Credit Illustration by Tom Bachtell
Last month’s Presidential debate, at Hofstra University, on Long Island, the first between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, was promoted more like a Mayweather-Pacquiao title bout than like a traditional ritual of the election cycle. In the end, Clinton’s performance was not only a win but enough of a knockout to resurrect the feeling that this election should not be close. One candidate displayed poise, intellect, and preparation, while the other rambled, made faces, and quibbled about whether he’d referred to Miss Universe as “Miss Piggy.” But, just five weeks before the election, the race remains close. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them having to do with millennial voters, a demographic that overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama and has shown some allegiance toward Clinton but not much enthusiasm for her. Two days after the debate, in a move intended to shore up her standing among those voters, Clinton appeared alongside Senator Bernie Sanders, at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.
In fact, a week before the debate, Clinton delivered what was billed as a “millennial” speech at Temple University, in Philadelphia—her most direct appeal yet to that group. Her comments about the cost of education (and her agreement with Sanders on the issue) and her denunciation of Trump’s birtherism were well received. She got sustained applause when, without hedging, she called Trump’s record racist. The decision to use the word more than once in the debate, and to keep hammering that point, can only have been encouraged by the response from the students in Philadelphia.
According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Clinton holds a lead of just sixteen points over Trump among younger voters. That gap narrows to twelve per cent when Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are included. (In a Times/CBS poll, more than a third of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine said that they will vote for a third-party candidate.) The first time many millennials voted, they elected the first African-American President. As Zach Galifianakis pointed out two weeks ago, during an appearance by Clinton on “Between Two Ferns,” this means that, remarkably, in 2016 many young people will be voting for a white Presidential candidate for the first time. Clinton offers those voters the chance to make history again, by electing a female President. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, sixty-six per cent of people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine believe that Trump is biased against women and minorities. A Quinnipiac poll places that number at seventy-three per cent.
Even so, the idealism seems muted this time around. A possible explanation is that young voters simply reflect the broader dynamic of American partisanship. The Republican and Democratic standard-bearers, no matter their relative qualifications, assets, and quirks, are only modestly more important than voters’ basic partisan affiliations. In this scheme, democracy looks something like a long-running Broadway musical, in which the production and the choreography are bigger draws than the particulars of the cast. This helps explain how Donald Trump, whose long public record shows scant trace of religious adherence, has consolidated the support of a majority of evangelical voters. One may walk by faith, not by sight—and apparently vote that way as well.
Other explanations for Clinton’s difficulties are more specific to her. She has spoken self-effacingly about the fact that she is not a “natural politician.” As she told the students at Temple, “I will never be the showman my opponent is, and you know what? That’s O.K. with me.” A larger concern is rooted in Clinton’s own long career. The journalist Jonathan Rauch has noted that candidates typically have fourteen years from the time they are elected to a major public office—the Senate, a governorship—to achieve the Presidency. Beyond that, a sort of expiration date is reached, owing, at least in part, to the fact that the longer one’s résumé the more likely it is that one will be whipsawed by past positions and changing values. Hillary Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, but she has been a national political figure since 1992, and that time line could be pushed back to 1978, when Bill Clinton was first elected governor of Arkansas.
President Obama has said that Hillary Clinton’s record as First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State makes her the most qualified Presidential candidate ever—but it also means that she represents the sort of institutional power that young voters distrust. It’s a can’t-win-for-losing paradox, considering that a central struggle for women of Clinton’s generation has been to gain access to that same institutional power. Clinton has accrued a great deal of baggage in four decades of public life in large part because it has taken a woman so many years to get to this point in the first place.
A similar dynamic afflicts Clinton’s support among African-Americans. Black Lives Matter activists have repeatedly criticized her for her support of her husband’s 1994 crime bill and for a speech she made, in 1996, in which she talked about “super predators”—a term that, in the context of the time, was used to refer to some black and Latino youths in American cities—and the need to bring them “to heel.” Those were disturbing comments, and she has apologized for them. Nevertheless, Trump disingenuously seized on them in the debate, and added, “I think that I’ve developed very, very good relationships over the last little while with the African-American community.” Hardly, but then Trump’s outreach to blacks is concerned less with winning their votes than with dampening their enthusiasm for Clinton, in order to diminish turnout.
In the past few months, the media have drawn an abundance of false equivalencies between Clinton and Trump. The polls point to a similar tendency among millennials, across lines of race. If not exactly a false equivalency, it is perhaps a false vicinity: the belief that Trump’s unmitigated bigotry is just a few degrees removed from Clinton’s history of establishment ties and nineties-era centrism. Maybe the debate will have shown them that the two candidates could scarcely be farther apart. ♦
Last month’s Presidential debate, at Hofstra University, on Long Island, the first between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, was promoted more like a Mayweather-Pacquiao title bout than like a traditional ritual of the election cycle. In the end, Clinton’s performance was not only a win but enough of a knockout to resurrect the feeling that this election should not be close. One candidate displayed poise, intellect, and preparation, while the other rambled, made faces, and quibbled about whether he’d referred to Miss Universe as “Miss Piggy.” But, just five weeks before the election, the race remains close. There are a number of reasons for this, one of them having to do with millennial voters, a demographic that overwhelmingly supported Barack Obama and has shown some allegiance toward Clinton but not much enthusiasm for her. Two days after the debate, in a move intended to shore up her standing among those voters, Clinton appeared alongside Senator Bernie Sanders, at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham.
In fact, a week before the debate, Clinton delivered what was billed as a “millennial” speech at Temple University, in Philadelphia—her most direct appeal yet to that group. Her comments about the cost of education (and her agreement with Sanders on the issue) and her denunciation of Trump’s birtherism were well received. She got sustained applause when, without hedging, she called Trump’s record racist. The decision to use the word more than once in the debate, and to keep hammering that point, can only have been encouraged by the response from the students in Philadelphia.
According to an NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, Clinton holds a lead of just sixteen points over Trump among younger voters. That gap narrows to twelve per cent when Gary Johnson and Jill Stein are included. (In a Times/CBS poll, more than a third of voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine said that they will vote for a third-party candidate.) The first time many millennials voted, they elected the first African-American President. As Zach Galifianakis pointed out two weeks ago, during an appearance by Clinton on “Between Two Ferns,” this means that, remarkably, in 2016 many young people will be voting for a white Presidential candidate for the first time. Clinton offers those voters the chance to make history again, by electing a female President. According to a Washington Post/ABC News poll, sixty-six per cent of people between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine believe that Trump is biased against women and minorities. A Quinnipiac poll places that number at seventy-three per cent.
Even so, the idealism seems muted this time around. A possible explanation is that young voters simply reflect the broader dynamic of American partisanship. The Republican and Democratic standard-bearers, no matter their relative qualifications, assets, and quirks, are only modestly more important than voters’ basic partisan affiliations. In this scheme, democracy looks something like a long-running Broadway musical, in which the production and the choreography are bigger draws than the particulars of the cast. This helps explain how Donald Trump, whose long public record shows scant trace of religious adherence, has consolidated the support of a majority of evangelical voters. One may walk by faith, not by sight—and apparently vote that way as well.
Other explanations for Clinton’s difficulties are more specific to her. She has spoken self-effacingly about the fact that she is not a “natural politician.” As she told the students at Temple, “I will never be the showman my opponent is, and you know what? That’s O.K. with me.” A larger concern is rooted in Clinton’s own long career. The journalist Jonathan Rauch has noted that candidates typically have fourteen years from the time they are elected to a major public office—the Senate, a governorship—to achieve the Presidency. Beyond that, a sort of expiration date is reached, owing, at least in part, to the fact that the longer one’s résumé the more likely it is that one will be whipsawed by past positions and changing values. Hillary Clinton was elected to the Senate in 2000, but she has been a national political figure since 1992, and that time line could be pushed back to 1978, when Bill Clinton was first elected governor of Arkansas.
President Obama has said that Hillary Clinton’s record as First Lady, senator, and Secretary of State makes her the most qualified Presidential candidate ever—but it also means that she represents the sort of institutional power that young voters distrust. It’s a can’t-win-for-losing paradox, considering that a central struggle for women of Clinton’s generation has been to gain access to that same institutional power. Clinton has accrued a great deal of baggage in four decades of public life in large part because it has taken a woman so many years to get to this point in the first place.
A similar dynamic afflicts Clinton’s support among African-Americans. Black Lives Matter activists have repeatedly criticized her for her support of her husband’s 1994 crime bill and for a speech she made, in 1996, in which she talked about “super predators”—a term that, in the context of the time, was used to refer to some black and Latino youths in American cities—and the need to bring them “to heel.” Those were disturbing comments, and she has apologized for them. Nevertheless, Trump disingenuously seized on them in the debate, and added, “I think that I’ve developed very, very good relationships over the last little while with the African-American community.” Hardly, but then Trump’s outreach to blacks is concerned less with winning their votes than with dampening their enthusiasm for Clinton, in order to diminish turnout.
In the past few months, the media have drawn an abundance of false equivalencies between Clinton and Trump. The polls point to a similar tendency among millennials, across lines of race. If not exactly a false equivalency, it is perhaps a false vicinity: the belief that Trump’s unmitigated bigotry is just a few degrees removed from Clinton’s history of establishment ties and nineties-era centrism. Maybe the debate will have shown them that the two candidates could scarcely be farther apart. ♦
