Of the various fronts on which the Democratic Party is current failing or flailing, the massive drop-off in enthusiasm among young voters contends to be the single most frustrating. As Ron Brownstein recounts at CNN, the votes of Generation Z and Millennial voters were crucial to Democratic victories in 2018 and 2020; yet President Biden’s current job approval rating among the 18-34 age range is a paltry 40%, boding disastrous knock-on effects for congressional Democrats in November. Current Democratic difficulties with these younger voters aren’t just a matter of neglecting to court a specialized constituency, but point to broader failures of strategy and mindset currently plaguing the Democrats, and that affect their ability to attract and energize a broad array of potential voters beyond these rising generations.
I’ve written a lot about the GOP’s descent into authoritarianism and its right-wing war on democracy, but in important ways, such Republican animus is directed in particular at younger voters, who collectively are more likely to be disenfranchised by racist voter laws, impacted by its war on abortion rights, afflicted by the results of the GOP’s anti-environmental policies, and disempowered by Republican effort to make white Christian nationalism the rule of the realm. The demographic changes so central to fueling the right-wing backlash are due primarily to the diversity of American’s younger generations, not just in terms of racial diversity but also as measured by trends like diminished religious affiliation and more diverse sexual identity. In this respect, we can, without much exaggeration, say that the GOP is not simply opposed to democracy, but to the American future itself.
Yet, over the first year and change of the Biden administration, younger voters’ support for the president and his party have slipped precipitously. Observers point to two major causes — the failure of Biden and Democrats to deliver on campaign promises that rallied them to the polls in 2020, and the absence of Donald Trump from the political scene to incentivize their political participation. What both have in common is that their solutions are at least to some degree within Democrats’ power to effect — if they can bother to do so.
You can criticize Joe Biden for the specific political strategies he’s embraced to try to pass his legislative agenda — wasting months of valuable time in a futile quest for bipartisan cooperation on his Build Back Better legislation, underestimating the coal baron cunning of Senator Joe Manchin — but he has at least tried to move forward legislation that would address the interests of younger voters. From free community college to green energy spending, campaign promises weren’t ignored — but they did run into the wood-chipper of extremely narrow Democratic majorities. From this, one truism of a conclusion can be drawn — if Democrats are to pass progressive legislation that appeals to and serves younger voters, they will need to elect additional progressive Democrats to both the House and Senate.
But to do so, at a time when the Democrats already control both houses as well as the presidency, would require more than being upfront and honest with younger voters about the political realities of a narrowly-controlled Congress, and the need to increase Democratic majorities in November. After all, reliance on this strategy alone would require a leap of faith among citizens who can’t realistically be expected to easily forgive Democrats for not passing high-priority legislation, when they hear every day from the media the basic truth that the Democrats control Congress and the presidency. This means that in order to increase their majorities, Democrats also need to turn up the fire and brimstone against their Republican opposition, and to communicate to voters — particularly disaffected Gen Z and Millennial members — the retrograde and punitive policies that the GOP is already passing around the country at the state level, and will attempt to pass through Congress should it gain control. Without substantive legislative accomplishments to run on, the Democrats must communicate to younger voters that the Republican Party is a white supremacist, authoritarian, Christian nationalist political organization whose end goal is to ensure that this rising generation of Americans are shut out of political power and subject to whatever punitive, exploitative legislation the GOP cares to pass. If Donald Trump is no longer on the ballot to motivate young voters, then Democrats must do everything to remind them that the poison of Trump has now seeped into the very marrow of the Republican Party.
Of course, this course of action — a scorched-earth campaign against the GOP — runs directly against Biden administration appeals to bipartisanship that arguably form a core part of Joe Biden’s self-constructed political identity. They also run counter to a basic Democratic reluctance to fully confront the GOP, which is in turn rooted in the gerontocratic nature of the Democratic leadership, a fear of such a strategy backfiring, and a wish to promote an image of the Democrats as a moderate, reasonable party. Yet, without telling the truth about the GOP, Democrats will continue to be unable to communicate a coherent narrative about American politics that's essential to attracting and retaining young voters. Without talking about the radicalization of the GOP, it instead looks like the major problem with American politics is Democratic infighting, rather than the Republican project to deny younger Americans the right to the ballot, to health care, to abortion, to a healthy environment, or to a livable minimum wage.
The key here is that there’s a direct line to be drawn between GOP radicalization and the Democrats’ support for young voters’ interests. The Republican Party has gone authoritarian not simply because younger Americans are transforming the country into a multiracial, religiously diverse nation in a way that is rippling across the country’s cultural fabric, but also because younger voters have already made their political impact felt by giving the majority of their votes to Democrats in the last several election cycles, pushing them into the majority in Congress in 2018 and 2020 and ensuring Joe Biden’s election. In other words, the GOP’s radicalization is due in no small part to the fact that younger generation have already begun to assert their growing power through the Democratic Party.
Also remember: Gen Z and Millennial voters haven’t been voting for Democrats due to some arbitrary and iron political law that says young people simply must vote for Democrats. Rather, these cohorts have favored Democrats because the party’s policies and politics appeal to them more than the GOP for substantive reasons; for instance, a party that supports raising the minimum wage and equality for gay Americans will attract the votes of young workers in entry-level jobs and rising generations who lack the bigotry of their parents.
But the crisis point the Democrats have reached is that young voters, like any voters in a democracy, expect something basic in return for their votes — they expect the party they voted for to actually represent them. Right now, in failing to pass the basic economic and social legislation that President Biden promised, the Democrats are failing to serve the young voters who put them in office, and it is reasonable for those voters to feel disappointment. A healthy democratic political system requires a party to effectively represent its constituents. This again brings us to the basic point that Democrats must communicate a coherent, truthful story about the nature of America politics — not only by acknowledging the conflicts and cross-pressures in the Democratic Party that have led to disappointing results in terms of recent legislation, but also by discussing the larger conflict between a reactionary right-wing movement embodied by the GOP and an increasingly diverse and politically progressive American majority centered in the Democratic Party.
As the GOP gerrymanders and voter-suppresses its way into securing minoritarian power against a Democratic-leaning majority in the United States, it’s fair to say that any Democratic failure to stop this authoritarian menace is not just bad for anyone who actually believes in American democracy, but would also be, quite specifically, a failure to protect the interests of Gen Z and Millennial voters who are most directly targeted by both voter suppression and the specific laws — anti-gay, anti-woman, anti-worker — that the GOP would then be in a position to pass. Of course, this isn’t any sort of theoretical situation — it is already happening, from the “don’t say gay” law recently passed in Florida to Texas’ bounty on pregnant women (who will mostly be Gen Z and Millennials) that have stripped millions of them of their basic rights. In this sense, the Democrats have already failed their young voters — which makes it all the more important to alert these cohorts to the danger posed by the GOP, as part of a strategy of gaining their votes and defeating this anti-democratic, reactionary onslaught.