The Democratic party has had its own reckoning this year. The electoral street fight between Donald Trump and conservatives has obscured the fact that young Democrats are choosing a 74-year-old democratic socialist with few elected allies to represent their party’s future. It’s a development that has impeded Hillary Clinton’s push for the presidential nomination, yes — but its true meaning and full consequences are likely to manifest only after the current election has passed.
Sanders has walloped Clinton among the under-30 crowd from the get-go this primary season, racking up more than 70 percent of it through March 15, according to an estimate from Tufts University. That dominance continued Tuesday night in Wisconsin: A CNN exit poll found the Vermont senator capturing 82 percent of 18 to 29 year olds.
The effect of these margins has varied by state, as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake has observed. As the primary has progressed, turnout among young voters has begun to exceed 2008 levels. But Sanders hasn’t corralled them in every state at such stunning levels. (In Florida, for instance, youth turnout increased 63 percent from 2008, but Sanders won the demographic “only” 64 to 35 percent.)
All of this, however, takes the short view. The youth movement of Sanders’s campaign has helped him engineer a stronger national challenge to Clinton than was imaginable, but it may not be enough to deny her the Democratic nomination. What it can do is signal that the party has a youth problem moving forward — quite a wonder on the heels of the Obama years.
As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote, reflecting the sentiments of a twenty-something Sanders backer: “For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.”
How nicely that dovetails with the same Trump sympathizers who have whacked the GOP for its treatment of immigration and trade. And how much less attention the campaign has paid to the Democratic crack-up.
No worries, though. Recent trends indicate there should plenty of time to make up for it. The Harvard Institute of Politics has found that the trust young voters have in major government institutions has waned continually since 2009, and trust in the presidency cratered at 32 percent in 2014 — a decrease attributable mostly to young Democrats. A Reason-Rupe survey of millennials found that pluralities don’t trust Republicans or Democrats to handle 12 of 15 major issues polled. This is the sort of broad dissatisfaction that doesn’t vanish overnight.
Just ask the GOP. The Democrats’ turn is coming.
