Young Democrats flocking to Sanders
Millennials like his unpolished approach.
Bernie Sanders is 74. He grew up playing stickball in the streets of Brooklyn and watching a black-andwhite television.
Yet this child of the 1940s, who says Franklin D. Roosevelt is his favorite president, has inspired a potent political movement among young people today. College students wear shaggy white “Bernie” wigs on campus, carry iPhones with his image as their screen saver, and flock to his events by the thousands.
And armies of young voters are turning what seemed like a long-shot presidential candidacy into a surprisingly competitive campaign.
“He may seem like some old geezer who doesn’t care about stuff,” said Caroline Buddin, 24, a sales associate in Charleston, S.C. “But if you actually give him the time of day, and listen to what he has to say, he has a lot of good ideas.”
In interviews, young supporters of the Vermont senator’s presidential bid almost all offer some version of the same response when asked why they like him: He seems sincere.
For the generation that researchers say has been the most bombarded with marketing slogans and advertising pitches, Sanders, a former mayor of Burlington, Vt, has a certain unpolished appeal.
The first group of students working to elect Sanders president sprang up at Middlebury College in Vermont. There are now similar chapters at more than 220 campuses across the country, with the big- gest one at the University of California, Berkeley.
The movement, at least initially, was not so much the result of an organized effort by the Sanders campaign, but more of a visceral response to the candidate himself.
“It seems like he is at the point in his life when he is really saying what he is thinking,” said Olivia Sauer, 18, a college freshman who returned to her hometown, Ames, Iowa, to caucus for Sanders.
“With Hillary,” she said, “sometimes you get this feeling that all of her sentences are owned by someone.”
Young voters’ support for Sanders has created a quandary in Hillary Clinton’s campaign headquarters in Brooklyn, N.Y., where millennial staff members have tried to persuade their peers to back the former secretary of state, using social media platforms like Snapchat and Instagram. On Monday in Iowa, Sanders bested Clinton among voters ages 17-29 by 70 percentage points, greater than the 43-percentage-point margin by which Barack Obama won that age group in Iowa in 2008.
That is true among men and women, and even Clinton called the gap “amazing” during an appearance on CNN on Wednesday.
The day after Clinton, 68, eked out a win over Sanders in Iowa, her campaign held a conference call with prominent Democratic supporters. Several of the officials, who are delegates to the party’s convention, expressed concerns about the campaign’s sometimes awkward attempts to reach young voters, including its reliance on baby boomer celebrities like Jamie Lee Curtis, 57, who have less resonance with the millennial generation.
On the phone call, Marlon Marshall, the director of state campaigns and political engagement, tried to assure the group that the Clinton operation would be using more youthful surrogates, including Clinton’s 35-year-old daughter, Chelsea, and would continue to talk about issues like college affordability.
“I do believe a narrative will continue,” Marshall said. The Sanders campaign, he added, will “keep drumming that.”
Privately, though, Clinton’s supporters say that while being a youth icon has its advantages, the support of middle-aged and older voters is enough for her to capture the nomination.