Young people voting overwhelmingly for Democrats is a foregone conclusion, but Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden appears to be struggling to capture the youth vote.
Biden served as vice president for President Barack Obama, whose commandment of the youth vote was pivotal to his wins in 2008 and 2012. Hillary Clinton, too, won the youth vote in 2016, allowing her to win the popular vote while still losing the Electoral College.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has had a lock on the youth vote, since public schools gloss over or ignore the horrors of socialism and communism, allowing the Vermont senator’s message of utopia to sound appealing. Now that Biden is the de facto Democratic nominee, he will have to work hard to get young voters to support him, as the Washington Examiner (my former employer) reported.
“During the Democratic primary, young voters across the country flocked to Sen. Bernie Sanders, even in states that overwhelmingly voted for Biden. In Alabama and South Carolina, where Biden won 63% and 49% of the vote, exit polls showed he still lost voters under the age of 30 by a double-digit margin,” the outlet reported.
Clinton, the Examiner reported, was able to woo young voters by the time she clinched the nomination. Just before the 2016 general election, Clinton had a 21-point lead over Donald Trump among voters aged 18-35 and she won those voters in the general by 19 points. The general is still far away, but it looks like Biden hasn’t captured youth enthusiasm.
More from the Examiner:
His first problem is they didn’t show up en masse in 2020, not even for Sanders. A study by The Harvard Institute of Politics found that youth turnout was either down or flat in eight of the first 12 primary contests, including in crucial swing states such as New Hampshire and North Carolina. This happened even though Sanders’s campaign designed its message and platform to cater to young progressives across the country.
Democratic insiders have been sounding the alarm about Biden’s trouble with young voters since March, telling NBC News that it reminded them of Hillary Clinton. That problem hasn’t gone away, even as he’s become the presumptive nominee. Recent polls conducted by Fox News, Monmouth, CNN, Quinnipiac, Selzer, and ABC/Washington Post found that Biden leads President Trump with voters under 35 by an average of just 12 points, 49% to 37%.
Sanders supporters also aren’t giving an indication they’d be willing to vote for Biden now that he’s basically the nominee (he won’t be official until the Democratic National Convention).
“Further complicating the situation for Biden is that a large portion of Sanders’s voters still show no signs of warming up to Biden. A Morning Consult poll taken on April 7 found that a plurality of Sanders supporters under the age of 35 held an unfavorable view of Biden. A recent ABC/Washington Post poll found that 15% of Sanders supporters plan on voting for Trump in the general election. Many more are saying that they are undecided or might not end up voting at all. That poll was conducted before Trump announced he was waiving student loans for at least six months but possibly through the end of the year, a significant issue for young voters. There are even rumors that Trump may go forward with some form of student loan forgiveness,” the Examiner reported.
Biden is already in a difficult position due to the coronavirus lockdown. Trump is holding daily press briefings about the virus, while Biden has been forced out of the spotlight and losing valuable campaign time.