Emily Ekins

Vice President and Director of Polling at Cato Institute
Many pundits and politicians have written off younger voters as out of touch with reality. Emily Ekins has a different view.
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Many pundits and politicians have written off younger voters as out of touch with reality. Emily Ekins has a different view.

Yes, a recent poll by Gallup revealed that 69 percent of Millennials expressed a willingness to support a self-described socialist for president. But Emily, a research fellow at the Cato Institute and a leading researcher of public opinion, says that if you look under the hood of recent opinion surveys, Millennials use the word “socialism” to describe European-style social democracies, while eschewing the Soviet-era tyrannies that older voters associate with the term.

“Millennials like free markets,” Emily wrote recently in the Washington Post. “Most already accept that free markets have done more to lift the world out of poverty than any other system. Instead, what this generation has to decide is whether higher education and health-care innovation, access, and high quality can be best achieved through opening these sectors to more free-market reforms or through increased government control. This is a debate we should be glad to have.”

Emily was born and raised in Sacramento, California. She majored in Political Science at Brigham Young University, where she spent a summer interning at the Six Flags in Sacramento, and worked for a year as a recruiter for Teach for America. In 2007, after a year as a research associate at Harvard Business School, Emily decamped to UCLA, where she earned her Ph.D. in Political Science, and wrote her dissertation on sources of support for the Tea Party movement.

While finishing grad school, Emily worked for four years as the Polling Director for the Reason Foundation in Los Angeles and Washington. While at Reason, Emily published an in-depth study of younger voters, entitled Millennials: The Politically Unclaimed Generation.

In 2020, a poll she conducted on political expression stunned America when it found that 62 percent of Americans say they have political views they’re afraid to share, including a majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans. “Americans with diverse backgrounds share [the] concern that their employment could be adversely affected if their political views were discovered,” she noted in her report. “A significant minority of Americans from all political persuasions and backgrounds…are more likely to hide their view for fear of financial penalty.”

As a member of FREOPP’s Board of Advisors, Emily is one of the key people we rely on to provide us with insights as to the issues and policies that matter most to the rising generations. “I’m happy to be involved in FREOPP,” says Emily, “because its primary goal is to craft public policy that expands economic opportunity for all Americans, allowing them to thrive and pursue their goals regardless of background or creed. That is what America is all about.”

Emily and her husband Justin live in Arlington, Virginia.