Presidential candidates have given attention to questions of college affordability, and students have started to scrutinize their plans and responses.
Students at the University of Texas at Austin got an outline from The Daily Texan.
So far, millennials have flocked to Bernie Sanders among Democrats and Donald Trump and Ben Carson among Republicans. In the Iowa caucuses, Bernie Sanders claimed 84 percent of voters between 17 and 29, but the vote was more fractured for Republicans. Ted Cruz took 26 percent of young voters, followed by 23 percent for Rubio, and 20 percent for Donald Trump, according to The Wall Street Journal.
While Sanders can solidify his youth support, young Republicans haven’t yet coalesced around one candidate. For the GOP, most candidates haven’t made a play for young voters. Only Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush have announced their plans to reform and improve higher education.
Higher education isn’t the only issue that millennials care about, but young Republican voters have rarely held the debate spotlight in a way that young Democratic voters have.
Clinton and Sanders have sparred over a debt-free vs. tuition-free model of higher education, and their views are well known by any voter interested. That gives the public the opportunity to discuss the benefits and costs of those plans. By ignoring the issues, the Republican candidates scrutinize one another on higher education less, and that scrutiny is much needed.
In a general election, the Democratic position will be that the government needs to invest more into higher education and forgive or reduce student debt. The Republican position, it seems, will be vague references to internal reform and financial incentives to cut costs, along with income-based repayment for student loans, which will involve some de facto debt forgiveness. The lack of specifics in the Republican position is indicative of a lack of focus on young voters.
Young voters don’t only care about higher education; health care policy and job creation concern millennials the most, according to a Harvard Institute of Politics poll.
For Clinton and Sanders, both campaigns have dedicated resources to understanding and courting the youth vote. For Sanders, it’s a key plank of his campaign. Among Republicans, however, the youth vote is an afterthought. With as many candidates in the GOP nomination race, a youth candidate could change a primary result.
For as much as the GOP exhorts the apathetic or uninterested to vote, their outreach efforts have been limited. To some extent, it might be a smaller pool to dive for votes. Rand Paul staked his Iowa campaign on youth support and had to exit the race when it didn’t materialize. Until the GOP candidates take youth issues more seriously, however, they’ll face an uphill battle in November.
