Really, young voters? You want to teach Democrats a lesson?

I almost spit out my Geritol the other day when I read what one young voter in Philadelphia told NBC News about why she is disillusioned about the presidential election.

“I don’t think the presidency has too much of an effect on what happens in my day-today life,” said Pru Carmichael, who supported Joe Biden in 2020 but says she will not vote for president at all this year if she has to choose between Biden and former President Donald Trump.

Seriously?

Maybe she believes she will never have an unintended, unwanted pregnancy.

But how can she not appreciate the profound changes the Trump presidency inflicted on this country? Had there been no President Trump, there would be no ultraconservative majority on the Supreme Court, no Dobbs decision overturning nearly half a century of reproductive rights, no outright abortion bans in 13 states.

In 2020, the youngest American voters were squarely in Biden’s corner. According to exit polls, 65% of those 18 to 24 years old chose him, the largest percentage of any age group. And yet, if recent national polls are to be believed, voters up to age 34 have grown disenchanted with the president.

Listen to what younger voters told NBC News they’re upset about: the country’s slow pace on reversing climate change, Biden’s failure to fully cancel student loan debt, his inability to federally codify the right to abortion and, perhaps most starkly, his handling of Israel’s war against Hamas.

“I mean, he made a lot of really big promises in his campaign, and virtually none of them were followed through on,” one poll respondent, Austin Kapp, 25, of Colorado, told NBC News.

Well, hey. The president doesn’t operate in a vacuum.

He did try to cancel student loan debt, and managed to erase nearly $132 billion of it, but the Supreme Court’s rightwing majority blocked his plan to cancel so much more.

He did try to codify Roe but was unable to marshal the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster by Senate Republicans.

And what has Trump been doing about abortion, besides taking credit for the overturning of Roe vs. Wade? He’s urging Republicans to mislead voters: “To win in 2024, Republicans must learn how to properly talk about abortion,” he told a group of Iowa supporters in September. “This issue cost us unnecessarily but dearly in the midterms.”

As for the Middle East crisis, even if you agree that Biden’s handling of the situation has been uneven, why would anyone think Trump, an outspoken supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, would handle it better. In an interview with Univision in November, he said that Israel needed to “do a better job of public relations, frankly, because the other side is beating them at the public relations front.”

He also has pledged to “revoke the student visas of radical anti-american and antisemitic foreigners at our colleges.

“A Republican getting elected isn’t the end. It is the beginning of a much larger fight,” a 23-year-old Wisconsin Starbucks worker and union organizer who is considering withholding his vote from Biden told NBC News. “I want to show the Democratic Party as a young person that you still need to earn our vote and if you don’t, the consequences will be your career.”

Teach Democrats a lesson by electing a democracy-destroying authoritarian?

My mother used to call that cutting off your nose to spite your face.