David Michael Miller
Hillary Clinton and her campaign are beside themselves that they’re not doing better with young voters.
In Wisconsin, Clinton is running second among voters under 30. Donald Trump is leading with 31 percent of the vote, Clinton is at 26 percent followed by Gary (“Aleppo moments”) Johnson at 20 percent and Jill Stein, who is at 9 percent.
That’s right. Clinton trails a man who casually insults women and people of color among voters who are especially supportive of those very groups. And she’s only a few points ahead of a man who couldn’t recall where Aleppo was and who thinks we shouldn’t sweat climate change because in a few billion years the sun will explode and consume us anyway — again, among a generation that is more concerned about climate change than any other issue.
How is this possible? Shouldn’t young people be flocking to a candidate who would be the first woman president and who actually has a plan to fight climate change? Shouldn’t they especially want to support her when her leading opponent holds the opposite views on virtually every issue they care about — to the extent that his views on anything can be deciphered into coherent English sentences?
It seems to me that what explains this more than anything else is the nature of being young. I’ve been there. In 1980 I voted for president for the first time. I never considered the possibility that a far right extremist ideologue Hollywood actor could ever be elected, so I felt free not to vote for the earnest but uninspiring incumbent Jimmy Carter. Instead, I voted for Citizens Party candidate Barry Commoner.
Commoner was like Ralph Nader but without the charming personality and not as optimistic. He was like Bernie Sanders if Sanders were more grumpy. But in his own way he was an idealist. He was a founder of the modern environmental movement and he was one of the first to wed environmentalism and social justice issues. His four laws of ecology still hold up well.
All-in-all, he was a good choice for opinion leader, but probably not so much for leader of the free world. I was one of his 266,000 votes. The more significant spoiler in 1980 was John Anderson, the erstwhile Republican who ran as an independent candidate with former Wisconsin Governor Pat Lucey.
Anderson was my second choice. What can I say? I was 21 years old, idealistic, and voting with my heart. And what did it get me? Ronald Reagan, who ran up the national debt by splurging on weapons of mass destruction and slashing taxes for the rich. I voted to save the environment and got a man who cut environmental regulations. I learned a hard life lesson, but if you had told me in 1980 that my real choice was between Carter and Reagan, well, I would have probably gone on at some length about not being willing to compromise on my first vote for president. I was not open to these sorts of pragmatic arguments because this is not a pragmatic time of life.
The same kind of thing happened in the 2000 election when Al Gore lost, largely because Ralph Nader got 100,000 votes from idealists in Florida.
By the way, if you run into aging baby boomers who are apoplectic about all this, you might ask them if they voted for Hubert Humphrey in 1968. This may quiet the conversation.
It’s tradition that young people control the cultural conversation (how many times have you had to Google the Saturday Night Live guest host?) while their parents and grandparents dominate the political choices.
But the power of youthful idealism has more benefits to society than downsides. It gave us Ronald Reagan (a bad thing, in my view) and George W. Bush (a bad thing in almost everybody’s view) but it also gives us Peace Corps volunteers, doctors who go to work in underserved communities and college kids who spend time teaching at-risk kids to read.
Hillary Clinton has policies young folks should like. But familiarity breeds contempt and Clinton has been on the national stage for their entire lives. She is the very definition of the establishment. Layer on top of that her very controlled personality and you have a recipe for rejection. No five-point plan can fix that. Even appeals from Sanders fall flat. She is who she is and nothing she can do between now and Nov. 8 is likely to move the needle.
But there’s always the chance that outside events that might help. Maybe in the final days before the election the grotesque prospect of a Trump presidency will drive young voters into Clinton’s camp. Maybe the best thing for Clinton would be scary polls only a few days out. I went into the voting booth in 1980 convinced that Carter would win and so my vote wouldn’t be needed.
Let’s hope that some 21 year old doesn’t learn a hard lesson in 2016 the way I did in 1980. Because that would be a really brutal lesson for us all.
