Young Americans love Paul Ryan because he’s the first candidate for national office to understand what they are going through and to produce a plan that will help them in the long run.

When Ryan graduated college in 1992, grads faced a similar tough economy with bleak job prospects – the year the Clinton campaign chased former President George H.W. Bush out of office with the mantra “It’s the economy, stupid.”

Kids who graduated college in the 1990s often faced having to get jobs at the mall rather than get that big job they wanted right out of college, not unlike today's Millennials.

The mantra of Ryan’s generation, aka Gen-X, born between 1965 and 1982, has been “Reality Bites” because they, like Millennials, have had to face the likelihood they will never see a dime of Social Security or Medicare and that they will likely do worse financially than their parents did for the first time in American history.

Ryan’s plan fits right within that generational context.

“Enter Ryan. While Democrats attack his Medicare plan as “radical” and portray him as pushing granny off the cliff, young people don’t seem to be buying this caricature. Or maybe ‘radical’ is what they want,” Daily Beast columnist Kirsten Powers wrote earlier this week.

While the Obama campaign tries to scare Boomers about the Ryan plan, its strategy to preserve Medicare and other Social Security has proven even more popular among Millennials than among members of Ryan’s own generation, according to a 2011 Pew poll.  The poll found that 46 percent of those under the age of 30 favored the Ryan plan compared with 38 percent of Gen-Xers.

Ryan’s plan wouldn’t affect anyone for another 10 years.

Polling following the Ryan pick found that it helped push Mitt Romney’s standing among younger Americans up to 41 percent and drag President Obama’s rating to 49 percent, according to the liberal PPP group.

A Gen-Y, aka Millennial,  commenter on Hot Air showed a similar appreciation for the Ryan pick and the VP candidate’s plan.

“I may be in Generation Y, but my parents are solidly boomers born in the early-mid 1950s, and I really hope that debt and entitlement reforms are a huge sticking point for the youth. I’m a huge fan of Paul Ryan for precisely this reason, I consider entitlement reform my #1 issue,” poster vegconservative writes. “The prevalence of Ron Paul’s support within the Gen-Y group makes me think that debt and the size of gov’t is probably a big issue with a lot of us, even though I’m most decidedly not a Ron Paul supporter.

“But I do think that once some ads get on the air describing why entitlement reform is so necessary now and not later, the youth support for Paul Ryan will probably stay strong.”

This is astounding considering that Obama/Biden won 66 percent of the Millennial vote in 2008.