Meet the Millennials Taking Over City Hall
The "Hall of Justice" has just two rules: A nightly game of beer pong, and a ban on talking politics after 8 p.m. The seven-bedroom house in upstate New York was home to a motley crew of government nerds--county legislators, city-council members, Ph.D. students and one big guy called "the Mayor." Svante Myrick got the nickname because he was always bigfooting decisions and hogging the remote control. But also because in 2011, at 24, he became the youngest-ever mayor of Ithaca, N.Y.
"The youngest generation is pretty sure that we can do it better than the folks that have been doing it for a long time," says Myrick, who was re-elected in 2015 with 89% of the vote. "And the folks that have been doing it for a long time are pretty sure that the youngest generation has no idea what we're doing."
Young people have always rolled their eyes at the received wisdom of the olds, but now they've got numbers on their side. Millennials--born between 1980 and 2000--overtook baby boomers as the largest segment of the U.S. population in 2015, yet they are led by one of the most geriatric federal governments in history. Donald Trump, at 71, is the oldest President ever elected to a first term. On Capitol Hill, the average ages in the House and Senate were 49 and 53 in 1981; today they're 59 and 62. Nearly half of Senators defending their seats in 2018 will be over 65 on Election Day, including California's Dianne Feinstein, who recently announced that she'll run for re-election at 84. More than half of the Supreme Court was born before you could buy a color TV.
The Founding Fathers framed America as a representative democracy, yet the largest living generation has the least representation in Washington. Trump was propelled into office by older voters, but many of his policies so far weigh heaviest on millennials, who voted against him by a double-digit margin and overwhelmingly disapprove of his presidency. When Trump banned transgender troops from military service, some of the loudest outcry was from young people, who are twice as likely as boomers to identify as LGBTQ. When Trump and his Attorney General Jeff Sessions, 70, ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program shielding 800,000 young undocumented immigrants from deportation, the effect will be mostly felt among millennial immigrants and their cohort. When 22 GOP Senators--with an average age over 65--pushed Trump to withdraw from the Paris Agreement, it appalled many young people, who tend to be the most concerned about climate change.