Hillary Clinton is in the unenviable position of attracting Bernie Sanders supporters at the risk of losing independents and moderate Republicans.
Her hope is that a deep aversion to Donald Trump will overcome voter apathy by November.
Millennials have stayed attached to Sanders’ plan for free college, though, and they want to see Clinton take action, according to NBC News.
They should plan to stay disappointed.
Already, Clinton has offered “debt-free” college which would still require students to pay tuition, but would cost $350 billion over 10 years from governments on the federal and state levels to cover costs that students wouldn’t pay. It’s a shift from students paying the majority of the cost for their degree to students paying a minority of the cost.
Yet that isn’t enough for Sanders supporters who rank higher education as a top priority.
“People will accept Hillary’s stance on things, but I don’t think they’re very passionate about what she’s proposing,” Elizabeth Siyuan Lee told NBC News.
Lee doesn’t count Clinton’s college plan as “progressive enough,” much like other Democrats have criticized Clinton’s lack of progressive credentials.
Even if Clinton would hijack Sanders’ platform, though, it’s not clear it’d be enough to charm young Democrats to her left. Her favorability rating among millennials is 37 percent, compared to a 54 percent rating for Sanders, according to a Harvard Institute of Politics poll. Her policies could change, but she has a trust problem that Sanders lacked.
The idealism that Sanders encouraged could sink Clinton. But she’s betting that millennials will trade their idealism for an anti-Trump pragmatism.
Only 4 percent of millennials told Harvard that education was the issue that concerned them most in the election. The economy, foreign affairs, and immigration mattered most. Given that millennials are the least likely demographic to vote, alienating independents with a leftward shift is a gamble.
Independents aren’t so aloof from the two parties; so long as Clinton maintains a Democratic platform that doesn’t push too far left, she should be able to carry a significant chunk of them.
“Those who identify as independents today are more stable in their support for one or the other party than were ‘strong partisans’ back in the 1970s,” Joshua Holland wrote for The Nation.
Reliable Democratic independents could be enough to offset any loss of millennials to apathy because Hillary didn’t feel the Bern. That may or may not be the best policy, but it’s good politicking.
Just as Republican millennials will vote for Trump by November when confronted with the prospect of a Clinton electoral victory, Democratic millennials will shudder and do the same. Clinton doesn’t need to be a millennial icon — she just needs to be good enough and stand beside Trump during a debate. Loathing for the other candidate has a magical ability to shake out the apathy of voters.
“I’m still going to vote for Clinton because I think she’ll do more for the state of our education than Donald Trump. But, of course, I would prefer if it was Bernie,” Emmet Sandberg told NBC News.
That will be the rallying cry of 2016. The election will be decided not with a bang, but with a shrug.
