Reinvent Podcast

John Della Volpe, Director of Polling at Harvard’s Institute of Politics and Founder and CEO of SocialSphere, has been studying Millennials since 2000. It all started, said Della Volpe, with two Harvard students who wanted to survey Millennials and find out why they were volunteering but not voting. Della Volpe has been polling and analyzing this generation—which he defines as people born between 1980 and 2000—ever since. Della Volpe discussed what he considers to be the defining characteristics of the Millennial generation, which include placing less importance on money and more on flexibility, and a relationship with the rest of the world that’s based on a collaborative approach to solving problems. Millennials also have famously low levels of trust in institutions ranging from Congress to the media, and increasingly identify as liberal, but decreasingly identify as Democrats. Della Volpe also talked about the role that Millennials played in the election. If Clinton had won 60 percent of this cohort instead