The confusion among the lovable Gen X bug men over at the Z Blog as to Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s generation is typical of blind men groping the tame elephant that is Gen Y.
Pete Buttigieg is the millennial candidate in every way. Most likely his support came from his age cohort. Further, it was heavily female, with the male portion being the sorts, who support the case against consuming soy products. On the other hand, Klobuchar is picking up the old Hillary vote. These are the old hens, who think having a female president is the only thing that matters. Her bitchy obnoxiousness reminds them of every fight they won with their ex-husband.
That is the democratic coalition right now. On the one hand it is spoiled, entitled millennial voters. On the other it is their divorced mothers. Sure, blacks, Hispanics, legacy whites and bronze age communists are there, but the people who run the party are of the two groups rallying to Buttigieg and Klobuchar. Those other groups are just accessories. They always have been, but now it is becoming explicit. None of the top-tier candidates have any appeal outside honkyville.
The image of the spoiled rotten, self-entitled Millennial soyboy skulking around the quad is now a fixture of intergenerational discourse. Like all stereotypes, there’s a grain of truth to it. The error lies in trying to stick this label on Pete Buttigieg, who at 38 is closer to AARP membership than to college age.
Here’s the Z Man from an older post on student debt relief ca. the 2016 election:
My bet is the Liberal Democrats are going to be testing a bunch of these ideas for the 2016 election. The idea is to promise the young free money so they will be vote for the Cult. Inevitably, the other side will offer up their own basket of goodies to the millennials.
Z had it right there. Democrat student loan schemes designed to bribe college-age kids into voting for Hillary would indeed have been aimed at Millennials. They weren’t primarily targeting voters of Buttigieg’s age. Unless you include 33-year-olds in your definition of “the young”.
This is a prime example of the nonsensical stretching the Millennial label has been subjected to since Madison Avenue’s memory holing of Generation Y.
The Millennium did indeed lends its name to the Millennial Generation, but the hermeneutic key the Z Man is missing is that Millennials’ formative years occurred around the turn of the millennium. The generation that came of age around then–with 9/11 as the demarcation line–is Generation Y.
Lumping people who grew up pre-smartphone and pre-9/11 into the same cohort with people who don’t remember a time before the internet and endless war gives you a category of no descriptive or predictive use.
And just so Jonesers don’t feel left out again, here’s Generation Jones getting left out … again.
The value of a model is determined by its predictive utility. Mayor Pete, AKA Candidate Y, will not be elected President of the United States. Neither Generation X nor Generation Y will be allowed to produce a President. Instead, the Boomers will cling to power until the last possible second before handing the reins to their Millennial clones.
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