Disillusioned Young Voters a Major Problem for Democratic Party

Young people have long been reliable Democratic voters, but today they do not like the way the party is headed and they’re walking away in droves.

The same thing is happening in the Republican Party but the Republicans’ problem is far less severe than the Democrats’ and so I’ll stick with Democrats for now.

All the polls agree on that the trend is real, and the evidence is clear.  Exact numbers are elusive, but the AP Votecast’s measure is typical.  It shows that voters under 30 years old preferred Democrats by 30 points in the 2018 election, 25 points in 2020, and 12 points last year.

Why is this happening?  For starters, today’s young Democrats plainly do not like Joe Biden.   They feel he’s too old to stay sharp enough to lead the nation for four more years.  After all, he would be 86 years old at the end of his term.  (Donald Trump would be 83 at the end of his but for some reason age hasn’t become an issue for him.)

But even if young Democrats were confident Biden could do the job, they still would not want him.  They feel he does not and cannot speak for them, not for today’s youth.  How could he?  His generation is yesterday.  Plus, for the last 30 years he’s cloistered himself so deeply inside that super-exclusive club called the U.S. Senate, and now the presidency, that he could not  possibly empathize with them.

It’s not that they prefer Donald Trump to Biden.  They don’t necessarily like Trump either.   At this point, it’s just that they are not motivated to support either one.

They would like both men to understand that it is today’s youth who will cope with decisions that are made today, not Biden and Trump and people their age.  Today’s older folks won’t be around to deal with the long-term results of their actions today, so the young voters are shouting at them: Please do your duty and retire now. Get out of the way and let those of us who will live in tomorrow’s world  take charge.

The candidates’ refusals to resign leave the young voters feeling powerless to control their own lives in a world that broadcasts a steady drumbeat of always-getting-worse bad news.  It can lead to hopelessness.

But it goes beyond just who will be president.  Recent surveys also suggest that young Democrats are also growing disillusioned with the party itself.  They feel the party has failed to deliver major legislation on civil rights, income inequality or abortion. They feel the party is disorganized, internally ideologically conflicted, and full of varied ideas about change, but showing little action.

It even goes beyond that.  A Pew survey last summer showed that many young people are so disillusioned with the political system that they’re ready to chuck the whole thing and start over.  Nearly 40 percent of Americans surveyed by Pew said they “wish there were more political parties to choose from in this country,”  and young people were especially in agreement.

Forty-seven percent of the young (30 and under) voters said they wished there were more political parties with viable candidates for elected office in the United States, compared with 23 percent of those 65 and older who said the same.  Young Democratic voters were almost twice as likely to wish for more political parties as were their Republican counterparts.

A major danger is that young people of whatever party will become so disillusioned with the political process that they will quit caring, quit paying attention, and not vote.  Only 27 percent of 30-and-unders voted in the 2020 presidential election, so that says something.  True, young people have never voted in large numbers, but the 2020 presidential election was the most important election in decades.  And only  27 percent voted?  Not good.

Next year’s election will arguably be the most important election in American history because we will be choosing between continuing with a democratic republic or handing it over to a neo-Nazi dictator. If young people give up now, and quit learning and quit voting now, our democracy crumbles.

There is evidence that is happening.  The Way to Win organization’s research in 2022 included a series of focus groups whose leaders reported that not one person could name a signature Democratic accomplishment from the first half of Biden’s presidency beyond his promise to cancel up to $20,000 in student loans.

That is scary.  Biden has accomplished a lot in the last three years, and the young people in those focus groups – and by inference, a lot more — were not aware enough to see any of it.

In the last three years, Biden  has led the federal government into investing in its people more completely than in any era since the 1960s.  He led the way to The American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.  Those initiatives jump-started the U.S. economy after the devastation of the coronavirus pandemic; are rebuilding our roads, bridges, harbors and internet infrastructure; have attracted $200 billion in private investment for chip manufacturing; and have invested billions in addressing the effects of climate change.

Biden led the way to the first meaningful gun violence reduction legislation in 30 years.  He rallied the world to support Ukraine in response to Putin’s aggression.  He issued executive orders protecting women’s reproductive rights and the rights of LGBTQ+ and interracial couples. And so much more.

And those young folks  couldn’t name one of them.

That’s scary and it’s dangerous, because democracy can only work when its citizens pay attention to the world around them – local as well as national and international – and vote.  If  they do not do this – if we do not do this — democracy does not work.  Democracy doesn’t fail us, we fail democracy.

And when we do that we play into the hands of those far-right people who believe that most people don’t know what’s good for them and that makes democracy dangerous. They seem to think that an autocracy is best because it would free us from having to make our own choices,  a “freedom” I would hope no American would want.

But the good news is that crisis creates opportunity.  Remember that Gallup poll recently that said only 32 percent of Americans are paying close attention to what is going on in the world right now?  That means that nearly 7 of every 10 Americans are asleep now, and that plainly includes an outsized number of young people.  It’s up  to those who are aware to awaken those sleeping folks to the reality that the upcoming General Election will decide whether we want to continue our democracy or turn our government over to a fascist dictator.

Fascist!  Nazi!  The words don’t seem to make young peoples’ skin crawl as it does us older people (I’m 84).  We grew up with World War II in our immediate rear-view mirrors, and we lived among those who served in the war.  We reflectively feel those fascist horrors, and today’s young people must feel them too because fascism is on our doorstep.

That is not an exaggeration.  Donald Trump, the person Republicans appear to want for our next president, is openly and accurately walking in the footsteps of Adolf Hitler, the German Nazi Fuhrer who ordered the “extermination” of 6 million Jews and 500,000 gypsies.

Hitler set off the deadliest and most destructive war in human history, a war that claimed somewhere  between 50 million and 85 million lives, or at least 3 percent of the world population, and it displaced tens of million people from their homes.  Nearly 407,300 uniformed Americans gave their lives to keep fascism at bay, and 72,823 more are still missing in action. The war cost America about $5.8 trillion in 2023 dollars, but the human cost is incalculable.

It amazes me that any American would even consider someone who apes that man to be our president.  But even when you add the rest — his multiple felonies, his attempt to deny many Americans their basic right to have their vote counted, the continuing Big Lie, and all the rest – Republicans still want him to be to become our president.  Unthinkable.

Young people may not like either presidential candidate, but the choice is all there is for now.  Prayerfully, they will hold their noses if need be, cast a vote for keeping democracy alive in the United States, and then get to work  grooming someone their own age to become president in 2028.

It’s to their advantage.  It’s their future.  But they’ve got to break out of this apathetic mood they’re in because, as you might recall from The Story of Nations, apathy is the penultimate step in a nation’s spiral into bondage:

From bondage to spiritual faith,
from spiritual faith to great courage,
from great  courage to liberty,
from liberty to abundance,
from abundance to selfishness,
from selfishness to complacency,
from complacency to apathy,
from apathy to dependence,
from dependence to bondage.

Elect Donald Trump and, as America’s Fuhrer, he’ll make us dependent on him, and then suffer bondage under him.

It doesn’t have to be.  Let’s sound the alarms.  Let’s wake up that 70 percent and get them to the polls.

We can win.  We must win.  We will win.