This presidential election features a major rift in the Republican party, as conservatives are threatened by the Donald Trump insurgency. But Democrats have a rift of their own: the under-30 cohort of the party is repudiating old-school, establishment liberalism in favor of the Democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. This does not bode well, says Chris Deaton, for the party moving forward.
From Chris Deaton, The Coming Democratic Rift | The Weekly Standard:
The Democratic party has had its own reckoning this year. The electoral street fight between Donald Trump and conservatives has obscured the fact that young Democrats are choosing a 74-year-old democratic socialist with few elected allies to represent their party’s future. It’s a development that has impeded Hillary Clinton’s push for the presidential nomination, yes — but its true meaning and full consequences are likely to manifest only after the current election has passed.
Sanders has walloped Clinton among the under-30 crowd from the get-go this primary season, racking up more than 70 percent of it through March 15, according to an estimate from Tufts University. That dominance continued Tuesday night in Wisconsin: A CNN exit poll found the Vermont senator capturing 82 percent of 18 to 29 year olds. . . .
The youth movement of Sanders’s campaign has helped him engineer a stronger national challenge to Clinton than was imaginable, but it may not be enough to deny her the Democratic nomination. What it can do is signal that the party has a youth problem moving forward — quite a wonder on the heels of the Obama years.
As Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi wrote, reflecting the sentiments of a twenty-something Sanders backer: “For young voters, the foundational issues of our age have been the Iraq invasion, the financial crisis, free trade, mass incarceration, domestic surveillance, police brutality, debt and income inequality, among others. And to one degree or another, the modern Democratic Party, often including Hillary Clinton personally, has been on the wrong side of virtually all of these issues.”
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How bad are the rifts within the parties? One-fourth of Sanders supporters say they will not support Hillary Clinton, if she gets the nomination. An earlier poll says that one-half of non-Trump Republican primary voters would vote for him if he gets the nomination.
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