ON OCTOBER 13, 2008, just one month after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, presidential candidate Barack Obama delivered a speech in Toledo, Ohio, outlining his “economic rescue plan” that would bring the country out of the deepest recession since the Great Depression. “It’s a plan that begins with one word that’s on everyone’s mind, and it’s spelled J-O-B-S,” Obama said. He then rattled off a list of initiatives that would later make up his $862 billion stimulus package.
On November 4, 2008, voters hired Obama to fix the economy. But four years and $5 trillion in deficit spending later, the jobs haven’t come back. The unemployment rate rose to over 10 percent and rested in July (the most recent monthly figure available at press time) at 8.3 percent—all this despite a promise from the Obama administration that the stimulus package would keep unemployment below 8 percent. But if the Obama economy has been bad for the country at large, it has been disastrous for one cohort of Americans who provided the president with his decisive victory in 2008: young voters, who now face an unemployment rate 50 percent higher than that of the nation as a whole.
Like the rest of the population in 2008, young voters were overwhelmingly concerned about the economy. According to the national exit poll, 61 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds said the economy was their top issue, compared to 63 percent of all voters. But the young were much more bullish than their elders about Obama’s ability to get the job done. The race between Obama and McCain was actually a dead heat among voters 30 and older. But 18- to 29-year-olds broke 2 to 1 for Obama. In fact, although they only made up 18 percent of the electorate in 2008, they broke so strongly for Obama that they provided 6 percentage points of his 7-point margin of victory. Obama’s margin among the young was unusual compared to the two previous elections. In 2000, Al Gore edged George W. Bush among these voters by 2 points (48–46, with Ralph Nader nabbing 6 percent). In 2004, they backed John Kerry over Bush by a 54–45 margin.
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