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Inspiration by the numbers by @BloggersRUs

Published by Tom Sullivan on August 3, 2019

Inspiration by the numbers
by Tom Sullivan

Any Democrat who wins the White House in 2020 will face tough odds of passing any of the policy proposals promised on the stump. Under-promise and over-deliver is good advice for building credibility in the business world. Politicians do the opposite.

“As far as I can tell, Congress is broken and nothing can fix it other than the Democrats winning 60 or maybe more Senate seats,” Martin Longman wrote this week at Washington Monthly. Not to mention how much in four years Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell will have skewed the courts. The particular details of this candidate’s health care plan or that one’s are not all that relevant in an age of gridlock, Longman warns:

Under these circumstances, every promise a presidential candidate makes that requires Congress to act is likely to be a broken promise. I don’t think it’s a great idea to compile a large record of broken promises. But what really makes no sense is to propose things that are incredibly unpopular with the key groups the Democrats need to win that have no prospect of being enacted. Doing that gets you a general campaign liability and a broken promise if you nevertheless win, and the tradeoff is at best that you excite a segment of the electorate that is going to vote for you anyway, assuming they vote at all. And then you’ll disappoint this group and expect them to show up for the first midterm election.

First, you’ve got to get them to show up in 2020.

Simon Rosenberg presents a case at Medium for why voters under 45 will increasingly turn towards Democrats. Someone born in 1974 saw exploding deficits and the first Iraq way during the Reagan-Bush years, followed by budget surpluses and the growth of the Internet under Bill Clinton, followed by 9/11, a second Iraq war and financial collapse under Bush II, followed by the election of Barack Obama and an improving economy and Obamacare, followed by a white-nationalist backlash, Donald J. Trump, plus “trillions in tax cuts to those who needed it the least, threatening health care for tens of millions, subjecting women and kids to inhumane conditions at the border, and tearing at the country’s broader social fabric though his relentless attacks on women and people of color.” Rosenberg elides a few details along the way, but he’s rolling.

His main argument is the lived experience of younger Americans among a more diverse population seeking greater equality orients them towards Democrats:

Not surprisingly, all of this has led to what is becoming a truly consequential divide in American politics — voters under 45 have become overwhelmingly Democratic. While these voters had been trending more Democratic in recent years, in 2018 there was an unprecedented and consequential shift among them. In the elections from 2000 to 2016, the Democrats beat the Republicans among under 45s by an average of 6 points, with Republicans even besting the Dems in 2000, 2002, and 2004. In the 2010 and 2014 midterms, the Dem margin was just 2 and 5 points, and in the 2016 general election it was 14 points. In 2018, however, the Democratic advantage in this group exploded to 25 points, 58–33. Over 45s were 50–49 for the Republicans, so these younger Americans were responsible for the entire margin in the Democratic 9 point win last year.

The future is Democratic and under-45, Rosenberg argues, if Democrats will just orient campaigns towards engaging those voters and turning them out. There’s the rub.

Arrayed against them is a cynical Republican Party that saw this trend first. Republicans have devoted considerable resources to retooling what used to be a more or less democratic process to one that secures them in power with minority support. Not to mention, they have spent decades undermining confidence in elections and in turning voters against government itself. Former Republican Congressional staffer Mike Lofgren described the strategy in 2011:

A couple of years ago, a Republican committee staff director told me candidly (and proudly) what the method was to all this obstruction and disruption. Should Republicans succeed in obstructing the Senate from doing its job, it would further lower Congress’s generic favorability rating among the American people. By sabotaging the reputation of an institution of government, the party that is programmatically against government would come out the relative winner.

Republicans employ a similar strategy in passing vote suppression measures. They will hurt Republican voters too, primarily Republican women. The G.O.P. is playing percentages. Harming their own voters is fine so long as the net effect is they hurt Democrats more. Their own voters are acceptable casualties.

The cynicism engendered by all this is palpable among younger voters. Percentage-wise, turnout spiked among younger voters in 2018. Still, older voters run the show.

I created the chart at the top last fall to track early turnout in North Carolina by age against population. (You’ve seen it before and will likely see versions again.) Might under-45 Americans participate more if they saw they have the demographic clout to make the changes they seek? Chicken-and-egg: Do people under 45 vote less because they think voting won’t change anything, or does nothing change because they don’t vote? North Carolina is not atypical. They have the numbers to take charge. They just have to exercise the power they already have.

Yes, Democrats need to offer younger Americans more reason to participate. But the greater reason they should vote is because they can wrest control from those now wrecking their futures if they do. And maybe not just save this country, but make it one worth saving. A 29 year-old Latina from the Bronx challenged the status-quo last year and took a congressional seat from the older white guy from the local Democratic machine. Now she holds power. Here’s hoping her peers find inspiration there. They might even flip a few Senate seats and prevent another Brett Kavanaugh.

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