Millennials seize the day
Below is Lorraine Connelly’s latest piece on the Millennial candidates seeking elected office in Wallingford this year, as well as the greater trend of Millennial’s getting involved in politics across the country.
According to the Millennial Action Project (MAP), which tracks young people running for office nationally, record numbers of people under 45 are running for office. From 2018 to 2020 researchers tracked a 266% increase in the number of people who sought local and state offices.
This momentum continues for the 2021 election cycle in Wallingford, as five millennials (born after 1981) and one member of Gen-Z generation (born after 1996) are exploratory candidates for the Democratic Town Committee. They are Nicole Barillaro, Sam Carmody, Whitney Mooney and Alexa Tomassi for Council, and Riley O’Connell and Jacqueline McFarlane for mayor. The youngest candidate is 25, and the oldest, 37.While all generations are diverse and complex groups, millennials and Gen-Zers are racially and ethnically more diverse, progressive, and pro-government, according to the Pew Research Center. Pew’s President, Michael Dimock, notes that examining generational cohorts gives researchers “a tool to analyze changes in views over time. They can provide a way to understand how different formative experiences (such as world events and technological, economic and social shifts) interact to shape people’s views of the world.”
A commonality among these local candidates is their desire to have a hand in shaping policy that will affect Wallingford’s future. Among the six, only Carmody, a legislative and government relations aide for Lt. Governor Susan Bysiewicz and former staffer for Congresswoman Rosa DeLauro, has experience as a political operative. Carmody, whose family has called Wallingford home for six generations, says, “Municipal governments are now dealing with many broader issues. I think it is realistic for our own town council to address larger issues that are very important to my generation including matters of equity, health care, and climate change.”
For Tomassi, a 2009 Sheehan graduate, running for office has been a longtime dream. She notes, “The time was right. After what we’ve all been through collectively with the pandemic and culturally over the last many months, it’s time to re-evaluate how we can cultivate and continue to grow an inclusive community, make sure our businesses thrive, and keep up with and invest in infrastructure.”
Like Tomassi, Mooney felt the pandemic exposed the town’s tectonic fault lines. A 2011 Lyman Hall graduate who has recently returned to Wallingford, Mooney says, “We should never go through a crisis again without town wide communication, texting programs, and regular leadership updates.” Another imperative for Mooney, addressing the elephant in the room –“racism.” Mooney who serves on the DTC’s Diversity and Inclusion Committee along with Jacqueline McFarlane, would like to initiate town-wide discussions and educational opportunities to help Wallingford move toward “a more anti-racist, equitable community.”
According to MAP, the increase in millennials running for office is evident in both parties. Republicans comprise 40% of candidates under 45 who ran for the House of Representatives in 2020. But a future tipping point is that millennials are more likely than other cohorts to identify as independent – they do not fit into the ideological box of either party.
Ideas do not win elections, votes do. So how to persuade those independents who comprise most of the Millennial demographic? Says Tomassi, “Millennials are communicators. We have so many avenues of communication – online and traditional media – that we can use to our advantage to collaborate and reach out to new demographics: underrepresented people, people who are traditionally non-voters, and people disillusioned by politics. Our access to different systems of engagement will help us mobilize to create better solutions, ensure more collaborative problem-solving, and bring new or previously unheard voices into important conversations that affect people in town.”
O’ Connell, whose family has also called Wallingford home for six generations, is the youngest candidate. A member of Generation Z, he notes, “Everyone in my generation has become completely disillusioned with politics because we’ve never been alive in a time in which politics actually worked, at least on the national level. The baby boomer generation has held political power in our country for significantly longer than any generation before, so we’ve all grown up only knowing the people in the same positions of power, more or less. In a way it can feel as if nothing will ever change or improve. In no case is that more true than in Wallingford.” He adds, “Winning the voters in my generation is about proving to them that not only can change happen, but it is right on the horizon.”
Aspiring stars on Wallingford’s political horizon, this group of candidates represents a growing youthful trend in political engagement. Remember, Wallingford once had the confidence to elect a 36-year-old as mayor, which to the generational cohort at that time must have seemed risky, almost unimaginable.
Lorraine Connelly is a Wallingford writer and resident.
