Morgan Bettes started her downtown music-promotion company 11 months ago armed with business savvy and a lot of hope. She’s not relying on government policy, nor the outcome of the November election, to give her much help.

“I probably should be thinking about that, but I don’t,” said Bettes, who’s 27.

Just like so many others in her generation. Unlike their parents, younger people don’t regard Washington – or their presidential votes next fall – as an important force behind their economic well-being.

“I don’t think the presidential race has anything to do with economics anymore,” said Tifini Hill, 36, a financial systems administrator from Brandon, Florida, near Tampa.

Rebecca Arends, 26, is an attorney from Tampa with tens of thousands of dollars in outstanding student debt.

She’s paying 6.8 percent in interest, the rate on loans to a graduate or professional student, well above the prime rate. She’s a fan of President Barack Obama’s, but she lamented that he hadn’t done much to help her with the loans.

“I’ve kind of given up on the government helping me out,” Arends said.

This disdain for all things political is a logical aftershock from the politics that dominated the younger generation’s most impressionable years. Since they became adults and began dealing with taxes, mortgages, health insurance and jobs, most voters under 40 have witnessed only what most regard as an inert, bickering Congress and White House.

For the past 15 years, they’ve seen the federal debt balloon to once-unfathomable numbers, watched the nation stumble through wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and endured a bitterly polarized political system.

Add to that the grave disappointment younger voters felt after 2008, when they turned out in big numbers for Obama. “There was so much optimism when Obama was elected,” said John Della Volpe, the director of polling at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, which regularly surveys 18- to 29-year-olds.

But the good feeling was tempered by the times. The nation was enduring .the worst economic recession since the 1930s. The government tried to ease the pain, but to people just starting to struggle to compete in the adult world, it wasn’t enough.

The pessimism lingers. Today’s college students “feel government is not there to help,” said Sylvia Panetta, co-chairman of California’s Panetta Institute, which surveys those students. Nearly 3 of 4 in the institute’s spring study said it would be tougher for their generation to achieve the American dream than it had been for their parents.

These attitudes are shaping a major change in how voters choose presidential candidates. Absent an active war, people historically vote their wallets.

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