(NEXSTAR) — Life was undoubtedly different in 1975. The American dream still seemed attainable, qualifying for an eagle plaque on your home was relatively within reach, and becoming an adult had four simple milestones.

A new working paper from the U.S. Census Bureau suggests young adults aren’t reaching adulthood quite as easily as their parents or grandparents may have in 1975.

Reviewing Census data, the paper’s authors considered four benchmarks that those in their 20s and early 30s hit as they start their adult lives: moving out of their parents’ house, getting a job, getting married, and having kids. 

In 1975, nearly half of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 had achieved all four of those milestones. Now, five decades later, less than a quarter of Americans in that age group can say they’ve done the same.

Nearly the same percentage of adults, about 22 percent, had moved away from their parents, been married, and had children in 1975. This group of adults was largely comprised of women, most likely, as it was more common then for them to stay home with the children. 

That has changed over the last 50 years, researchers noted, making this combination of milestones — living away from parents, married, with children — vastly less common in 2025. Less than 8 percent of young adults have completed only those milestones.

The five most common combinations of adulthood milestones among young adults today all include having a job. Most common among 2025’s young adults, comprising 28 percent of those between the ages of 25 and 34, is being a member of the labor force and living away from parents, according to Census data. 

The second-largest group of young adults, about 21 percent, has achieved all four major milestones. That’s less than half of the percentage who had reached it in 1975. 

Between 1975 and 2025, one milestone combination comprises roughly the same-sized portion of young adults: being married, living away from home, and working. In 1975, about 15 percent of young adults had reached only those milestones. Today, it’s about 14 percent. 

More adults are at least in the labor force today at 9 percent, up from 3 percent 50 years ago. Living away from parents with a job and children now sits at 8 percent, way down from 22 percent.

The working paper also points to several factors that can impact your path to completing the common adulthood milestones today. Economic pressures and the desire to feel financially stable may shuffle your priorities, causing you to live with your parents longer and forego marriage, for example. 

A recent study found that a family of four with a household income under $200,000 could only afford to live comfortably in seven states. Another shows that, if you can only put up a 10 percent down payment on a home, just 11 metro areas may still fit into your budget. Yet another analysis determined more than 30 percent of American households aren’t earning enough to be considered middle class. Studies have also found a decline in the belief that having children is necessary for adulthood.

“One’s decisions to marry, for example, may be impacted by their economic circumstances,” the paper reads. “Or becoming a parent may influence decisions to participate in the labor market.”

The working paper also considered another factor: education. Attending college, especially programs that take longer than four years to complete, has also grown in popularity. Pursuing such a path may delay some or all of the four adulthood milestones. 

Researchers noted that “the milestones to adulthood are often interrelated” and may include stages your parents or grandparents may not have experienced.

Nonetheless, the milestones necessary to reach adulthood may only continue to change in the coming years, especially in the face of declining birth rates, increasing housing costs, a tough job market, and changing financial priorities.

The full paper can be viewed on the Census Bureau’s website.

A recent study from Stanford University and King’s College London published in July by the British Journal of Political Science revealed something that is probably not a surprise to most people familiar with small business in America: people who own businesses lean to the political right. 

“Leveraging diverse sources of data — representative surveys from around the world, campaign finance records, voter files, and a first-of-its-kind, bespoke survey of small business owners — we find consistent evidence that small business owners are more likely to identify with and vote for right-wing parties,” the study’s authors wrote. “The experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.” 

Is that a surprise? Not really. For more than 20 years I’ve written about small-business owners and have run my own small business, and none of this is news to me. 

For starters, I speak to more than 50 trade and industry conferences a year on public policy, economic and technology issues impacting businesses. The audiences I speak to range from 200 to sometimes more than 5,000 people. And who are they? Mostly business owners (and mostly middle-aged white men too, but that’s another story for another day).  

These are good and smart people. They have quietly and successfully run businesses in places you may never have heard of, often through multiple decades and involving many generations of workers and family. And although I tend to avoid politics in my presentations, it’s not difficult to read the room. Most are Republicans and most voted for Donald Trump. This gets validated from the conference leaders and individual attendees I speak with before and after. 

I also know this because I sometimes provide services to start-up companies. The owner of one start-up is a good example of the typical business owner I see. She taught math for over 15 years in a local school system. She left to start a nonprofit that provides specialized tutoring for advanced students. Like most educators I meet, she’s a lifelong Democrat — and she still is., but she’s wavering.  

I have watched her become harder, angrier and more stressed as the responsibilities and tasks of running a business weigh down on her. “I spend more time negotiating insurance, talking to my lawyer and accountant and dealing with employee issues than I do teaching math,” she recently told me.

Are the Republicans so much better than Democrats for business? Some economic reports have shown that the economy is better historically under Democratic presidents. Some Republican policies — hello, tariffs — are causing significant angst for many business owners. Under the Biden administration, the Small Business Administration doubled down on its efforts to provide more loans to small businesses and support minority startups. So why the disconnect? Why the right-leaning sentiment?  

I can provide some context. 

One reason has to do with risk. When you run a business, you are the one taking the risk. You’re not getting a paycheck. You can’t just go home and forget about it. You can’t take a vacation without keeping in touch. You are responsible for everything all the time. You are making decisions with your money that affect the people — employees, customers, partners, suppliers — who rely on your business. You desire political leaders who will help mitigate your risk, not increase it.

Government regulations increase the risk of you inadvertently doing something illegal or breaking some rule, and this makes it harder for you to operate your business. Government rhetoric that gives more power to workers creates more risk that you will lose valuable talent or be forced to incur more costs. Business owners gravitate toward those politicians who reduce their risk rather than add to it. 

There’s also control. People leave their jobs to start businesses not just because of their passion or entrepreneurial drive, but also because they want more power over their own lives. I can assure you that running a business takes more time and commitment than clocking in to a job. But you also get more say over when and where you spend that time without reporting to an unreasonable boss. You also have more control over the money you spend and generate and the decisions you make. Any interference or challenges to that control is against your best interests.

Fear plays a big part in driving business owners to the right. As mentioned above, we’re taking risks. My best clients — owners who have been running companies for decades — are fearful that the cliff they see at the end of their 90-day backlog of orders is real and that no new orders will come in. This keeps them up at night. They are afraid of all the things they can’t control — interest rates, inflation, economic growth, taxes, labor policies. They fear governments that increase their administrative burdens, limit where and how they can do business, and overtax the profits they work so hard to generate.  

Finally, business owners, though optimistic and opportunistic, are also generally wary and untrusting. My non-profit math friend learned the hard way that people lie. Employees don’t show up for work, service providers don’t deliver as promised and customers don’t pay. When you have enough people lie to you for a long enough period of time, you start to doubt everyone you work with.  

Like the rest of us, they know that politicians lie for a living. Tax cuts, economic growth, grants and investments are promised and then never materialize. All things being equal, they would rather hear less from their government leaders than believe in promises that are often broken.

In the end, business is about perception. Despite all of their shortcomings, right-leaning politicians give the perception that they are pro-business. Those on the left give the perception that they are pro-worker. Business owners will lean towards those who generally reduce their risks, allay their fears and give them more control over their decisions. If you want to win over the hearts (and votes) of the more than 30 million small-business owners in the U.S., you have to address these concerns.  

Gene Marks is founder of The Marks Group, a small-business consulting firm.  

Last month, President Trump told Republicans in Texas and other states to redraw their congressional maps to help secure a Republican majority in the House of Representatives in the 2026 midterm elections: “Texas will be the biggest one. And that’ll be five.”

Republicans in the state legislature responded immediately. It is “absolutely permissible to draw maps on maximizing partisan advantage,” State Rep. Brian Harrison declared. Texas Democrats, vastly outnumbered in the legislature, tried to delay a vote in the special session called by Gov. Greg Abbott (R) by leaving the state, but the Republicans’ supermajority made the outcome inevitable.

“We have got to recognize the cards that have been dealt,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) announced, “and we have got to meet fire with fire.” To “offset the rigging of maps in red states,” Newsom called for a referendum to let California bypass its redistricting commission and create five more congressional districts favorable to Democrats.

Gerrymandering dates back to the 19th century, but it has intensified in recent decades due to residential self-sorting, software that can draw partisan maps with much greater precision, and now, apparently, a willingness to do it mid-decade for no special reason except partisanship, instead of only in years when the Census results come in.

In 2020, for example, Republicans and Democrats retained over 90 percent of their seats in the House. In 2024, only about 40 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives were at all competitive.

Partisan gerrymandering subverts democracy by allowing a party to perpetuate its power in state legislatures and the U.S. House; by reducing incentives for politicians to be accountable to their constituents; by increasing loyalty to “the base,” who dominate low-turnout primaries (the only substantial threat to reelection); and by making bipartisan cooperation much less likely.

But a gerrymandering arms race may now be virtually impossible to stop.

In 2019, the Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, gave a green light to partisan gerrymandering. In his majority opinion in Rucho v. Common Cause, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledged that partisan gerrymandering “might be incompatible with democratic principles,” but asserted that the case, which involved redistricting in North Carolina and Maryland, presented “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.”

Roberts maintained that remedies for partisan gerrymandering were in place, writing, “Numerous states are actively addressing the issue through state constitutional amendments and legislation placing power in the hands of independent commissions, mandating particular districting criteria for their mapmakers and prohibiting drawing districts for partisan advantage.” Article I Section 4 of the Constitution, Roberts added, gives Congress the authority to alter “time, place, and manner” regulations prescribed by a state “at any time.”

In a powerful and prescient dissent, Justice Elena Kagan noted that Roberts did not dispute claims that “if left unchecked,” partisan gerrymandering might “irreparably damage our system of government.” The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment applies to “the debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen’s vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise,” Kagan asserted.

Kagan implied that Roberts’s assurances about existing remedies were either naive or disingenuous. Because politicians “maintain themselves in office through partisan gerrymandering,” she wrote, “the chances for legislative reform are slight.” Fewer than half of states allow voters to put referendums on the ballot. And Kagan cut the legs out from under Roberts’s observation that opponents of gerrymandering have recourse to state courts: “If they [state courts] can develop neutral and manageable standards to identify unconstitutional gerrymanders, why can’t we?”

To expand on this point, Kagan pointed out that every one of the 3,000 maps generated by an expert that adhered to all the criteria North Carolina used except partisan advantage led to at least one additional Democratic district over the initial Republican proposal. To the majority’s concern about the absence of concrete criteria for determining how much partisanship is too much, Kagan suggested that the appropriate answer was, “This much is too much. By any measure.” And the high court should have mandated that the state revise them.

In a recent YouGov poll, 76 percent of respondents (including 66 percent of Republicans) viewed partisan gerrymandering as unfair and deemed it a major problem. Only 4 percent thought it was not a problem at all. 74 percent of adults under 30 are concerned about partisan gerrymandering, up from 55 percent in 2022.

What recourse do we the people have? A tit-for-tat response, justified as a temporary suspension of principle, may well be the only option available to Democrats, even though Republicans will have an advantage if the war moves beyond just Texas and California. But it must be accompanied by a sustained response from large numbers of “ordinary” citizens, including visible and vocal manifestations of their urgent commitment to end a practice that, as Justice Kagan put it, turns “upside down the core American idea that all government power derives from the people … and enables politicians to entrench themselves in office.”

The goal would be persuading Democrats, Republicans and independents to make opposition to partisan gerrymandering a litmus test for who they vote for and against in 2025 and 2026.

And Trump’s announcement last week that he intends to lead a movement to get rid of mail-in ballots and voting machines gives added credence to the claim that nothing less than the future of free and fair elections is at stake.

Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Emeritus Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.