By ALICE B. LLOYD, Weekly Standard
Bernie Sanders fans filled football stadiums, but Hillary Clinton couldn’t fill a conference room at the Democratic National Committee headquarters on Thursday.
While she pumped her “New College Compact” in North Carolina—developed in concert with Sanders—dozens of local college kids came and went from DNC headquarters in downtown Washington that same evening. The majority of volunteers had come from college campuses to cold call voters and discuss how their candidate might “power through” hergenerational handicap. (Her support among likely young voters ages 18 to 34, by the latest Quinnipiac poll, hovers at 31 percent to Libertarian party nominee Gary Johnson’s 29.)
Minutes after I arrived, a girl at a nearby table looked stung and a little scared as she hung up her latest call. “That one said he’s for Trump,” she told no one in particular. (Comrades who might have comforted the poor girl were all on the phones.) Nearby, a skinny college boy with a red paperback titled Socialism Past and Future partly concealed under his call sheet did a little victory dance and shimmied over to add his latest donation to the organizers’ tally. Later on, he’d cheer when speaker Symone Sanders mentioned her work on the Bernie Sanders campaign.
Sanders, formerly national press secretary for the Bernie Sanders campaign and now another Clinton surrogate, told me why so many of the kids are over it: “Millennial voters are tired of what they’re hearing from Democrats and Republicans.”
She believes that third party candidates, and even Donald Trump, are pulling young Sanders supporters from the Clinton camp because millennials are bored.
