A theory of why Hillary Clinton struggles with young voters.
Updated by Ezra Klein @ezraklein Oct 3, 2016, 9:10aWhat’s most interesting about the leaked audio of Hillary Clinton assessing the Bernie Sanders movement from February isn’t what she says about Bernie Sanders or his supporters. It’s what she says about herself.
Clinton does not — contrary to Politico’s initial, and quickly deleted, headline — mock Sanders’s supporters or Sanders himself. And before a room of wealthy donors, she doesn’t attack Sanders from the right — she doesn’t argue that she’s the only candidate who will save capitalism, or that a Denmark-style welfare state will crush America’s entrepreneurial grit.
Instead, she offers a theory for why she struggles so much to inspire young voters.
“It is difficult when you’re running to be president, and you understand how hard the job is,” she says in the audio. “I don’t want to overpromise. I don’t want to tell people things that I know we cannot do.”
This, more than anything else, is her critique of Sanders, and her explanation of his success. “There’s just a deep desire to believe that we can have free college, free health care, that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough, and that we just need to, you know, go as far as, you know, Scandinavia, whatever that means, and half the people don’t know what that means, but it’s something that they deeply feel.”
It’s easy to miss what’s new in that comment. Until the last clause, this tracks with Clinton’s public criticism of Sanders almost exactly. She frequently argued that his policies lacked crucial details, that the numbers didn’t add up, that the big dreams were unmoored from clear plans. It’s only in these comments that Clinton admits she understands the real source of the appeal.
People feel “that what we’ve done hasn’t gone far enough,” and even if they’re not sure where a Sanders or a Trump will take the country, they know their vision is to go further, faster, than Clinton is promising, and that matches their sense of what the moment requires.
Her effort to put herself in the shoes of younger millennials winds toward a similar conclusion. “If you’re feeling like you’re consigned to, you know, being a barista, or you know, some other job that doesn’t pay a lot, and doesn’t have some other ladder of opportunity attached to it, then the idea that maybe, just maybe, you could be part of a political revolution is pretty appealing,” she says. “So I think we should all be really understanding of that and should try to do the best we can not to be, you know, a wet blanket on idealism.”
There’s an observation that the Atlantic’s Molly Ball made about Donald Trump that nailed a key part of his appeal: “All the other candidates say ‘Americans are angry, and I understand.’ Trump says, ‘I’M angry.’”
This describes the Clinton-Sanders dynamic, as well. Bernie Sanders says “I want a political revolution!” Hillary Clinton says, in effect, “I understand why young people might want a political revolution.” Clinton is stuck on the outside of youthful idealism looking in.
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http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/10/3/13133874/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-leaked
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