Patrick Henningsen 
21st Century Wire
What’s up with the millennials? The Clinton campaign may have felt a jolt after seeing the front page headline from this morning’s Wall Street Journal which read, “Millennials Have Cooled on Hillary Clinton, Forcing a Campaign Reset.“
Traditionally, the 21 to 35 year old age bracket (born 1980-1993 in our epoch) has been a bastion of the Democratic Party. According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, Hillary Clinton’s lead over Republican Donald J. Trump among under 35’s plummeted in the month of August from 25 points… down to only 5 points. Pretty shocking, but even more so in a week that has seen a Hillary health scare, resulting in Trump surging ahead of Clinton in multiple national polls, and also in perennially pivotal electoral patches like Florida and Ohio.
So what’s up? Why can’t Hillary chill with the millennials, like Barack once did?
Back when she was battling Bernie Sanders in the primaries, Clinton pulled out all the stops for the millennials – even promising America’s students a “debt free” college experience including free university tuition. Somehow, Hillary’s sizzle has failed to produce the Bern with this crucial demographic. As much as they would love for it to be true, even the most optimistic of students knows that free tuition for all is nothing more than pie in the sky, with some left feeling patronized in a way that voters have come to expect from desperate politicians making increasingly desperate promises on the campaign trail these days. What’s really being overlooked by Democrat Party elites here though, is the uncomfortable truth that the old party ways simply aren’t working anymore, and the Clinton campaign is not viewed as transformative (as Colin Powell calls it) and thus, millennials are finding it difficult to get behind it.
So if they are no longer with Hillary, where are they going? Definitely not to the GOP. Trump is a non-starter when it comes to millennials, many of which are already registered Democrats. No offense to Trump supporters, but that’s just the way it is – there’s simply not enough young deplorable jugend to go around. Both Trump and Clinton are two of the oldest potential president elects ever to face off in a general election, at 70, 69 yrs old respectively. Instead, a sizeable number of young swing(ing) voters are flocking to Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson, who is currently polling at around 9% nationally, and also to Green Party candidate Jill Stein who is polling around 4%.
One aspect worth noting here is that, unlike their generational predecessors, 21st century millennials are not afraid to take a risk on what they might view as a “political start-up” like the Libertarian or Green party. While traditional two-party system dinosaurs dream of squeezing rich donors at fundraising dinners, millennials dream of Podemos and crowdfunding the next revolution. But digital Jerusalem is still a ways off, and here is where idealism inevitably clashes with hard-core political reality: with the Trump-Clinton race in a near dead heat, millennials who have migrated into those alternative Johnson and Stein camps will indirectly decide the 2016 Election in much the same way that Independent candidate Ralph Nader did in 2000 and to a lesser extent in 2004, although it’s not so easy to calculate between Clinton and Trump exactly who will be the chief beneficiary from that alternative displacement vote.
CHILLERY: Clinton is struggling to excite the millennial voters (Illustration: TrumpNews)
There is another spanner in the Democratic machine which no one is talking about, and one which could certainly hurt Hillary Clinton, and help Donald Trump on November 8th. One pronounced crimp in the Clinton juggernaut came as a result of the Wikileaks’ DNC email leaks which revealed how, in its effort to shoe-in Clinton ahead of this past summer’s party convention, the Democratic Party conspired to railroad the Bernie Sanders campaign – effectively killing its mercurial millennial phenomenon. Old party hacks might not understand why this is so important because they are so wrapped up in time-honored Tammany Hall traditions, but to young idealistic millennials, this party betrayal would not only be viewed as unfair, but also as undemocratic, and rightly so. As a result, a nationwide write-in campaign for Sanders as President has begun to pick up steam. If this pulls in 2%, or even 1% – away from Hillary’s tally, especially in the key ‘battleground’ states like Pennsylvania, Arizona or Michigan, then the race becomes even tighter still, and more unpredictable.
This excerpt from the Reason report (below) should be the most sobering of all for Democrats, and it reveals the source of their fatal disconnect:
A Reason-Rupe poll of millennials in 2014 found 66 percent of them believing government was wasteful and inefficient even as many said they planned to vote Democrat in that year and in 2016. The drop off in support for Democrats is unsurprising, given that the rhetoric about government that Democrats deploy does not match the reality on the ground.
In other word: the Democrats are as addicted to lying as any other political organization, and this cannot be fixed – it’s an institutional thing.
In order to shore-up the millennial gap, the Democratic Party has dispatched its cohort of ‘rock stars’ to college campuses across the country in order to woo millennials. Michelle Obama, Elizabeth Warren, and even Sanders (how Bernie could go out stumping after the DNC Leaks is pretty amazing in itself) have been sent like missionaries to the four corners of the country, in order to try and win back those millions of lost liberal souls, and lead them back into the party flock.
To millennials, Bernie Sanders’ primary election loss dashed their hopes in much the same way Ron Paul supporters felt in 2012 – betrayed by a collusion between party mob bosses and the mainstream media. In both cases, aside from the obvious corruption, what was really dashed was the idealistic view that their generation had a real and meaningful stake in US politics and could even elevate its own candidate in a national election. Millions of previously disengaged voters finally found an original voice that resonated with their generation, and to see that voice crushed by political insiders and media operatives is a bitter pill to swallow. In America’s winner-take-all system of Presidential elections, there is only room for one party winner – a reality which will continue to frustrate young voters going forward, many of whom are well aware of parliamentary systems in other nation states, and systems which appear to allow more plurality when it comes to choosing a viable political leader. Like it or not, managing those ‘global’ expectations in terms of party and leadership choice is a reality that America will have to contend with in the future.
With so many ‘free radicals’ still orbiting this election, it will be tricky to project a clear winner. Shades of 2000 perhaps, but this year there will be no hanging chads, but maybe something worse. Half the voters will be blaming either Obama (vote rigging), or Putin (vote hacking), as a reaction to any perceived electoral stitch-up (see #HashTagHell).
It’s a tricky year for the bookies, but one thing you can bet on is a serious fall-out after election day. So brace yourself, because in case you haven’t noticed, many Americans are viewing this election as a true ‘do or die’ moment.
In a United States already polarized along very pronounced partisan lines, whichever the result, one side will be baying for blood. That’s just the way it is this year.
Author Patrick Henningsen is journalist and geopolitical analyst for 21WIRE and host of the SUNDAY WIRE weekly radio show and also ON THE QT [email protected].
Here’s more useful analysis on the 2016 ‘millennial dynamic’ from Ed Krayewski at Reason…
A number of new polls show Libertarian presidential nominee Gary Johnson doing very well with millennials and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton underperforming with the same demographic that helped President Obama build winning coalitions in 2008 and 2012.
A New York Times/CBS poll shows 26 percent of voters under the age of 29 supporting Johnson and a further 10 percent supporting Green presidential nominee Jill Stein. Similarly, a Quinnipiac poll shows Johnson at 29 percent of young voters, and Stein at 15. In that poll, Clinton barely edges out Johnson among young voters, getting 31 percent. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is at 26 percent among that demographic in the poll. Further, a Global Strategy Group poll of millennials in 11 battleground states found 73 percent of millennials saying that Trump was a racist, and just 38 percent supporting Clinton in a 4-way matchup.
The results have yielded unsurprising hand-wringing from older liberals who feel the vote of millennials belongs to them. Clara Jeffrey, editor-in-chief of Mother Jones, tweeted that she has “never hated millennials more” in response to the NYT/CBS poll, which earned refreshing responses from millennials…
READ MORE ELECTION NEWS AT: 21st Century Wire 2016 Files
