Arkansas's moderate millennials
We rarely get a deep dive into the thinking of any generation of the state’s voters, much less this generation that will shape the future of Arkansas politics following an era of dramatic political change in the state. But a new Hendrix College/Talk Business & Politics survey designed and analyzed by four Hendrix students from said generation does just that.
Decidedly more progressive than their elders on an array of issues, Arkansas’s 18- to 29-year-olds are clearly more conservative than their peers across the nation on those same issues. Because of their general resistance to ideological or partisan labels, it is most accurate to see those Arkansans in the last few years of the millennial generation and the first few of Gen Z as emphatically moderate.
On certain key issues, the survey’s findings do suggest that Arkansas voters of the future will be more progressive than those that dominate the current electorate. For instance, the issue of marijuana legalization will clearly be passé within the next two decades even in Arkansas. A majority of survey respondents (55 percent) believe that marijuana use should be legal in all cases and another 37 percent feel that only medical marijuana should be legal, leaving only a small percentage (6 percent) stating that pot should be illegal in all cases. Similar patterns were shown on climate change, with 55 percent of respondents stating that global warming is caused primarily by human activities.
Finally, only 13 percent of the survey’s respondents feel that firearms should be less regulated. An overwhelming majority of 18- to 29-year-olds think that guns should be more heavily regulated (43 percent) or are now regulated at approximately the correct level (41 percent). On this question, there was a divide between 18- to 24 year-olds (the Gen Z generation) and 25- to 29-year-olds (the millennials), with the younger group being decidedly more in favor of regulation. This pattern of sharpened progressivism in the Gen Zers was shown in several spots in the survey and will be a crucial trend to watch as additional Generation Z Arkansans arrive in the electorate.
Read more: https://arktimes.com/columns/jay-barth/2019/05/31/arkansass-moderate-millennials
