WHAT would it take for young people to get off the sofa and vote? Cosmopolitan magazine is offering to lend a “party bus” full of snacks, freebies and shirtless male models to the student group that does most to raise turnout. Barack Obama has launched a social-media campaign to woo the young. In a recent op-ed for Medium, a blogging website founded by the inventors of Twitter, he resorted to naked flattery. “One of the reasons I’m so confident about America’s future is that I’m confident in you—a generation that’s more educated, diverse and digitally fluent than any before you,” he purred.

Yet no one expects many youngsters to show up at the polls in November. Typically, few do in mid-term elections. In 2010 only 24% of millennials (18-29-year-olds) voted, compared with 51% of Americans aged 30 or over. Youthful apathy is nothing new. Back in 1972, when millions of baby-boomers came of age and just after the voting age was lowered to 18, those who predicted that youthful idealists would toss Richard Nixon out of office were disappointed. Hunter S. Thompson, himself a famously dissolute journalist, lamented that the young “lie around on waterbeds and smoke that goddamn marrywanna” instead of casting ballots.

Many young Americans bridle at the suggestion that they are too lazy to vote. “We’re not apathetic, just frustrated,” says Mary Rouse, a student at Elon University in North Carolina. Like half her generation she identifies with neither the Republicans nor the Democrats—the highest level of disaffiliation of any age group since the Pew Research Centre started measuring it 25 years ago.

Young people do care about politics: they just dislike it. Less than a third think that running for office is an honourable thing to do, according to research from Harvard University, while two-thirds think that politicians mostly go into public service for selfish reasons. Millennials can barely remember a time when jobs were plentiful or Washington wasn’t gridlocked. More than a third of them live with their parents. Many have vast college debts. Small wonder they are alienated.

When they vote at all, it tends to be for Democrats: two-thirds backed Mr Obama in 2012. But they are not simply left-wing: a recent poll for Reason, a libertarian magazine, found them socially liberal and fiscally conservative. Two-thirds support legalising same-sex marriage, 61% think abortion should be legal in most cases and just over half believe the drinking age should be lowered. Yet 66% agree that when the government runs something, it is “usually inefficient and wasteful” (see chart). And by 57% to 41% they prefer smaller government, fewer services and lower taxes to the opposite.

Democrats are desperate to raise turnout among the young. On October 7th Michelle Obama told students that voting might improve their sex lives. “Bring that cute guy or girl you have that crush on,” she said. “Trust me, they’ll be impressed.” Democratic candidates stress their social liberalism and boast of their plans to help students pay for college, while painting Republicans as fuddy-duddy male chauvinists who want to ban contraception. In Louisiana, for example, Mary Landrieu, the incumbent senator, promises lower interest rates for student loans and bigger grants for poor students. She has also danced the “Wobble” at a tailgate party and has helped a 28-year-old perform a “keg stand” (doing a handstand on a beer keg while drinking from it). She is not the only candidate trying to show a fun-loving side to youthful voters. Scott Brown, a Republican running for the Senate in New Hampshire, recently attended a student party, though he pointedly ignored an offer of some mood-altering pills. Kay Hagan, a vulnerable Democratic senator from North Carolina, first won her seat in 2008, buoyed by all the youngsters who turned out for Mr Obama. (She won the youth vote by an incredible 47-point margin.) This time, the president is not on the ballot and Ms Hagan is struggling to make the young swoon without him. Still, her allies in the teachers’ unions are helpfully trumpeting the Republicans-hate-education theme. One ad blasts Ms Hagan’s opponent, Thom Tillis, for having “cut $500m” from the North Carolina education budget as state House Speaker. (In fact, education spending rose by $700m between 2012-13 and 2014-15.)