Four years ago, President Obama won 60 percent of voters between the ages of 18 and 29, but by the latest national polling numbers, Hillary Clinton’s support among the same age group hovers around just 30 percent. Clamoring to appeal to a Bernie Sanders-loving youth, the Clinton campaign is hewing close to the often parodied “millennial think-piece” talking points in official language.
In an open letter published Monday on Mic.com, Clinton praises the young voters’ supposed frenzy for startup businesses and their sensitivity to social justice. She also commends their desire “to do work you love and find meaningful”—a flattering spin on the millennial generation’s stereotypes of entitlement and unprofessional behavior.
Indeed, last-ditch flattery seems to carry Clinton’s platform for millennials. Her letter opens with the following adoration:
Millennials were a sure bet for Obama in the last two elections, and they were credited with helping him win the White House twice. But Clinton’s struggles with the age group—which went for Sanders by significant margins in Democratic primary states—raise the possibility that young voters could actually cost her come November.
“[Winning over young voters] could very easily be the difference between winning the election or not,” Democratic pollster Andrew Baumann said, concerning Clinton’s middling millennial support.
Clinton has made a noticeable push for millennials in the last week. She valiantly dragged herself from her sickbed to join kid-approved progressive senators Elizabeth Warren and Sanders at campaign stops in the sink-or-swim swing state of Ohio over the weekend. And in a speech at Temple University in Philadelphia on Monday, she specifically targeted the finicky young Democratic voter: “Your generation is the most inclusive, progressive and entrepreneurial that we’ve ever seen,” she told an unsmiling patchwork of college kids. (Touchy-feely virtues notwithstanding, the startup stereotype is misleading when the share of individuals under 30 owning businesses has hit a 25-year low, according to the Wall Street Journal.)
Clinton has stumbled into a common trap, revealing an awkward distance from voters’ real concerns. She could have cribbed her talking points from a prototypical long-form article about millennials, the sort of which appears more often than not in the pages of the New York Times. It’s a formula frequently parodied as pandering, patronizing, and oblivious—parodied by narcissistic, thin-skinned, and tech-savvy millennials, of course.
