Recent polls show a tightening of the presidential race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. But rather than Trump poaching voters from Clinton, the race is closer now largely because significant segments of voters are choosing to back third (and fourth) party candidates Gary Johnson, a Libertarian, and Jill Stein, of the Green Party. Four-way polls consistently show that these two candidates draw more support away from Clinton than they do from Trump. Interestingly, Johnson and Stein both find high levels of support from millennials, voters age 18 to 29. Clinton's problem with younger voters and the way that she and her supporters respond to it demonstrates a larger problem within the Democratic Party and our society as a whole: the mutually reinforcing contempt between Baby Boomers and millennials.
The Democratic primary contest between Clinton and Bernie Sanders was much closer than Clinton and her allies within party leadership expected thanks in large part to millennial voters' strong preference for Sanders over Clinton. While Clinton eventually won the nomination,1 she has struggled to win the support of those young voters. Even Clinton's vaunted and all important advantage with non-white voters is significantly less pronounced with young minorities. Her message from the primary that she is the most experienced candidate did not register with a generation that has come of age in an era where the consequences of the economic failures of the Baby Boomer generation have fallen hardest on the youngest cohort. Indeed, Clinton's decades of experience may be more of a burden than a boon in her efforts to connect with millennials. Young voters see her as a part of the corrupt political and business establishment that wrecked the economy and housing market just as the millennials began to graduate from college. Her close ties to the finance industry and her penchant for raking in corporate speaking fees do not help matters.2 These sorts of qualities are not appealing to young voters. In a Harvard IOP poll conducted late last year, voters between the ages of 18 and 29 put significantly more value in "integrity", "level-headedness", and "authenticity" than either business or political experience as the most important qualities for a presidential candidate. Simply put, millennials do not trust Hillary Clinton.
Since she clinched the Democratic nomination, Clinton has made some efforts to appeal to young voters. But she has mostly waged her general election campaign under the seeming assumption that millennial voters—who are more progressive than previous generations, dislike Donald Trump much more than they dislike her, and have overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama—will come around eventually. Indeed, if she paid any heed to millennial concerns about her lack of trustworthiness and long standing connections to wealthy elites, she likely would not have spent the better part of the late summer fundraising from those elites at private events. However, these recent poll numbers indicate that Clinton erred in her assumption and millennials are not, in fact, coming around. Clinton's supporters are not happy about this development. But rather than express frustration with their candidate for failing to pay anything other than lip service to the concerns of young voters, Clinton supporters have taken a different tack—one that is generally common among Baby Boomers on a whole number of subjects: blaming the millennials themselves.
A tweet from Mother Jones co-editor Clara Jeffery is representative of the response by older Clinton supporters3 to these recent polls:
Some frustration on the part of Clinton supporters is understandable. Clinton, for all her serious flaws, is nowhere near as bad as the rolling disaster and looming existential threat that is Donald Trump. And Clinton supporters can make the case that their candidate has made a genuine attempt to address millennial concerns with her domestic policy agenda. But this response, in addition to being so obviously condescending, completely misunderstands the situation. Sure Clinton has made some small effort to appease millennials with her genuinely progressive domestic policies. But by continuing to comport herself as the ultimate, experienced insider, she is completely ignoring the central issue of her trustworthiness that is so important to those voters. Also, by assuming that millennials will consolidate behind her now that she is the Democratic nominee overestimates how significant party loyalty is to a generation that generally prefers to eschew the sorts of identifiers and labels that matter so much to Boomers and Generation X. Clinton's overreliance on the threat of Donald Trump's near guarantee of chaos and her championing of herself as the solemn, serious defender of the status quo ignores how badly the status quo has been for young people. Millennials supported Bernie Sanders because he was genuine, trustworthy, and revolutionary. Hillary Clinton has made no effort to be any of those things yet she still expects those same voters to support her. In reality, she is actively pushing young voters toward two candidates even more flawed than she by refusing to take any of young voters' concerns seriouslyi have never hated millennials more https://t.co/q042TC2Lul pic.twitter.com/zHoqYJ2UwO— Clara Jeffery (@ClaraJeffery) September 15, 2016
This follows a typical pattern of interactions between Boomers and millennials on any of a number of subjects. Boomers, by the virtue of antecedence, are in large part responsible for the conditions of the world that the millennials are in the process of inheriting. For a whole host of reasons, the Boomers have been far less than satisfactory in their role in this process. When millennials offer criticism, the Boomers actively ignore the concerns of millennials, belittle them, and complain about how different they are from how the Boomers were at a similar stage in their generational development, all the while refusing to acknowledge their own dramatic failings. It has even led to a laughably terrible journalistic genre known as "Millennial Bashing". This is, essentially, what Clinton, her Boomer supporters, and her campaign surrogates have done throughout the election. And while it is ultimately unlikely to cost her the election, it is at least putting it at risk. It also leads me to wonder if there is a looming generation schism within the Democratic party and progressive politics in general.
One of Clinton's more pathetic attempts to pander to younger voters is her campaign's laughably out of touch use of memes and internet culture.4 Perhaps the meme researchers on her campaign need to familiarize themselves with Old Economy Steven. In this meme, a photo of a teenaged Baby Boomer from the early 1970s is overlaid with, at the top, a typical Boomer complaint about millennials and, at the bottom, some assertion demonstrating either how much easier it was for Boomers when they were young or how badly they have failed the younger generation in the intervening years. It is, as Kevin Roose and Stefan Becket write, a "wry commentary on the way today’s young people struggle with student debt, unemployment, and other recession-era economic concerns, only to be described as lazy and entitled by members of an earlier, luckier generation." It is also the meme that far and away best represents how millennials and Hillary Clinton view each other. Were she to adopt it, it would likely be one of the first times that younger voters could feel that she is being authentic. That honesty alone would not be enough for her to garner their support, but perhaps it would be a first step toward the candidate acknowledging the concerns of a crucial segment of her electorate.
Chris Alarie is Spectacular Editor-in-Chief of Uncanny Valley Magazine.
1 And the endorsement of Senator Sanders.↩
2 Nor does her reluctance to divulge the content of her speeches.↩
3 Born in in 1967, Jeffery is actually right on the cusp between Boomers and Generation X. But her attitude fits squarely within the typical Boomer view of millennials.↩
4 Both Gary Johnson and Jill Stein have made similarly pathetic attempts to glom onto meme culture. Trump, on the other hand, has been adopted by a particular sector of the internet with a love of both frog memes and white nationalism.↩