In the Demo Book Club, feat. The Selfie Vote
We read books for the show and thought you should know about them. So - an occasional series, starting with this one by Kristen Soltis Anderson
For so much of the research we’ve done, we have focused on contemporary media sources. We started with headlines from the New York Post and other extremely online publications and our research overall has shifted heavily into the journalistic media narrative arc that has been assigned to Millennials; a group we’re not even sure we would say exists.
But of course, there was an ur-text for journalists to build from. Wasn’t it Millennials Rising that kicked off this whole escapade? To understand the narrative arc of the Millennial Myth, and what shaped it, we decided we need to read the most visible and influential books (at least nominally) about Millennials over the past 20 years that coincided with shifts in the story.
Up first, Kristen Soltis Anderson’s 2015 book The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America (And How Republicans Can Keep Up).
Anderson is an experienced and respected pollster, and the book comes on the heels of the so-called GOP autopsy that was conducted after Mitt Romney’s loss in the 2012 U.S. Presidential election.
Anderson does a great job laying out ways that the GOP could better relate to younger voters based on the post-election study conducted by the party. But the book comes across now like a time capsule, from when politics seemed comparatively civil and sane, before TFG made his trip down the escalator.
As a book about Millennials voting habits, it feels incomplete, and maybe feels like publishers wanted to leverage Millennial fever to book more pre-orders. Anderson wavers in her description of the subject constituency, referring to them as ‘young voters’ more often than Millennials, and never defining boundary ages for the group she’s describing. (Unfortunately, it’s in the title, so we are more critical than most readers might be.)
Anderson nails the idea that our political attitudes don’t just arrive on election day; we’re each exposed to ideas and experiences that shape or drive a perspective and by the time we get to our first ballot box, we’re voting on the sum of those.
She also highlights the analytics-driven electoral campaign voter engagement strategies that has only grown in influence following the publication of her book. These tools were present in 2012 (and earlier) but they continued to evolve, for better or worse, in 2016 and beyond.
Two links for context:
Kristen Soltis Anderson on 538 Politics Podcast, “Are Millennials Getting More Conservative?
Nate Cohn on NYT’s The Tilt Newsletter “Millennials Are Not an Exception. They’ve Moved to the Right.” [subscription required]
We thought it was a good start for our book club, as it reflects a pivotal time in the narrative - and as we approach yet another presidential election cycle in the US. We’ll have more to say about the political alignments of Millennials this fall and - no doubt - throughout next year’s chaos.
But for our next book, we’re reading Bobby Duffy’s The Generation Myth. Want to read along with us? Pick it up here.