Serious question (not trying to bait anyone). What do you make of the rise of Independents?

[JHan]

23. they're strange to me.

"independent" is also a way people brand themselves.

If they see all political brands as awful, they'll brand themselves "independent" to signal how different and special they are.

Millennials might not register for a number of reasons - but based on my own experience, many of us don't because we were nurtured to see politics as a terrible sordid business. And since we live in a world where one of the worst hot takes is that "both parties are the same", and the media loves bothsideism narratives, a lot of this "independent" talk is based on ignorance.

"But it is getting near impossible for us to "recruit" anyone below 50 into becoming active in the Democratic Party as an institution. "

Not sure about that, there's active recruitment going on but there's this as well:

"Progressives aren’t just out of sync with their own need to recruit and retain young people. They’re also lagging behind conservative interests. A 2017 study found that between 2008 and 2014, conservative donors gave three times more to millennial outreach groups than liberal donors. Much of that funding, Thompson says, went to things like paid fellowships, travel stipends and study grants ― creating the feeder system that will guide young people into actual jobs with political campaigns and think tanks.

“The Republicans are building an army, while the Democrats are still paying you in ‘making the world a better place,’” said Carlos Vera, the executive director of Pay Our Interns, a watchdog group. “I’ve had older people say to me, ‘Well, I did unpaid internships and I was fine.’ Then you ask them when that was and they say, ‘1972.’ You could work your way through college back then. That simply is not the case anymore.”

Vera spent last year calling every lawmaker in the House and Senate and asking whether they paid their interns. His report, Experience Doesn’t Pay the Bills, found that more than half of Republican senators offered paid internships, compared to fewer than a third of Democratic senators. In the House it was even worse: Twice as many Republicans as Democrats paid their interns.

This year, Vera has been calling nonprofits and think tanks and asking them the same thing. So far he’s found the same pattern: The Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and Americans for Prosperity pay their interns. The Progressive Policy Institute, Let America Vote and the Human Rights Campaign don’t.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/right-wing-millennial-machine_us_5b049aebe4b07c4ea102e0c3