By: Ethan Stoetzer – insidesources.com – January 22, 2018

As midterm elections approach in 2018, both Republicans and Democrats are going to work to activate their bases, but what about the millennials?

As midterm elections approach in 2018, many question the ability of Republicans to hold on to their majorities in the House and Senate, and wonder whether or not conservatives will be able to maintain their dominant position in many state governments.

David Andersen, a political science professor at Iowa State University, thinks that there will be an additional factor at play in the 2018 elections, which will become more pronounced in 2020, and that is the behavior of millennials as a major voting bloc. The following interview has been edited for clarity and conciseness.

Let’s talk about your predictions on the population of millennials and baby boomers in the country and the size of the voting blocs.

Yes, so millennials actually started outnumbering the baby boomers about four years ago, but because they’ve voted at lower rates, they won’t actually catch up to them in the electorate until about maybe 2018, probably 2020. And after that, millennials should dominate for a long time. The baby boomers have been the largest voting bloc in America since 1978, so we really have had 40 years of baby boomer rule, and may be starting off 40 years of millennial rule. I mean, there are so many things about that possibility that blows my mind because I think millennials are the generation that aren’t used to being in charge of their own lives or anything, and they’re about to inherit the United States.

What’s your biggest takeaway from that?

I think the biggest thing of interest to me is that for the first time in 40 years, we may see the political conversation in America change. When the baby boomers became the dominant voting population, they helped elect Ronald Reagan and a whole new set of issues got put on the table. It’s really only in 1980 when the nation started caring about tax rates and abortion and gun control and these big hot-button issues that we’ve been talking about for the last 40 years. That’s all baby boomers and Reagan, and if you talk to millennials, those are largely things they say they don’t care about and it’s very likely that we will see a candidate likely in the mold of Bernie Sanders who says ‘okay let’s shift the conversation, let’s talk about making college affordable, let’s legalize marijuana, and let’s make the net freely accessible to everyone,’ which if you say that to a baby boomer, they’re like ‘you’re crazy, that’s stupid.’ I think it’s going to be a shift like that that’s going to feel for most of the country seismic.

Even though data currently shows low voting turnout by millennials?

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Source: How Millennials Will Reshape American Politics in 2020