Millennials Becoming Disillusioned with White House

The youth vote is a powerful force. President Barack Obama was able to tap into it in 2012, and it landed him a second term in the White House.
       
The turnout of America's youngest voters was so great that if they'd swung the other way -- or even split their vote -- there would be a different president in office right now.

"We had 22 million voters turn out; that's almost half of all those eligible to vote, voted," Alison Howard, communications director for Concerned Women for America, said.

But over the past few years, something's changed, and polls show a majority of the millennial generation -- 18 to 29 year-olds -- doesn't plan to participate in the upcoming midterm elections.

The most recent poll by Harvard University's Institute of Politics found that only 1 in 4 of the young Americans surveyed will definitely be voting this fall.

Millennials say it's not because they're apathetic. In fact, they care passionately. They're just repelled by what they see in Washington, including from the Obama administration.

"I sense a deception that took place in the last administration's promises to my friends and peers, my age group -- I'm 25, myself," Howard told CBN News.

"We were promised a lot of hope and change and what we're seeing before us now is a country very different from the one we were promised would come from this administration," she said.

So how do politicians reach a generation turned off by politics? Howard says it's about paying attention to the issues they care about.

"We are a very community-minded people," she explained. "We are daughters and sons and students, and because of that, when we see our mom and our dad lose their job, or we see our grandparents not able to have the same health insurance coverage as they had before, now it's our issue."

"And now it's something that we're deeply interested in -- seeing how our elected officials are talking about it and what they're going to do about it," she added.
 
Many millennials recognize they're a generation that will bear, and see their children bear, the weight of the decisions being made now in Washington -- because those actions will have consequences that will last for decades.

So millennials have a message for the grownups on Capitol Hill: get the younger generation involved, engaged, and invested in their futures and the future of America.

And right now, polls show millennials clearly don't see that happening.