Seventy percent of Millennials favor same sex marriage; Mike Huckabee has based his entire candidacy in opposition to the idea and no other candidate was brave enough Wednesday night to say they agreed that same sex couples should be permitted to marry legally. Sixty-eight percent of Millennials are in favor of legalizing marijuana; no candidate was willing to come close to saying the idea might have merit; Rand Paul’s insistence on a state’s rights approach to (medical) legalization choices was as close as the field came. Instead, Jeb Bush in the best Boomer presidential candidate tradition apologized for using the stuff when he was young, chalking it up to youthful indiscretion, and Governor Chris Christie asserted that maintaining pot’s illegality was so important as President he would go against traditional Republican deference to state’s rights and assert federal law supremacy over state law to prosecute offenders. Like old people out of touch with what is happening in the world around them, the candidates kept on talking about repealing ObamaCare; meanwhile, fifty-two percent of Millennials approve of the program.

If that weren’t bad enough, the candidates spent an inordinate amount of time bashing the parents of many Millennials, not a smart approach because Millennials, unlike previous generations, actually revere their parents. One out of five Millennials has an immigrant parent. Every candidate on the stage wanted to seal the border so no more immigrants could get into the United States without documentation. Of greater concern, most candidates also signed on to deporting undocumented immigrants who are already here. The ones who didn’t go that far were the only candidates who gained or kept their support among a focus group of Fusion TV’s target audience, Millennials. Four of Donald Trump’s ten supporters in the Florida-based group deserted him, with two going to Carly Fiorina, and one each to Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush. To the Millennials watching, those candidates appeared to be the only ones at the dinner table talking a modicum of sense.

Read the article “GOP Debates: ‘Meet the Parents’ Night for Millennials” on brookings.edu.