Hillary’s Defeat Unveils Need for Young Voters
Written by: Matthew Segal
Hillary Clinton could have been the next Democratic nominee – if she had genuinely courted young voters. Mark Penn, her former top adviser, agrees. In a New York Times op-ed piece covering what went wrong, he admitted, “From more aggressively courting young people earlier to mobilizing the full power of women, there are things that could have been done differently.” Unfortunately for Mr. Penn however, this realization came much too late.
Hillary’s campaign recognized her critical mistake in Iowa and at least paid lip service to the idea of targeting younger voters during the New Hampshire primary: “We worked very hard to get young people out in Iowa and didn’t do as well as we should have,” said Clinton spokesman Jay Carson. “So we’re redoubling our efforts here in New Hampshire in hopes of turning out more young people.”
Yet “redoubling” seemed much more like dividing as the primaries and caucuses unfolded. Whereas Obama built a grassroots infrastructure, ubiquitously coordinating “Students for Barack” volunteer chapters on college and university campuses throughout the country, Hillary held a single conference call in conjunction with her “Hillblazers” program. I, along with 800 other young people, was on this call and heard about five hand-picked questions briefly answered before the Senator eventually hung up the phone. The whole event lasted about a half an hour and no future “young voter call” was ever scheduled.
Where Obama held frequent town hall forums with young supporters, rallied constantly on college campuses, sent op-ed pieces to student newspapers and challenged young people to prove the skeptics wrong, Hillary merely sent Chelsea to university lecture halls and thought Ugly Betty’s star, America Ferrera, would be a better ambassador to younger voters than she would. Young voters viewed this as classic political pandering; plus, contrary to conventional wisdom, we prefer substantive policy dialogue over high-fives from a candidate’s celebrity surrogates.
Perhaps most frustrating of all was when my non-profit organization, the Student Association for Voter Empowerment (SAVE), tried assiduously to hold a young voter town hall forum with the Senator Clinton in both Ohio and Pennsylvania.
While both Joe Biden and John Edwards on the democratic side were delighted to participate in forums with us in Iowa and South Carolina, the Clinton campaign was almost impervious to our request. After six weeks of no response to our regular emails, calls, and faxes, we finally broke through to the campaign after we enlisted the help of a U.S. Congresswoman and high profile Clinton. Alas, our request for a young voter dialogue with hundreds of college students was denied for no clear reason in both primary states.
What this unequivocally proves is that the Clinton campaign wrote off young people. Rather than attempting to build a student base, investing more resources in youth outreach, and putting up a hard, energetic fight with Senator Obama for our constituency, the Clinton campaign relied on the demographics they knew they could win (i.e.: older women and working class folks) and prayed mightily that these groups would turn out in high numbers. Clearly, if a candidate wants to win their election, this is not the future of American political campaigning.
The winning candidate will be the one who reaches out to demographics beyond where he or she has a stronghold, will be the one who speaks to groups who they are not historically comfortable speaking with, will be the one who writes off no voter and invests in youthful enthusiasm as an outlet for creating more grassroots energy, volunteer membership, and potential swing votes.
There are currently forty-four million eligible young voters (ages 18-29)—comprising twenty percent of the American electorate. With such a large representation in the electorate, it would seem remiss for any politician not to court us and anomalous for any reporter not to mention us. Yet both happen virtually all the time. If I were an adviser to the McCain campaign, I would urge them to confront this historical misstep and look to Hillary’s young voter error as a source of great wisdom moving forward to November.
