Democrats’ generational malarkey

It’s almost always cringeworthy when politicians try to adopt Instagram patois into their messaging (“How does your student loan debt make you feel? Tell us in 3 emojis or less.”), so if the thought of Biden dropping a “we stan” or “yas queen” into his stump speech makes you recoil, be glad he’s at least opted to build his message around a throwback.

“Malarkey” is probably as foreign to today’s Gen Zers as “VSCO girl” is to your grandmother. (Google it if you must.) The Biden team surely knows this and knows that many of the other Democrats in the race, such as California Sen. Kamala Harris, are driven by “the fixation that some younger staffers have with liberals on Twitter.”

Biden is doubling down on the fact that his own base in the Democratic Party knows exactly what “malarkey” is. They’re older, and they make up a large piece of the primary electorate. But while a strategy that explicitly focuses on the older wing of his party may actually be a savvy move in the primary, highlighting the generational divide rather than trying to bridge it could have consequences down the road.

If Biden wins a bruising primary with almost no support from Democrats under the age of 50, can he put the party back together again to defeat President Trump in November?

The latest polling on the Democratic primary has some eye-popping figures about the generational divide in the party. Quinnipiac’s latest national Democratic poll shows Biden obliterating the competition among Democrats over the age of 65, winning 39% of them — roughly twice the share of second place South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg at 20%. Biden still fares quite well among those aged 50-64, winning 28%. For comparison, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s support among those over age 50 is in single digits, and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren garners only 11%.

But for younger Democrats, Biden falls far down the list, clocking in at only 14% with Democrats under age 35 — half the level of support Sanders gets with the same group. Harvard University’s Institute of Politics youth poll has similar results, with Biden in third place behind Warren and Sanders among young likely Democratic primary voters.

Sanders is the clear champion among young Democrats, even though his support is almost nonexistent among older Democrats. Warren’s support is not quite so lopsided, but she clearly trails Biden among the older cohort. Biden may be making a sensible decision to hang on to that group tightly while the young and very “online” support is carved up by the rest of the field.

November, as always, looms in the distance. Some 56% of young Americans in the Harvard poll say they’ll never vote for Trump, while only 22% say there’s at least a good chance they will vote for him. Only 4% say they most value a candidate’s “ability to relate to me” and only 3% say they place the most importance on “youth,” so being Mr. Malarkey may not be a huge problem in a general election against an incumbent who is dreadfully unpopular with young people.

But Democrats’ biggest foe in the fight against Trump among young voters may not be Trump, but apathy. Young liberals are not the majority of Democratic voters, but they are some of the party’s loudest voices. If the likes of Sanders and Warren are dispatched unceremoniously by the older and more moderate Democratic primary electorate (an electorate where at least 60% of the primary voters in key states such as Iowa and New Hampshire were over the age of 45 last time around) the same wounds from Sanders’s defeat in 2016 could be re-opened.

In a world where our national politics are split more and more along generational lines, Democrats need younger voters to turn out as big as they did in 2018 in order to combat the aging Trump base. But if Democrats nominate a candidate with very little youth support, they may have to run the same playbook as 2016: rely on energizing their young voters through anti-Trump sentiment alone, not real affection for their candidate.