A WIRED election
Why is Trump losing the under-65 vote in Texas? He’s afraid of the future.
If you live in Texas and you’ve never received a letter welcoming you to the AARP, then you probably support Hillary Clinton for president.
That’s the result of a Public Policy Polling (PPP) survey released last week that showed the Democratic candidate leading among Texas voters under the age of 65. Younger voters have traditionally swung Democratic, but Donald Trump’s candidacy is redefining youth up by an entire generation. In comparison, a 2012 PPP survey found that Republican candidate Mitt Romney was losing only Texas voters under 30. So what’s different this year? Political scientists like to say that demographics are destiny, and Texas voters under 45 are about one-quarter Hispanic. That number is only 17 percent for voters over 65, according to the Pew Research Center. Trump hasn’t exactly tried to win over Hispanics, and the variation in population makeup could explain why Texans who aren’t senior citizens have turned against a candidate who only seems to be welcomed into the Hispanic community in the form of a piñata.
Still, it feels like something else is going on besides Trump’s racial rhetoric, insults to women and cozying up with white supremacists. It has to do with policy.
On every issue from energy to trade to education, Trump looks square into the rearview mirror. This can be comforting for older voters who would want to replace a changing world with a faded Kodachrome image of the past. But for students in college, young people looking for jobs, parents wondering what life will hold for their own kids, the future is inevitable whether we like it or not, and the president should be ready to face the challenges of a dynamic globe rather than pretend like they don’t exist. Anyone who isn’t already retired knows that they’re competing not only with the student in the next town or a business on another coast. They’re competing with the entire world — and competition can make us better.
This is the reason why WIRED magazine has made its first-ever endorsement of a presidential candidate — Hillary Clinton.
“Right now we see two possible futures welling up in the present,” Scott Dadich, the editor in chief of the emerging technology magazine, wrote in this month’s issue. “In one, society’s every decision is dominated by scarcity. Except for a few oligarchs, nobody has enough of anything. In that future, we build literal and figurative walls to keep out those who hope to acquire our stuff, while through guile or violence we try to acquire theirs.” That’s Trump’s future. “In the other future, the one WIRED is rooting for, new rounds of innovation allow people to do more with less work — in a way that translates into abundance, broadly enjoyed.” That’s Clinton’s future. It is also the Texas future. While pundits were worrying about scarcity, oil and gas geniuses like George P. Mitchell used fracking to open up a world of oil surplus. Tech companies have found a home in Austin where the brightest minds are working on the next big thing. NASA, SpaceX and Blue Origin all have a foot placed firmly in the Lone Star State as they take steps beyond our planet.
To put it bluntly: What does Texas have to gain from a president who promises to save a dying coal industry when our future is clearly powered by natural gas and renewable energy?
We’re a state that’s not afraid of growth and competition at a time when other places are tied up in red tape. Texas is optimistic about the future. Trump is terrified of it, and no amount of pivoting or new staffers will change that fact.