WASHINGTON – It can command endless hours of cable news, draw crowds in the hundreds of thousands and launch candidates from obscurity to the steps of Capitol Hill. What it can’t do is attract young voters.
The tea party has become the de facto lightning rod of this year’s election. But a survey released Oct. 21 by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics revealed that only 11 percent of Millenials (18-29 year olds) consider themselves supporters of the tea party movement.
At least in its current form, the tea party appears structurally and ideologically incompatible with modern American youth, a voting bloc that both Republicans and Democrats have actively courted in the weeks before the midterm elections.
At the heart of the tea party’s youth dilemma is its decentralized, fragmented structure that makes penetrating and mobilizing a preoccupied, on-the-go demographic difficult.
“You have to expend extraordinary energy to get young people involved. They’re distracted with school, with romance, with life worries,” said Larry Sabato, a political analyst who runs the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “I see no evidence the tea party has done that.”
Because of its grassroots nature, the tea party lacks a central leadership structure. But those driving the movement realize that to attract Millenials to their rank-and-file, they’ll first need prominent leaders who are Millenials themselves.
“More young leaders begets more young participants,” said Matt Kibbe, president of FreedomWorks, a group founded by former House Majority Leader Dick Armey that has fueled much of the movement’s growth.
Kibbe said it’s crucial for the tea party to recruit young people by giving them alternatives to standard political activism that are more in line with what youth enjoy.
“The tea party is different,” he said. “We have music, we have fun, we do protests. It’s a different set of activities than your typical, canned Republican stump speech that was driving people away in droves.”
Another factor driving away some young voters is the tea party’s perceived support of conservative social views, like opposition to abortion rights and gay marriage.
“Socially and culturally a lot of young people don’t connect to the tea party movement because of value issues,” Sabato said.
Many young conservatives tend to line up with the libertarian model of being fiscally conservative but socially liberal, according to Peter Levine, director of CIRCLE, a Tufts University group that conducts research on the political involvement of young Americans.
Many individual tea party groups, such as those that support Ron Paul, are more libertarian and do not espouse socially conservative values. But voters and the media rarely distinguish between the different ideological threads within the larger tea party movement, according to Emily Ekins, a UCLA doctoral student who tracks the tea party’s varying philosophies and manifestations.
Thus, some young voters who might otherwise identify with tea party themes of lower taxes and less government spending hesitate to associate themselves with the tea party because of the stigma surrounding social conservatism.
“A lot of young people, whether it’s from the media, professors or other sources, come to the opinion that the tea party is just a bunch of right wing extreme radicals, racists, whatever,” said Patrick Kelly, a tea party activist and freshman at Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, Ill. “That’s the biggest deterrent.”
Another deterrent is that the tea party seems to be looking back, while American youth are looking forward. Christopher Kukk, who teaches political science at Western Connecticut State University, pointed out that tea party rhetoric repeatedly harkens back to the founding fathers. Even the movement’s name is a reference to an insurrection more than 200 years in the past.
“It’s all about keeping America, preserving America, not changing America,” Kukk said. “You see a lot of Millenials talking about changing America.”
Yet some within the movement argue that young people should be looking back, in order to appreciate the potential risks in our future.
“Young people today grew up with very little knowledge of communism and socialism,” said Joel Pollak, a Republican trying to unseat Democrat Jan
Schakowsky in Illinois’ 9th congressional district. The 33-year-old has been endorsed by tea party groups, and said that Millenials’ lack of cold war memories has prevented them from recognizing the threat that current government policies pose to American freedom.
Ironically, tea party opposition to government action leads young people to see the movement as an ideological mismatch, said Matthew Segal, the 25-year-old executive director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment.
“The tea party is based on an anti-government premise, and young people are the most trusting constituency of government,” Segal said.
And some young voters agree with the tea party ideologically but avoid association with it because they tend to retreat from any large-scale group identifications.
“They don’t like labels, period,” Kukk said.
Many young voters also recoil at the tea party’s homogenous racial makeup. According to the Pew Research Center’s October political survey, 85 percent of registered voters who agree with the tea party are white. Just 2 percent of tea party supporters are black.
“The young generation is just by the numbers the most diverse generation in American history,” Levine said. “You can’t get that much purchase on this generation if you look like you’re all white.”
Yet an opportunity does exist for a third-party group to capture the attention of Millenials. More than 40 percent of young voters do not classify themselves as members of a major political party, according to Harvard University’s October poll. But most experts doubt the tea party movement can overcome its differences with young voters and gain traction with these independent Millenials.
“There is room for an independent party to rise up and grab young people,” Segal said. “If the tea party numbers don’t show that, then they clearly aren’t resonating with young voters.”