For a party desperately in need of pre-Social Security-age blood, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems like a promising prospect. The woman who felled Representative Joe Crowley in the New York 14th last week is just 28-years-old, which would make her the youngest member of Congress next January when she will be, almost certainly, sworn in. And Ocasio isn’t just young, she appears to be charismatic, an engaging campaigner, and a shrewd strategist. She’s a natural.
“When I first started this race, people were telling me, ‘Only go after . . . voters that have voted in the last three primaries. Everyone else is a waste of time.’ That was appalling to me,” she told In These Times.
“You’re also saying that the only people that matter to you is 1 to 3 percent of our population. While I understand maximizing your efforts, I also know that the only time we create any kind of substantive change is when we reach out to a disaffected electorate and inspire and motivate them to vote.”
Ocasio understood she reflected the leanings of a significant enough bloc of her district that she could upset Crowley. For instance, like Bernie Sanders (for whom she volunteered) she supports Medicare-for-all and tuition-free college; she wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement and empower hard-line environmentalists. She says “housing [is] a human right.” And all of these stances play well in an urban district where a generic congressional Democrat is a 29-point favorite, per the Cook Partisan Voting Index. But are they trending toward mainstream opinion in the Democratic party?
“If there is any seat in America that is advocating for the abolishment of ICE,” Ocasio said, “it should be NY-14. It is a district that is 85 percent Democratic. We have very little to risk by taking bold and ambitious positions.” Her observation is instructive. She has room to take stances that would get Democrats in competitive districts defeated handily. In this respect, her candidacy represents a testing ground for left-wing policy.
The $64,000 question for Democrats is this: Are the democratic-Socialsts—the Ocasios and Bernies of the world—trying to lead Democratic voters to a new place ideologically? Or are the Democrat voters already heading that way on their own?
The data here might not be what you expect. Conventional wisdom has always held that young voters have been leaning ever-further to the left. But if you compare questions in the Harvard Institute of Politics youth poll between spring 2008 and spring 2017, the opinions of voters under age 30 on a typical basket of policy matters have been steady over the last decade. Here are several questions with the responses corresponding to “agree / neither agree nor disagree / disagree”:
Recent immigration into this country has done more good than harm:
Spring ‘08: 24/35/42
Spring ‘17: 32/37/27
Qualified minorities should be given special preference in hiring and education:
Spring ‘08: 18/29/54
Spring ‘17: 19/38/38
Our country’s goal in trade policy should be to eliminate all barriers to trade and employment so that we have a truly global economy:
Spring ‘08: 29/43/29
Spring ‘17: 26/47/23
Basic health insurance is a right for all people, and if someone has no means of paying for it, the government should provide it:
Spring ‘08: 61/20/19
Spring ‘17: 46/29/21
The last question sticks out. While it’s not a direct proxy for wanting single-payer health insurance, the notion that health insurance is a “right” is the basic justification for single-payer. And counter to what you might think, post-Obamacare young people have become much less supportive of the idea.
Going by the spring 2017 survey, Millennials are closely divided on polarizing issues such as immigration and taxes. But while they are unmistakably to the left on the environment and healthcare, there is no indication that they have veered further to the left in recent years.
The tentative lesson from this survey—keeping in mind that it is just one survey—is that young voters today aren’t much more left-wing than they were a decade ago. So if today there are lots of young voters who identify with the politics of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, it’s not because they Millenials have changed. It’s simply that people like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio Cortez weren’t on the ballot in 2008.
And Democratic politicians are just now catching up with their voters.
