For younger politicians gaining traction in Wisconsin and nationwide, issues central to millennials such as student debt and unemployment rank high on their priority lists.
Daniel Riemer, D-Milwaukee, was first elected to the state assembly when he was 25, which is more than half the average age of assembly representatives, as reported in The Journal Sentinel. Riemer was motivated to run for office at such a young age because he wanted to find a more pragmatic approach to poverty, he said.
“It occurred to me that we were not doing enough in the state of Wisconsin,” Riemer said. “There were a number of opportunities in policy to approach reducing poverty through primarily work-based programs and programs that reward wages and we weren’t doing that effectively.”
Being one of the youngest members of Wisconsin State Assembly gives Riemer the unique opportunity to talk about and understand some of the issues that affect younger people in the state of Wisconsin, he said.
Greater student debt following college graduation and attempting to “climb from the bottom rung to middle class,” Reimer said, are some of the problems millennials face today. Since he ran for office shortly after finishing college, Riemer said he is able to talk about these issues on a more visceral, immediate level.
“I think the biggest example of that is the amount of student debt that people in our generation have accumulated and how that needs to be an issue highlighted by policy makers,” Riemer said.
To provide support for young people running for office at a younger age, Luke Squire co-founded LaunchProgress, an organization dedicated to helping young people run for office.
Squire came up with the idea as a way to invest in progressive strategies and see results at a federal level, Squire said.
“It felt like there was a lot of money being spent, and there wasn’t a lot of results going on federally so we started to look at other ways you can invest to try to support these progressive strategies,” Squire said.
When LaunchProgress was first launched, Squire and his co-founder noticed that many successful politicians tend to begin running for office at a young age.
The company attempts to help someone who might see themselves as a candidate along the campaign trail, he said.
“In terms of how much money is being spent every year on campaigns, there was really not a lot being spent on this kind of capacity building and investing on young people to get involved in politics,” Squire said.
He said looking ahead, a challenge facing millennials is a sense of disappointment and a feeling of failure with current politics. LaunchProgress aims to get more young people involved in politics to build a stronger democracy and a more responsive and transparent government, he said.
Squire said that ultimately, encouraging younger people to run will give citizens better representation in government.
“The most immediate direct impact from getting young people involved is that you’re going to have people get elected who are much better candidates and much more representative of the districts that they represent,” Squire said.
