In the attempts at forecasting the 2016 Presidential elections, one of the many questionable assumptions is the built-in advantage the Democratic Party seems to have in regards to turnout in Presidential cycles. Along with that is the built-in thinking that whoever the Democratic candidate is will know just how to bring in the youth vote, because hey, the youth like to vote for Democrats, and that the Republicans will drive them away because hey, Republican policies still do not line up with the youth's views.
Regardless of the accuracy of these assumptions, what is not in dispute is how closely-tied the Democratic Party's success (or defeat) will be to how well they get the younger demographics out to the polls.
In a recent diary, Dailykos's Steve Singiser discusses the implications of our youth electorate.
There are two primary reasons why young voters seem far more unlikely to make their mark than the balance of the electorate. For one thing, younger voters consistently are less inclined to be registered, when compared with their elders. For another, they also underperform their registration at midterm time, relative to the older subset of voters.
For Democrats to perform well, even in presidential years, it is becoming increasingly important to turnout the youth vote.
Therefore, in order to win nationally, Democrats are going to need both expanded turnout and outsized margins among that younger cohort of voters, even in presidential years. The former (in presidential years, at least) seems plausible. Young voters have been consistently, as seen above, in the upper teens as a share of the electorate in presidential years. The latter, however, seems like a far less certain bet.
While people often take note of just how well Democrats did with the youth vote with their pick Obama, what is also often implied by this is that the support of the youth would exist even if Obama weren't the Democrat they were voting for.
I find this to be a grossly dangerous assumption to make.
I do not think people give President Obama enough credit for how good he has been at turning out the youth vote. I do not think this is internal to just the Democrat-Republican divide, I think Obama's ability to reach and speak to younger voters is currently unmatched by any other politician on the national stage.
Take a look at just how much Obama brought out the youth vote compared to other Presidential contenders.
All told, Obama has won 2-3 million more votes from people age 18-29 than any other major-party presidential candidate this century, including fellow Democrats. The gap between the number of youth votes Obama received over his respective opponents accounted for over half of the difference in the popular votes. Keep in mind, these are voters who will be voting for decades on from now, so Obama, like any other brand, has done really well to hook them while they are young.
People may find other reasons to explain this disparity between Obama and his counterparts.
He had a good social media team and a very modern campaign; it goes without saying the next Dem candidate could build just as formidable a team. The Republican party is still out of step with the younger generation, and that will pay off for Democrats. All Obama had to do to get the youth to support him was to use twitter and fist bumps and slang.
All of these are quite valid rationales, but at the end of the day, I do not think these alone can account for Obama's support from the youth.
He did what few other politicians ever do. He took the time to genuinely act like he cares about the younger generation. He didn't just go through the motions, he took the time to find out how to best talk to them, to find out what issues they cared about, to find out how he should discuss them, and perhaps most importantly, he just generally gave the impression that the youth should be more engaged in our political system.
And they responded to that. The youth are not so gullible to just accept any politician who knows how to hashtag and selfie, what they ultimately want is to feel like they can be a part of the political system in a meaningful way, and Obama gave them that, and I don't think many of our current politicians do, or even know how to.
So, this seems like a problem to me. People do not give Obama credit for how hard he works, how much better than others have been, to reach and speak to younger voters and motivate them to come out to the polls. People think the support Obama enjoys with the youth will easily transfer over to his successor. People think that the continued Republican will be enough to drive the youth vote away, and keep them coming for Democrats. People think the Democrats have unlocked the secret recipe to bringing the youth out to vote, and it is a recipe that does not necessarily require President Obama.
I think these are dangerous thoughts to have. I think political strategists will miss some important opportunities because of these thoughts, and could have disastrous results for Democrats.
Take, for example, this recent tweet by Hillary Clinton amid the current vaccinations debate:
She really got a lot of props from the mainstream media. "Ooh, look at her, knowing how to use a hashtag."
However, what this tweet perfectly encapsulates is the trap these Democratic politicians not named Obama will fall into, if they think they will have the youth vote behind them in 2016.
First of all, this tweet is so out of touch, not just with the young voter, but with base Democrats in general. Let's say the most mundane, noncontroversial things ever, and make it sound groundbreaking! You know what would have been a far more powerful statement, Hillary's handlers? "The science is clear: evolution is fact, human-caused climate change is real, and #vaccineswork." I mean, the second one was just confirmed by Republicans, and you can't even emphasize that point, as the headlining Democrat? Talk about getting lapped.
Second of all, the fact that she had to tie her support for vaccines to her status as a grandmother, is that not as condescending as it gets? Hey, you know, these scientists and doctors who have been studying this issue for a century, you just can't trust their wisdom like you can trust a grandma. Better get to treating that syphilis with mercury and washing your mouth out with soap, while you're at it.
But those are just the overall problems with this tweet. Once we dig down into how this impacts the overall optics of the younger demographic, and it is actually far worse.
It reinforces the sentiments that play a factor in why the youth register at such low rates, and then turnout to vote at such low rates. The idea that politicians don't really care about listening to the youth, what they care about as issues, and to listen to what the youth offer as solutions.
The sentiment that politicians all over the country send to our youth is one of indifference: despite what we say, we don't care if you participate in our government. In fact, we just want to tell you what to do. #Weknowbest.
The youth do not just want to be told what to do. They are at an age that they are finally starting to gain some autonomy and ability to think for themselves. They have begun the struggles of real life and being on their own, and something they would really appreciate is knowing that their government is looking out for them too. To find that they can't express this newfound independence in the government that has a strong influence on most of the issues they care about, has got to be incredibly disenfranchising.
The one person in our political system who seemed to buck this trend was President Obama. At least he tried often, and earnestly, and even if it sometimes did not go off without a hitch, at least he made the effort. He surrounded himself with young staffers like them. He spoke to them on their level, not from a status of superiority. And for many young voters, that was far more than they ever seem to get from anyone else.
If Hillary is the best nominee we can come up with who speaks to the youth vote, we may as well count on a loss of a few million votes right now. This is not to say that she hasn't proven that she does have some of the sway Obama has over the youth. I think she comes as close as anybody else. Both as the above tweet shows, the overall instinct of politicians to administer rather than to engage, to decree rather than to inform, to force rather than to lead, could stand in the way between youthful dominance at the polls, or a wide swath of strong Democratic voters who just stay home.
Democratic strategists may easily be fooled into taking the youth vote for granted, and not working hard enough to get their candidates to fully embrace the youth vote. The thinking will be that, they wouldn't possibly vote for the Republican, so what difference does it make? But with the youth vote, that would be a mistake, because they are also the demographic most likely to simply stay home on Election Day. And this would have ramifications, not just for the Presidency, but for Democrats further down the ticket.
Look, I am not saying that we continue to have Obama do the work of bringing out the youth vote, for the next decade or so. But for one, I do not see any of the current Democratic frontrunners working as hard as Obama did to reach the youth voters specifically. And two, it is clear that many still have not learned how to couch their rhetoric in a way that will reliably bring young voters into the fold the way Obama did. They are simply taking it as a given, and not putting in the work.
Whether we like it or not (and I would always make the case that it is a good thing to see an engaged youth demographic, but that might just be me), the success of the Democratic Party depends on how well we get the youth engaged in politics, and ultimately, how well we get them to turn out to vote. The fact that this has yet to reflect in any Democrat's campaigning who isn't Obama is really disheartening.
It would be a mistake for Hillary or any other Democratic 2016 Presidential hopeful to not seriously target the youth vote.
But it would be an even larger mistake to simply take their votes for granted.