there is this huge missed opportunity to reach young people who are not on college campuses, because i think both parties, republicans in particular, even though the party's base increasingly is of non-college educated voters, they have kind of missed that boat when it comes to young people in other speaking of young people, i'm really curious how, you feel or how you're seeing like the tick tock band conversation go especially red states college campuses. how are young people like reacting to like what's the matter families you think about it around so i don't have a good answer for you on this one yet. i'm always reluctant to answer a question where i don't have like concrete data, but this is something that i'm going to be studying over the next couple of weeks. so stay tuned. i do find that is a generational. i'll take a step back and focus it on generations and their

differing views of china itself. so it's interesting when you ask older voters, what do they think of the united states in relation to china? they are much more likely to view the united states today as a superpower that is on the and china as the rise and about to eat our lunch and younger voters instead actually don't view the u.s. as a big influential superpower now. but as a result they also don't view america as having declining influence in relation to china. so for younger voters are in some ways a little bit less and i say this very broadly, this is not, you know, young people on the right, but just young people broadly, a little less concern about a rising china taking over for the u.s. as a world leader, but that a lot of that is because for many young people, they don't think of the u.s. as this big you know the world leader right now anyways so that i think affects the way conversation around china plays out for young people. so i think the next question

will really come down to unpacking the midterms real quick, because there are a couple of big exit polls differing conclusions for for how should we think about that? yeah. so the past election in the midterms there were two big questions. one was would young people turn out to vote? and two, if they did turn out to vote which party would they break for and it does seem as though young people turned out in in relatively big numbers. there are some analysts believe that there was huge sort of youthquake that happened. but i think some of that data a little bit shaky, but young people, definitely did not stay home, was not a like 2014 style or midterm where the bigger debate is, is did young people break for democrats by a little or by a lot? and there two different exit polls for reasons that would take me like 8 hours to explain here. but of them suggested that young voters broke really heavily for democrats like his level broke for democrats.

and another one of the exit polls actually showed that the gap wasn't that big, wasn't that different, you know, prior midterms, etc. . so it is a little bit of a choose own adventure environment out there at the moment. but what i think is most alarming to me as someone who leans right of center is that that winston churchill baloney quote i mentioned before, like we are now getting more and more proof that is a bunch of nonsense in that you used to have voters in their forties and their thirties. forties used to break relatively conservative ish and that is no longer the case that as my generation has we are still voting not by 2 to 1 margin type numbers, but are leaning much more leftward than gen-x was at the same point in time in their generation and will cycle. and so you're beginning to see challenge play out for where the damage that done 15 years ago is still up in those exit polls and

it's going to make it so that republicans have to do more and more to either try win over young voters like the next batch. young voters that are coming up like basically declare bankruptcy with millennials and start fresh with the new generation or really run up numbers with older voters. but the math is going to come in for them. so the last few big ones always curious how much social matters. for example, i mean at a political level. s.o.s., you know a kind of phoned in think piece like aoc has so much political look at all her followers and kind of sort of wonder i guess that like just can be commoditized away when like when everyone gets an instagram and when eventually more successful politicians do kind of have those skill sets. so to what degree does like social media, like the meme, like twitter? do those spaces, how how much do those matter in your analysis? i think it matters a lot because it's a primary way that most young people are getting information about what's going on in the world around them. i hesitate to use the word. the word like this is how they're getting most their news, because we think of news as like

very formal, you know, i'm reading an article, etc., but the way they information about what's going on in the world around them is overwhelmingly through social media channels. i do think that a problem the right runs into and that gen z conservatives are getting better at but is you have to be i think native to some of these platforms in order to do it right if you just parachute in like i am not on tiktok, if i signed up for tiktok tomorrow and attempted to become a tik influencer, it would be, i'm sure, would be horrific and cringe worthy because i would be kind of like, how does this platform work? i you have to be sort of native to the platform in problem on the right. is that a lot of content that i think is created with an eye toward winning over young on these platforms is ultimately being pushed or asked for by who is a donor somewhere up the chain who's really upset that their grandson is like leaning left and wants to know how to fix it. and so the incentives are

ultimately, yes, you're trying to reach young, but you're also trying to give this baby boomer, something that they can then like share on facebook. and you know that they think is what the want, but may not actually be what the kids want. and so i think there's that tension, right? i think that there needs to be more of an effort, the right to actually put the microphone in the hands of young people and let them do stuff that isn't intended to be for young people. but it's really the old people who want to win. the young people, if that makes any sense. yeah. so i think the last big question, the answer quickly is we've seen a lot of like narrative energy towards like, wow, like minority voters or a certain context are like voting more for republicans. hispanics in florida like to what degree could we see these like generational like shift how how how much? because once again like the racial narrative is different. that was five years ago. how we expect big shifts or do you see things as being pretty consistent? i am not in the business of saying anything impossible in

politics anymore. so it is entirely possible that you could have either the back end of gen z or whatever the generation is after them, you know, reacting to what they've seen, come before them and say, well, you guys all pushed things this and you wanted to blow up these big institutions and you wanted to read, you know, radically change or change x, y and z and that a disaster. so now i'm going to pivot this other way. i recall this will sound very off topic, but there was a fascinating article i read about very, very, very people these days who who decide to join the not just the catholic church, but decided to take up orders and become either a priest or a nun because the average of precedence has been going up dramatically. no, nobody had been opting into that life. but that for young women who are in to that life, they are overwhelmingly more likely these days to choose orders that are like very strict. right. that that like that. it's almost this backlash to like, oh, my culture, you know, everything's become more sort of loosey goosey.

i'm going to i'm going to reject. so there's always a chance that the next generation will look at what millennials and gen z have done and said. that's ridiculous and stupid. and they'll they'll swing another. but i don't think that stuff just happens without there sort of institutions individuals and resources behind trying make sure that when a tipping point that there's like resources behind it to to push that change and so if there's suddenly going to be a generation that loves free markets or you know changes its views on on any number issues it doesn't just happen on its own. very well said thank you. joining us for this first session and thank you all.