Barack Obama’s move to the White House was largely due to his success with young people. That’s the case in more than just his general election victories, too.
According to Iowa caucus entrance polls in 2008, “young voters preferred Obama over the next-closest competitor by more than 4 to 1,” Time wrote. “This suggests that the under-25 set—typically among the most elusive voters in all of politics—gave the Illinois Senator a net gain of some 17,000 votes. Obama finished roughly 20,000 votes ahead of former Senator John Edwards and Sen. Hillary Clinton.”
Obama’s caucus success put him on course to the presidency.
Eight years later, a similar story has emerged from the first two primary battles of the Democratic race—except the font in which it’s written is bigger, bolder, and all about Bernie. Young voters have taken to the Vermont senator, 74, even more than they did Obama, who was 46 when he first ran for president.
The margins are startling. In the charts below, keep your eyes on two things: How the middle bar, already the highest, increases between 2008 and 2016, and how the first bar remains mostly flat in that same span. Here’s Iowa:
And here’s New Hampshire:
The first three bars represent the share of the under-29 vote among Clinton, Obama and the remainder of the field eight years ago. The second three show the same split among Clinton, Sanders and a mostly depleted field that was nowhere near as competitive as it was in 2008.
We can draw a definitive conclusion from that fact: Hillary Clinton is flat-out unpopular with young voters in the Democratic primary right now. The last time she ran, she split support among other candidates: John Edwards, and to a lesser extent, Bill Richardson.
This year, there’s no place for those voters to go but to her and Sanders—and they’ve broken for the latter unambiguously. The split has doubtlessly contributed to Clinton’s shortcomings with female voters so far.
“Women under 45 overwhelmingly picked Bernie Sanders over Hillary Clinton [in New Hampshire], according to exit polls, with women under 30 backing the Vermont senator by an almost 4-1 margin,” CNN reported after the vote. Overall, Sanders won 53 to 55 percent of women Tuesday night, depending on the exit poll estimate.
Clinton’s youth issue isn’t confined to people in their 20s, either. Sanders defeated her in Iowa among voters aged 30 to 44 by a margin of 21 points, and that figure widened to 34 points in New Hampshire. Compare that with how Time framed Obama’s allure to young adults in the early stages of the 2008 Democratic primary:
She went on to capture a plurality of those New Hampshire voters in 2008. This year, she was drubbed.
And she even lost the 45-to-64 bloc to Sanders 53 to 45 percent.
Listen closely. You might hear a faint gulp.
