The sleeper development that was widely overlooked in the 2006 election was the 22-percentage-point margin of support given to Democrats by 18-29 year-olds, almost all of them members of the up-and-coming Millennial Generation. This was just the latest piece of evidence about a generation that has been trending progressive and increasingly voting Democratic in large numbers. But a comprehensive review of available data from a range of polls and surveys in recent years shows just how fortuitous this generation is for progressives. Millennials are emerging as an enormous asset for progressives going forward – as enormous as the sheer size of this, the largest American generation ever.

The “Millennial Generation” is becoming the most common name for young people born roughly in the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, who are pouring out of college right now. This generation is even larger than the Baby Boomers, though just how much bigger depends on where you put their beginning and end birth dates, which currently has no consensus. For this report, we define Millennials as starting in 1978, when the birth rate started climbing from the lows of the Generation X years, and ending in 1996, after an 18-year span that matches the span of the Baby Boomers, and is typical of the 18-to-20 year span for a generation.

Similar to the Boomers, the Millennials are poised to impact the country at every life stage and in myriad ways - but particularly in politics. By 2008, the number of citizen-eligible Millennial voters will be nearing 50 million. By the presidential election of 2016, Millennials will be one third or more of the citizen-eligible electorate, and roughly 30 percent of actual voters—and this is making no assumptions about possible increased turnout rates among Millennials in the future, which could make their weight among actual voters higher. Moreover, from that point on, the Millennials’ share of the actual voters will rise steadily for several decades as more and more of the generation enter middle age.

The Millennials are an unusual generation, not like young people we have seen for a long time. As first noted by generational analysts William Strauss and Neil Howe, they are not individualistic risk-takers like the Boomers or cynical and disengaged like Generation Xers. Signs indicate that Millennials are civic-minded, politically engaged, and hold values long associated with progressives, such as concern about economic inequalities, desire for a more multilateral foreign policy, and a strong belief in government.