Joel Kotkin, the Presidential Fellow of Urban Futures at Chapman University in Orange, Calif., has written extensively on demographics, housing, and issues related to income inequality in the 21st century. Kotkin often blends research on demographics with historical reasoning, and he has chronicled the decline of California, a presage for the country as a whole. Recently he spoke with National Review about the future of Millennials and the Republican Party after Trump.
A moderate Democrat, Kotkin thinks that Republicans have “signed a pact with the devil” by embracing Trumpism. With Trump at the helm of the party, Republicans “can’t talk to Millennials, can’t talk to a lot of women, can’t talk to minorities, and can’t talk to immigrants” — the future electorate,” Kotkin said. “If the Republican Party cannot appeal to younger voters — or, not repel them with Trumpism — then the party won’t have a viable, long-term base.
How will the party relate to, and perhaps capture, a large swath of the Millennial electorate, before Millennials go all in for the Democratic Party? Kotkin thinks the messaging and policy from a post-Trump Republican Party should “focus on upward mobility.”
According to Kotkin, one problem constraining Millennials is homeownership. In his 2019 article “Property and Democracy in America” Kotkin notes that “by 2016 homeownership among people aged 25–34 dropped from 45.4 percent in 2000 to 37.0 percent in 2016.” The drop, however, does not reflect the demographic’s preference for homeownership. An Apartment List study found that nine out of ten Millennials want to own a single-family home, but only 4.4 percent have prepared to do so within a year. Millennials are less likely to become homeowners compared with their parents, according a 2018 Urban Institute report, which cites several external barriers to homeownership among Millennials, including high rental costs, unstable labor markets, and college debt.
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