As widely reported, Republicans have taken an “unprecedented” 10-point lead in the generic congressional ballot.  With President Obama’s approval rating upside down and Congressional Democrats job rating taking a plunge, their message of a “Summer of Recovery” has failed.  One only has to look at Gallup’s consumer spending charts (below) and the consumer confidence index to see why the Democrat message has fallen flat.

Pundits are laughing at Biden’s latest quote about the upcoming election, but I think we should pay more attention to the idea behind it:

The reports of the death of the Democratic Party have been greatly exaggerated.  The day after the election there will be a Democratic majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate. If it wasn’t illegal, I would make book on it.

Gallup points out that Republicans are much more enthusiastic, hold a 3-point lead on the generic ballot, and the Presidential approval rating is below 50%, all indicative of double-digit loses for Democrats in November.

While Biden may be overstating the Democrats’ strength, it is important that Republicans realize that this election is not yet “in the bag.”  Voters are clearly upset with Obama and Democrats, but recent polling suggests (pdf) that voters hold a very negative opinion of the Republican Party - worse than what they think about the Democratic Party.

Democratic Party
Positive   32%
Neutral  22%
Negative  44%

Republican Party
Positive  24%
Neutral  28%
Negative  46%

This means that voters aren’t going to be casting a vote for Republican candidates because they like the GOP.  Actually, swing and Independent voters will have to hold their nose to vote for a Republican.  The fact is that the GOP has done little to positively re-brand the Republican Party in a way that makes it attractive.  This makes our candidates just as vulnerable as the Democrats.  And we shouldn’t forget that no matter how many seats we win (or lose).

While many pundits think that the takeover of the US House is eminent, I am a bit more cautious.  We are seeing a lot of data that shows Republicans competitive in Dem-held seats.  But, with voters as upset with Republicans, we can’t take anything for granted.  We still have to run a superior race.  The seats that we are out-campaigned in, we will no doubt lose.

The 2008 Presidential Election saw an influx in the number of Millennial voters (voters born after 1982) getting involved in politics and voting at the polls. But how much of this will transfer into this year’s Midterm Elections, and how exactly will these voters decide which candidates and issues they want to support on the ballot. Analyzing the voting patterns of millennial voters has always been a specialty of mine—I conducted several papers and theses on the topic while in college. But further research demonstrates that these voters are constantly evolving, and it is important for campaigns to know how these voters think politically to win over their support now and in the future.

Internet killed the video star

Robert Putnam wrote in his book Bowling Alonethat Americans were living in a “weak ties� nation, where they were becoming isolated from their communities and apathetic towards politics. The last few years has brought a resurgence of a “strong ties� nation among millennial voters, however, largely as a result of the growth of the Internet and social networking. Facebook, MySpace and other similar websites have connected people, especially the younger generations, in an unprecedented fashion that IMs, telephones and emails could never achieve. Most campaigns have picked up on this, and have created Facebook profiles for them to disseminate information to the voters and create a community of volunteers to rely upon for grassroots efforts. The Pew Research Center reported in its February 2010 study on millennials that one in three (32%) have posted a message of some type on a social network in the past 24 hours and more than half (56%) have sent an email during that same timeframe. These numbers only further the case that the Internet is the best tool for reaching out to Millennial voters and will continue to be so as time passes, as the study found that the older voters got, the less likely they were to use the Internet and social networking sites.

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity

Millennial voters tend to be much more socially liberal than older voters. Just over half (52%) of them are pro-choice and 50% support gay marriage according to the same Pew study. The number of millennials who are pro-choice, however, is only slightly higher than that of older adults, as 48% of people between the ages of 30 and 64 are pro-choice. MIllennials are more liberal with respect to their support for gay marriage, as only 43% of Generation X-ers (ages 30-49) and 32% of Baby Boomers (ages 50-64) support gay marriage. A possible explanation for the fact that millennials are more open to gay marriage is that two-thirds (65%)of them say they have at least one friend or family member who is gay. Millennials are also much less religious overall, as only 37% of them actively participate in religious activities (including daily prayer) and one in three (31%) consider themselves to be unaffiliated with any religion.

It’s the economy, stupid

Overall, millennial voters tend to vote Democratic in general elections. The Pew study found that 51% plan to vote for the Democratic Congressional candidate in their district in November while only 37% plan to vote Republican. The number of who identify themselves as Republican/Lean Republican has also risen since 2007 from 30% to 35%, while the number of who identify themselves as Democrats/Lean Democrat has dropped by the same amount. Yet these voters are trending Republican, as only one in three (33%) planned to vote Republican in 2006.

A large part of this can be attributed to their preference for fiscal conservatism and the current state of the economy. In a study conducted by USA Todayin October of 2008, 50% of all Millennial voters said that the most important issue in deciding who to vote for that November was the economic crisis, and four in ten (39%) were most worried about the rise in unemployment. WRS polling over the past year has found that this is still true, as nearly all of our federal and statewide polls have demonstrated that this is the most important issue to them as well. This also explains to some degree why made up the largest chuck of “Paulites�—supporters of Republican Presidential candidate Ron Paul in 2008 and potentially in 2012. Paul, and subsequently his son Rand—who is the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Kentucky this year—made a name for himself as being a libertarian Republican who advocates for a smaller government and less government regulation of the financial markets. They are also the most likely (44%) out of all generations to believe that the private businesses make a fair amount of profits and are not too powerful, further proving their capitalistic nature.

So what really matters to millennial voters?

Here at WRS we use a proprietary tool called the “Values Centered Issue Analysis� (or VCIA for short) that helps us have a better idea of the motivations and thought process of voters as they consider the most important issues to them in the upcoming elections. Looking specifically at the responses of voters 18-34 from studies conducted in a variety of Congressional Districts throughout the United States, we discovered that the economy and unemployment is still the largest concern to them and what they would like to see fixed first. Millennial voters want to see the economy improve because they are worried about their friends (and in some cases, themselves) who are unemployed and struggling to make ends meet, and how this is having a negative impact on their communities. They would like to see the economy improve so that they can have better financial futures as they start their families and enter middle-age. Millennial voters are also very concerned with the fact that they believe the Federal Government has failed them in recent years, and helped contribute to the current economic situation. Again this impacts their communities and thus, in their minds, having a government that works for them will not only improve the economy but restore prosperity to the country both in their minds and in the minds of the rest of the world.

What to say to Millennial Voters this Fall

Winning over Millennial voters in the polls is possible if campaigns focus on a few different things. First, the more a campaign connects with millennial voters through the Internet, the more likely they are to turn these voters into both supporters and volunteers. One note of caution is that they should not push a large focus on fundraising with these voters—considering the economic state of the country and the high numbers of unemployment among, the last thing a Millennial voter wants to hear from a candidate is “Would you be willing to donate to my campaign?� Republican candidates should also target the younger voter with a message about improving the economy and working to decrease the unemployment rate nationwide, as that is by far their biggest concern and the issue that will likely make or break their support for you in November. Reminding these voters that you would like to see the economy improve will also help them become more optimistic about their own individual lives and the lives of their families, friends and communities. And if all these steps are followed, the millennial vote should be winnable by the GOP in November.

A new study reveals that 62% of television viewers watch “time-shifted” primetime TV series through Video on Demand, DVRs and the Internet.  However, the amount of live viewing is static enough to allow TV ads to reach 85% of viewers.

These means that television is still king when placing political ads.

Gallup tracking of 2010 midterm congressional election voting preferences shows 47% of registered voters saying they would vote for the Republican candidate and 44% for the Democratic candidate if the election were held today. Though down slightly from last week’s seven-percentage-point Republican lead, the GOP has held an advantage each of the past four weeks, the first time either party has done so this year.

The consistent Republican advantages are also notable from a historical perspective. In Gallup’s 60-year history of asking the generic ballot question, it is rare for the Republicans to be ahead among all registered voters. In fact, last week’s seven-point lead is the largest Gallup has measured for the Republican Party at any point in a midterm election year.

Even in two of the strongest Republican years — 1994 and 2002 — Democrats led or were tied in the final pre-election poll among registered voters. Republicans, however, led in those polls once turnout was factored in using Gallup’s likely voter model, which correctly forecasted that more voters would cast ballots for Republican than Democratic candidates. (Gallup will begin to provide likely voter estimates for the 2010 vote in October.)

Republicans usually make gains in their share of the vote after the likely voter model is applied, and generally hold an advantage in actual voter turnout in midterm elections, so a Republican advantage among all registered voters is an ominous sign for the Democrats’ prospects.

There are signs voter turnout in 2010 is not likely to go against historical patterns, with 46% of Republicans and 23% of Democrats saying they are “very enthusiastic” about voting this year. Republicans have led in reported enthusiasm throughout the year, and the current figures are tied for the largest enthusiasm gap by party this year.

Republicans’ relatively stronger showing on the generic ballot throughout August is due in part to Republican gains in party affiliation and a slightly higher level of support for Republican candidates among independent voters, as detailed in last week’s update.

In addition, though party loyalty in terms of voting is high on both sides, in August there are signs of slight but notable changes. So far this month, 96% of Republican registered voters say they would vote for the Republican candidate, exceeding Republicans’ party loyalty for any prior month. At the same time, the percentage of Democratic registered voters preferring the Democratic candidate — 91% — matches the monthly low for either party to date.

Bottom Line

Gallup’s generic ballot for Congress, which has been an accurate predictor of the national vote for the U.S. House in past midterm elections, continues to suggest 2010 will be a good year for the Republicans. The consistent Republican advantages among all registered voters in recent weeks are unusual from a historical perspective. Though a swing in the Democratic Party’s favor cannot be ruled out, voting patterns observed in the generic ballot in a given midterm election year generally hold throughout that year

WRS’ Bryon Allen is featured in Campaign and Elections’ new piece on Microtargeting:

C&E: Let’s start with where things are now. What are some of the capabilities you all are developing now?

Allen: Maybe it’s just because of where we are in the election cycle, but one of our biggest interests right now is a con­stant endeavor to push down the fun­damental insides of microtargeting and modeling to lower-level races. It’s always fascinating to look at where everybody’s coming from. The traditional pollster–media consultant relationship, in our opinion, needs to be just as strong, with pollster–mail, pollster phones, pollster direct voter contact, and that works well in a big race where you can afford your own microtargeting.

Rivlin: I get asked a lot, “How do you work with pollsters?� One of the sim­plest ways I like to answer is, we look through the other end of the telescope. The pollsters are more involved in mes­saging and working out exactly what the language is and what the landscape is. We’re more nuts and bolts, the people you need to speak to. We find that the data is not refined enough to get to the nuance of messaging, but the data can get to divisions that really speak to peo­ples’ big ideological breaks.

One of the big repercussions of the 2008 election is that more people want microtargeting. There are a whole lot of people who worked on the Obama campaign—their first-ever campaign—who are used to seeing a model score on the voter file. They’re surprised to open a voter file and not see a model score.

C&E: Maybe you could expand on that a little for those who don’t know what a model score is.

Rivlin: Model scores come in a lot of different guises. There are models that do the clustering and divide the popu­lation into different categories. Another way of doing a model score is to give a predicted probability or a ranking of someone having a particular attribute. How likely are they to vote, how likely are they to vote democratic, how likely are they to have a particular issue? You know the way that these things have been increasingly used, is that people do a select on a list of people from age 35 to 47; you can say, I want a list of people that are 35-47 who are likely to vote. So that would be how a lot of people on the ground interact with those scores, and it’s interesting. In 2008, I spent a lot of time trying to persuade peo­ple that this dark magic was actually not so scary and was accessible and they should trust it. Micro­targeters aren’t the wizard of Oz. [laughter]

Drechsler: As Joel alluded to, a lot of it is dispelling myths of what microtargeting is. Some out there see it as magic, and some see it as bullshit.

Allen: The truth lies somewhere in between.

Drechsler: The Obama campaign’s success with microtargeting has made everybody in some way want it. Some people have very high expectations [that they’ll have the same result Obama did], which isn’t necessarily true. The campaigns that embrace microtargeting and run with it will have success. Those campaigns where they say, “We don’t need it,� without having an understanding of what it is, can be frustrating.

C&E: When you approach a client, what are some of the things you impress upon them? What is the education process?

Drechsler: The approach is different depending on budgets. The reality is, we can do programs as small as $10,000 or up to a half million. It really depends on what your objectives are. I think one of the best selling points is that it pays for itself.

Meyers: We try to walk through with clients on this idea of, “Is my campaign big enough for mar­ket targeting, or is it too small?� And then we try to say that it doesn’t really have anything to do with how big a district you are in; it has to do with how big your direct contact budget is. If you have a $30 million budget, and you’re going to spend $29.9 million of that on TV and the rest on market targeting, that doesn’t make any sense. Our general rule is that if the project is going to cost you 10% or less of your direct contact budget, then this isn’t an easy decision for you. If you’re in the 30 to 35% range, you’re probably at the point that you should just be looking to put more mail in the mailboxes.

C&E: Does it make your job difficult, figuring out what the other side is doing?

Meyers: We all have some idea what each other does, but we’re probably missing half of it or mis­interpreting half of it. There are certainly a few people that claim to do microtargeting, but you can just tell by the way they talk about it that it isn’t the same thing.

Rivlin: Part of the arms race isn’t so much work­ing out what weapons each person has as assuming the other side has the arms and making sure you’re muscled up so that when you go to battle, you’re not at a disadvantage.

Allen: Nothing that anybody at this table does is reinventing the wheel in terms of analytics or modeling. The tools already exist. Building your analytical tool chest is fairly easy, especially since the user community always lags behind the state of the art in terms of what we can do with the data or the behavior of the data. We have to push the enve­lope incrementally, because if we try to throw three new tools at [clients], they will probably use none of them. When you do a big presidential level race or a top-tier senate race, you’ve got people who are presumably focusing a lot of time and energy on adoption.

Rivlin: I find that this conversation has to happen on two levels—that you have to have buy-in from the people who are signing the checks and order­ing the projects, but increasingly you also have to have buy-in from the people who are implement­ing it on the ground. In 2008, we ran projects where people would spend a lot of money and we would be in contact with the campaign folks, and some of the people on the ground didn’t know the scores existed or didn’t know how to use them and didn’t trust them.
Field organizers are my favorite people in cam­paigns, but they have to know how to pull the list. They have to know what things are, what they can trust. It’s very tempting to see a score on a screen like it’s on tablets of stone. You know the reason those people have the jobs they have is that they get the local politics, they get where they should use the models blindly, where they should use the models straightforwardly. You should em­power people so that they don’t either distrust it or trust it so much that they turn off their politi­cal brains.

Drechsler: The worst thing that could happen is to have a model that sits on a shelf. You spend the time and the effort and the campaign spends the money, and nothing ever happens.

Rivlin: Or, they layer on things they shouldn’t be layering on. They say, “This is a model score, so I will use this within the universe that they would have already selected.� Sometimes they have good reasons to do that, but sometimes it defeats the whole purpose of the model.

Allen: That’s always the friction: How do you get what you can provide to that sweet spot of what can be used and what will be used? We could talk till we’re blue in the face about propensity groups, clusters, classes, all sorts of fun stuff. There are always three skill sets worth looking for in our firm: people who are smart and can do great analytics; people who can sell the stuff, be­cause we’re a for-profit industry; and then people who can help communicate it back to the users.

Drechsler: [You’re] educat­ing somebody who might be a regional field direc­tor on this cycle, but two cycles from now might be a campaign manager on a statewide level. That’s the investment.

C&E: We’ve talked a bit about going down ballot, where budgets get smaller and smaller. What’s the fur­thest down ballot you have seen microtargeting used effectively?

Allen: Well, if I start talk­ing about the state senate or state assembly races in California, those are spend­ing more money than half the congressional races in the country.

Rivlin: It’s not so much what level the race is, as much as what level it’s purchased at. So if you are working for a statewide entity, whether it’s a cau­cus or an interest group, the economies of scale are worthwhile for buying some modeling that isn’t going to be as precise for each individual race but will give them a lot of purchase across their races. If the cost is minimal or zero, then, unless you’re not doing any direct voter contact, you can still use it. The question is whether it’s worth investing in from the beginning if it’s a lot of money.

Allen: That’s the real challenge: The places where, intellectually, these kind of targeting and analytics tools would be most powerful and useful are the campaigns that are most reliant on door-knock­ing, phone-banking, and direct voter contact. For the New York City mayoral race, I’m sure they bought the whole world. So much of the move­ment of that race—and I didn’t poll it, so I have no idea what moved what—but presumably it was television. Everyone’s got a little bit of money to throw around to buy some TV. It’s when your only tool in your arsenal is direct voter contact, mail, phones, and doors that the quality and so­phistication of the targeting is going to be the most impactful in terms of real wins/losses, be­cause it’s the only way you’re communicating. The flip side of that is where budgets become smaller, because if you had a lot of money to buy TV you wouldn’t be relying so much on knock­ing on doors and phone banking. That’s the chal­lenge we all face.

Rivlin: The other place where it’s most beneficial is where you don’t have obvious cues to target. So, the places that can’t afford it are often the places that need it the most. The classic example of that would be in a primary election. You can target on who is likely to vote pretty easily by vote history. Knowing who is likely to support your candidate rather than the other candidate is crucial. You don’t have partisan registration, partisan primary history, and this is where it is most impactful. There are not that many places where primary candidates have enough money to really invest in it, and then the question is whether they have enough direct voter contact to make it worthwhile.

That’s where you can do more interesting stuff, in states where it is easier to identify the supporters and lack of supporters. That’s where the added val­ue is if you start modeling issues or subsets within. We tell people not to do projects if they can get 90% of the way there using what they’ve already got in the file. It’s a waste of their time.
Meyers: Ballot issues, too, are a huge area where this can be of benefit. Some of that isn’t even so much that they don’t have the money. They’re just this group of people that is used to ballot stuff. They are just completely not used to do­ing mail and phones because there was never really any value to it.

C&E: Then you run into the California problem again, where ballot issues are king.

Allen: Especially ballot issues that have non-standard constituents.

Meyer: Or where it is just sort of mud­dled. We did some joint stuff in Ohio, where one party might lean one way or the other, but it wasn’t so strong that you just wanted to get all the Demo­crats and leave all the Republicans and vice versa, that you were going to have to get some votes out of these guys. You know, we did this Obama initiative stuff in Ohio on primary day, and it was a little scary in this Tea Party age. Are we going to be able to thread this needle?

Drechsler: And even in party-rigged states, we sometimes find ourselves ask­ing, “Why do we need this?� You might have the advantage of 400,000 votes, but you’re down in the polls. You’re go­ing to need that crossover; you’re go­ing to need to figure out who you can reach out to, who your soft Dems are. A Democrat in one part of the state is very different in another part of the state, just like a Republican is different.

C&E: Something you would never have known had you not gone through this process.
Meyers: That can be a struggle too, when you find something that is counterin­tuitive. How do I validate this enough? I come out of the purely political world, even trying to convince myself that I’ve really found something. And then, do I have confidence enough to take this up the ladder?

Rivlin: That’s where we make our mon­ey; it’s why we have a mix of political backgrounds, rather than just stats class­es from MIT. Our job is to interpret the politics and see when something comes up that’s counterintuitive: Is it counter­intuitive because there’s a lot of coun­terintuitive things in the world that become perceived wisdom? Or because there’s something wrong with the data and the stats? Our job is to make that decision, and that’s where the art comes in. That is what’s fun about the gig.

Allen: If it were just plugging things into a computer and spitting out lists…ugh.

C&E: Let’s talk about looking ahead. What gets you excited about what you are going to be able to do? Some of the advancements you think are coming?

Meyers: I think in 2012 we’ll see the full integration of the digital side of cam­paigns. We’re seeing that more now, but it’s not fully there yet. By 2012, you’ll have the full integration of it—the Holy Grail we’ve been seeking since we start­ed. Every time someone has asked me this since 2004, “Where I can deliver my commercial to somebody,� is be­ginning to exist. We could do it if they would let us, there’s no technological impairment.

They don’t know how to put a bill­ing system together for an individual ad that goes out. They know how to bill the cable system, and they don’t know how to bill a household. The hard part of that is, how do you make people who aren’t partisan watch your stuff? Getting someone in the middle to watch something is so hard. Out­side of the presidential candidate, why would anybody opt to do that? It’s like, well, you have a website that people can go to get information, but what would you need this for?

Drechsler: You can take the approach of shooting fish in a barrel: You’ll hit somebody. Or you can do the scalpel or laser. I think that’s the greatest benefit of microtargeting for campaigns—it hones in on how to deliver the best, most pre­cise message to your voters. it complicated and hard is that you can’t simul­taneously run seventeen different messages in a campaign. When we talk about this stuff, you’ve got to take the micro out of microtargeting. No campaign, not even presidential, can run 17 niche message streams to 17 different groups of people. You can’t afford to do it, it’s impractical to do mail runs or phone strips, and the logistics are ridicu­lously important. At the end of the day, each of us has to get 50 + 1. You’ve got to be able to deliver narrow messages, but also not get so focused that you’re looking at your own navel. You have to find really nice clean universes that have 5% coverage of the population so that you end up winning big in the places you target and ignoring the rest of the population.

Meyers: We get frustrated, especially on big cam­paigns, with some of the laziness. There isn’t a real reason you can’t put together a dozen telephone scripts. There are some practical reasons why you can’t put together a dozen mail pieces every time you send mail out, but mail scripts aren’t hard.

Allen: No campaign is going to say, “Okay, I’ll be the experiment, we’ll mess around with something that might or might not work and see you on Elec­tion Day!� You get this nice field experiment thing because not everyone is going to implement what you are doing in the same way. Not everyone is going to adopt it to the same level. Not everyone is going to make the same choice based on the advice they’re given. Across multiple campaigns, you’re going to get this nice field experiment mode. Then you say, “All right, let’s see if we can learn anything, and hopefully we’ll learn something important and be able to adapt what we do.�

Meyers: And convince anybody that you’ve actu­ally learned anything.

Rivlin: I think that the testing question, this is one of the advantages of being in a firm that does other stuff. We have a research and development budget that is mixed between the mail side and the analyt­ics side, and we do a fair bit of it. Even earlier this cycle, we did tests and some of it was subsidized through legalities that allowed us to learn what works and what doesn’t work. I think modeling has gotten to a place where people are comfort­able. The thing that’s dragging us back a little bit is the quality of the data. We can improve the model­ing. I think the next step is working out the effec­tiveness of programs.

Allen: Persuasion and GOTV is tough to test.

Rivlin: Yes.

Meyers: I don’t know how you guys feel, but I’m frustrated trying to extend these tests that get done to all campaigns for all times. Somebody had touched on this earlier. “I’m going to run this cam­paign like a business.� There’s no business in the world that would spend $20 million to go from 47% market share in California guaranteed to 51% market share! There’s sort of this silliness to it.

C&E: Is there a concern that there isn’t enough po­licing of the industry? That’s why there is always such a thing with polling—when something goes wrong, everyone goes nuts because everything’s accepted as legitimate.

Rivlin: I think your reputation matters; it matters in everything in politics. It’s the same reason we down-sell a huge amount of time. The clients will come to us and ask us for x, y, and z. We’ll sell them x, and tell them to spend their y and z for voter contact, because they need to come back for more and for your reputation. They’ll see pretty quickly that certain things are harder to test, but if they are running any kind of ID program, they’re running things again. There is policing almost af­ter the fact, and, as with everything in this busi­ness, reputation and the people giving you recom­mendations are key.

Drechsler: Training that regional field director, who might be way down on the totem pole today but could rise above down the line—that’s where you’re building your reputation. Its standard prac­tice to be nice to people, to take their calls and walk them through it. There are times where some people get it better than others, and it’s frustrating and you want to beat your head against the wall.

On the flip side, occasionally you have people who come in and question everything, and it’s just one of the things you have to deal with. In some ways we police our­selves. There are some who claim they do microtarget­ing, and they don’t do mi­crotargeting! I think that’s the most frustrating thing. You sit there and you pull your hair out, trying to go around and dispel that, but is it always the best use of your time? You think, “They won’t be around next cycle; we will be, because we’ve been doing this and we have a track record.�

Allen: There is enough mon­ey chasing things in politics that even people who aren’t very good at what they do manage to make a de­cent living sometimes. But there are hierarchies, and if you are successful and win things, people sort it out pretty quickly.

Meyers: Oddly, the lousy competitor is the one who scares us most—going out and selling real cut-rate stuff.

Drechsler: It’s tricky because you don’t want to outright trash them, because then you are trashing the people who hired them for making a bad decision. It’s a delicate walk through that minefield.

Meyers: Right, when we lost Bloomberg to you it was a little difficult; it was the only time we ever lost to another democratic firm. Had to can­cel the summer home!

Andrew Drechsler works for Strategic Telemetry, one of the premier Democratic microtargeting firms.

Joel Rivlin is director of analytics at MSHC Partners.

Michael Meyers is a partner and president of Target Point Consulting, one of the first Republican microtargeting shops.

Bryon Allen is the chief operating officer at Wilson Research Strategy, a Republican polling and targeting firm.

Beloit College puts out its Mindset list for the kids entering college this fall (a.k.a, the class of 2014).  This study of 1,400 students gives us a glimpse of how this generation will view the world.

Most students entering college for the first time this fall—the Class of 2014—were born in 1992.

For these students, Benny Hill, Sam Kinison, Sam Walton, Bert Parks and Tony Perkins have always been dead.

1. Few in the class know how to write in cursive.

2. Email is just too slow, and they seldom if ever use snail mail.

3. “Go West, Young College Grad� has always implied “and don’t stop until you get to Asia…and learn Chinese along the way.�

4. Al Gore has always been animated.

5. Los Angelinos have always been trying to get along.

6. Buffy has always been meeting her obligations to hunt down Lothos and the other blood-suckers at Hemery High.

7. “Caramel macchiato� and “venti half-caf vanilla latte� have always been street corner lingo.

8. With increasing numbers of ramps, Braille signs, and handicapped parking spaces, the world has always been trying harder to accommodate people with disabilities.

9. Had it remained operational, the villainous computer HAL could be their college classmate this fall, but they have a better chance of running into Miley Cyrus’s folks on Parents’ Weekend.

10. A quarter of the class has at least one immigrant parent, and the immigration debate is not a big priority…unless it involves “real� aliens from another planet.

11. John McEnroe has never played professional tennis.

12. Clint Eastwood is better known as a sensitive director than as Dirty Harry.

13. Parents and teachers feared that Beavis and Butt-head might be the voice of a lost generation.

14. Doctor Kevorkian has never been licensed to practice medicine.

15. Colorful lapel ribbons have always been worn to indicate support for a cause.

16. Korean cars have always been a staple on American highways.

17. Trading Chocolate the Moose for Patti the Platypus helped build their Beanie Baby collection.

18. Fergie is a pop singer, not a princess.

19. They never twisted the coiled handset wire aimlessly around their wrists while chatting on the phone.

20. DNA fingerprinting and maps of the human genome have always existed.

21. Woody Allen, whose heart has wanted what it wanted, has always been with Soon-Yi Previn.

22. Cross-burning has always been deemed protected speech.

23. Leasing has always allowed the folks to upgrade their tastes in cars.

24. “Cop Killer� by rapper Ice-T has never been available on a recording.

25. Leno and Letterman have always been trading insults on opposing networks.

26. Unless they found one in their grandparents’ closet, they have never seen a carousel of Kodachrome slides.

27. Computers have never lacked a CD-ROM disk drive.

28. They’ve never recognized that pointing to their wrists was a request for the time of day.

29. Reggie Jackson has always been enshrined in Cooperstown.

30. “Viewer Discretion� has always been an available warning on TV shows.

31. The first computer they probably touched was an Apple II; it is now in a museum.

32. Czechoslovakia has never existed.

33. Second-hand smoke has always been an official carcinogen.

34. “Assisted Living� has always been replacing nursing homes, while Hospice has always been an alternative to hospitals.

35. Once they got through security, going to the airport has always resembled going to the mall.

36. Adhesive strips have always been available in varying skin tones.

37. Whatever their parents may have thought about the year they were born, Queen Elizabeth declared it an “Annus Horribilis.�

38. Bud Selig has always been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball.

39. Pizza jockeys from Domino’s have never killed themselves to get your pizza there in under 30 minutes.

40. There have always been HIV positive athletes in the Olympics.

41. American companies have always done business in Vietnam.

42. Potato has always ended in an “e� in New Jersey per vice presidential edict.

43. Russians and Americans have always been living together in space.

44. The dominance of television news by the three networks passed while they were still in their cribs.

45. They have always had a chance to do community service with local and federal programs to earn money for college.

46. Nirvana is on the classic oldies station.

47. Children have always been trying to divorce their parents.

48. Someone has always gotten married in space.

49. While they were babbling in strollers, there was already a female Poet Laureate of the United States.

50. Toothpaste tubes have always stood up on their caps.

51. Food has always been irradiated.

52. There have always been women priests in the Anglican Church.

53. J.R. Ewing has always been dead and gone. Hasn’t he?

54. The historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia has always been a copy.

55. Rock bands have always played at presidential inaugural parties.

56. They may have assumed that parents’ complaints about Black Monday had to do with punk rockers from L.A., not Wall Street.

57. A purple dinosaur has always supplanted Barney Google and Barney Fife.

58. Beethoven has always been a dog.

59. By the time their folks might have noticed Coca Cola’s new Tab Clear, it was gone.

60. Walmart has never sold handguns over the counter in the lower 48.

61. Presidential appointees have always been required to be more precise about paying their nannies’ withholding tax, or else.

62. Having hundreds of cable channels but nothing to watch has always been routine.

63. Their parents’ favorite TV sitcoms have always been showing up as movies.

64. The U.S, Canada, and Mexico have always agreed to trade freely.

65. They first met Michelangelo when he was just a computer virus.

66. Galileo is forgiven and welcome back into the Roman Catholic Church.

67. Ruth Bader Ginsburg has always sat on the Supreme Court.

68. They have never worried about a Russian missile strike on the U.S.

69. The Post Office has always been going broke.

70. The artist formerly known as Snoop Doggy Dogg has always been rapping.

71. The nation has never approved of the job Congress is doing.

72. One way or another, “It’s the economy, stupid� and always has been.

73. Silicone-gel breast implants have always been regulated.

74. They’ve always been able to blast off with the Sci-Fi Channel.

75. Honda has always been a major competitor on Memorial Day at Indianapolis.