Bernie Sanders fans filled football stadiums, but Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill a conference room at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Thursday.
While she pumped her “New College Compact” in North Carolina—developed in concert with Sanders—dozens of local college kids came and went from DNC headquarters in downtown Washington that same evening. The majority of volunteers had come from college campuses to cold call voters and discuss how their candidate might “power through” her generational handicap. (Her support among likely young voters ages 18 to 34, by the latest Quinnipiac poll, hovers at 31 percent to Libertarian party nominee Gary Johnson’s 29.)
Minutes after I arrived, a girl at a nearby table looked stung and a little scared as she hung up her latest call. “That one said he’s for Trump,” she told no one in particular. (Comrades who might have comforted the poor girl were all on the phones.) Nearby, a skinny college boy with a red paperback titled Socialism Past and Future partly concealed under his call sheet did a little victory dance and shimmied over to add his latest donation to the organizers’ tally. Later on, he’d cheer when speaker Symone Sanders mentioned her work on the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Sanders, formerly national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign and now another Clinton surrogate, told me why so many of the kids are over it: “Millennial voters are tired of what they’re hearing from Democrats and Republicans.”
She believes that third party candidates, and even Donald Trump, are pulling young Sanders supporters from the Clinton camp because millennials are bored.
“Even though if you really drill down and look at Gary Johnson’s platform and look at Jill Stein’s platform, you know that neither of them are real progressives or they’re really about the issues that we care about, but they just know that they’re not the two things that they see fighting all the time,” she said. In other words, when boring old mom and dad are fighting again, you’d rather go live with your cool aunt or uncle—Aleppo ignorance notwithstanding.
It’s not that young people are tired of the issues or uninformed about them, but they—like so many Americans—are fed up with the same old defenses.
Adriyanna Andreus, head of the College Democrats at Howard University, couldn’t get behind Clinton until the Democratic convention in Philadelphia, where she arrived an ardent Sanders supporter. “I was a Bernie Sanders fan. It wasn’t until I went to the DNC convention and Obama spoke that I actually started to support [Secretary Clinton],” she said. Adriyanna, “still a Sanders girl at heart,” wants Hillary to win—and to turn around her millennial support. She could start, Adriyanna said, by “being willing to have those conversations and actually seeming as though you’re listening. I think we all know Hillary kind of struggles—and it’s not her fault—sitting well with the voters and finding a connection there.”
Another student volunteer, a Georgetown junior who’s supported Hillary Clinton since last fall, said she was embarrassed for her peers who planned to cast a third-party “protest vote”—but, at the same time, she understood why many of her friends couldn’t stand Hillary Clinton. The Clinton campaign’s awkward social media offerings— particularly “Seven Reasons Hillary Clinton Is Like Your Abuela”—”weirded them out,” she said. An off-putting tone-deafness made young voters not want to engage with issues they would otherwise care about, and did care about when Sanders was on the stump. Hillary’s recent “Humans of New York” post on Facbeook, however, represented a step in the right direction: “Those words resonated.”
The difference, according to Marlon Marshall, the campaign’s national director of field engagement, was that with the HONY post, you got an unfamiliar Clinton story—one in which men taking the bar exam in the same room as Clinton and her Wellesley classmates hurl sexist insults. Marshall says the campaign will continue to tell Hillary Clinton’s stories, regardless of voter fatigue, because someone out there might not have heard them yet, or might not have heard one quite that way.
“The more we go out there and tell her story,” he said, “we’ll pull ’em back.” For one thing, “A lot of young people don’t know that she left law school and went to work for the Children’s Defense Fund”—and in the next 52 days, they should find out.
Marshall knows all of Hillary’s stories, of course, having worked With Her for most of his career. A stint with Barack Obama after the 2008 primary only brought him back—after a year of opportunities for devotional espionage, Marshall became White House liaison to the State Department in 2009.
He who knows her strengths (and weaknesses) told the assembled millennials Thursday to tell their fellow young voters something they haven’t heard. “All of you are here because you have your own story,” he roused the callers to look within—tell voters, “What do we stand for.” Marshall also said he’d known from the start this race would be close, and these last few weeks an all-out battle. So, if in this short stretch Hillary’s same old narrative doesn’t change any more minds, maybe some idealistic kids can.
