Sorry, March for Our Lives isn't the voice of a new generation.
It's mainly the same middle aged women from the Women's March with some photogenic teens out in front of the camera.
Whereas the 2017 Women’s March was 85 percent women, the March for Our Lives was 70% percent women. Further,participants were highly educated; 72% percent had a BA or higher.
Contrary to what’s been reported in many media accounts, the D.C. March for Our Lives crowd was not primarily made up of teenagers. Only about 10 percent of the participants were under 18. The average age of the adults in the crowd was just under 49 years old, which is older than participants at the other marches I’ve surveyed but similar to the age of the average participant at the Million Moms March in 2000, which was also about gun control.
Even more interesting, the new protesters were less motivated by the issue of gun control. In fact, only 12 percent of the people who were new to protesting reported that they were motivated to join the march because of the gun-control issue, compared with 60 percent of the participants with experience protesting.
Instead, new protesters reported being motivated by the issues of peace (56 percent) and Trump (42 percent), who has been a galvanizing force for many protests.
This is fairly typical of lefty protests.
Most of these protests are attended by regular protesters. The issues change, but the protesters abide. And new protesters are attracted by the usual broad opposition to the right rather than the specific issue. They don't really care about gun control, but they hate Trump.
Peace sounds odd, but not too surprising if you understand the structure of lefty protest politics. Anti-war protesters are still the most reliable protest attendees. It's why general lefty protests will still include the usual, "U.S. Out of Everywhere" and "Jews Out of Palestine" (and these days, ("Stop Yemen Famine") components.