Last weekend’s “Saturday Night Live” gave viewers a lot to laugh about with its trenchant treatment of Hillary Clinton. Making light of Clinton’s struggles to win over younger voters, one skit imagined Clinton singing “I Can’t Make You Love Me” to a table of four young Bernie Sanders supporters at brunch.
It’s not just “SNL” that finds humor in Clinton’s failings with millennial voters. Many Republicans are delighting in exit poll numbers showing that Clinton trails Sanders by gargantuan margins with Democratic primary voters and caucus goers under age thirty. For instance, in Iowa Clinton won only 14 percent of young caucus goers.
But as tempting as it is to celebrate Clinton’s inability to win over young voters, Republicans should be deeply concerned about the enormous appeal that Clinton’s socialist opponent, Bernie Sanders, has with this age group.
I’ve long declared a state of emergency for the Republican Party when it comes to young voters. After losing the youth vote by only slim margins in both the 2000 and 2004 elections, Barack Obama annihilated John McCain with this age group in 2008 and four years later proceeded to defeat Mitt Romney by a whopping twenty-three points.
Some Republicans are hoping that young voters will behave differently with Obama off the ballot, leading to a reversion to the norm. The thinking goes something like this: Republicans may lose the under-30 vote yet again, but Clinton will be a much weaker opponent, and Republicans will therefore either lose by less or will be less harmed by a youth vote that largely stays home.
I confess that I have savored poll after poll showing Clinton struggling to reel in this key slice of the Obama coalition. Clinton does not possess many of the qualities — candor and spontaneity, chief among them — that young voters are looking for.
Should the GOP nominate a strong candidate who makes a real effort to win millennials, she’d be at risk of seriously underperforming Obama’s margins.
But Clinton’s weakness with young voters comes at the same time that young Americans are “feeling the Bern” and flocking to Sanders. In his 70s and hardly exuding an aura of “young and cool,” Sanders has nonetheless become a rock star to the campus left. That an avowed socialist would become an idol for young Americans on campuses across the country should cause Republicans and conservatives deep concern.
While college campuses have always been incubators of youthful leftward thinking, the last few years have showcased a particularly dramatic left turn. Headlines show not just standard issue protest or anger when conservative speakers come to college campuses, but outright demands that conservative voices be silenced and erased, to the point where even left-leaning comedians are being driven away from performing on campuses.
The campus left turn isn’t confined to political correctness. Campuses have always been left-leaning, but today’s campus culture is further left than we’ve seen in decades. An annual survey of college freshman shows that more students who are new to campus are identifying as “liberal” than at any time since 1973. In 2015, surveys showed that slightly more adults under age 30 felt positively about the term socialism than felt negatively about it.
It’s certainly true that Hillary Clinton performs poorly with young voters in part because she fails to pass the test of authenticity. But it is also the case that many young voters really, really like Bernie Sanders. They like his ideas, they like what he stands for. And while it may be easy to dismiss Sanders’ appeal as being about “Free Stuff” (which even Hillary Clinton is quick to acknowledge is a hollow, unworkable promise in the case of things like free college for all), Sanders is taking a generation’s anger over being left out of economic prosperity and channeling it into an argument that only socialist economics can fix the problem.
In the absence of a robust conservative counter argument, how can you blame young voters for being won over by Sanders’ rhetoric?
Republicans should not sit back and bank on the idea that young Sanders supporters will abandon Clinton in a general election because they haven’t warmed to her in a primary. What Sanders has done is far different than what Obama did to win over millennials; Obama’s strength was in a personal narrative wrapped in hope and change, Sanders’ is in tapping into a much more deeply ideological energy.
If the candidate you like personally fails to win the primary, perhaps you stay home or give the other side a look. But what if you’ve been ideologically galvanized along the way? It is hard to envision Sanders supporters deciding to hand the White House to the GOP instead of Clinton, either by switching their votes or sitting at home.
Republicans should view Clinton’s weakness not as a gift but rather as an opportunity to try to win over some hearts and minds who haven’t heard a message about why liberty and free markets create opportunity. And the fact that the socialist Sanders is capturing the hearts of so many millennials should only underscore the need for this effort to begin, and begin now.
Kristen Soltis Anderson is a columnist for The Washington Examiner and author of “The Selfie Vote.”
