Hil goes to school
Pushes for support of college students & millenials
HILLARY CLINTON is unveiling her plan to make college more affordable Monday — and sees the proposal as a key part of a strategy to ramp up enthusiasm among millennials about her White House run as students return to campus this fall.
Clinton’s campaign is planning a concerted back-to-school push, using the issue to attract and identify supporters across campuses in the four early-voting states as well as the dozen Super Tuesday states that will vote in early March.
The effort is aimed at galvanizing the younger voters who flocked to President Obama in 2008 and make up a large — and growing — part of the Democratic base. It’s also aimed at closing a buzz gap she’s facing compared with the man who beat her in the primaries eight years ago and potentially with Vice President Biden (below r.), should he decide to run.
According to findings from a recent national Quinnipiac University poll shared with the Daily News, Obama’s job approval rating is solidly in positive territory with voters aged 18-34, while Clinton’s favorability with the same age group is underwater, with 39% viewing her favorably and 46% viewing her unfavorably.
She still beats Jeb Bush, a leading GOP candidate, by a ninepoint margin with millennials in the survey. But Biden — who, despite being five years older than Clinton, is popular with millennials who prize his authenticity — has a 17-point lead over Bush with the young voters, a sign she’s lagging with the key demographic group.
Some Clinton allies privately admit that she lacks the charisma of the current President. And even Obama failed to get younger voters to turn out in 2012 at quite the same levels as he had in his first run. But they argue that many young voters are excited at the prospect of electing the first woman President, and point out that many polls show her winning millennial voters by wider margins than Obama did in 2012.
Clinton’s campaign has been busy finding volunteer leaders on campuses across the country to push their classmates to pledge support and plans to pair Clinton’s big Monday event with a major online push.
“We’ve identified voluntary leads on a lot of the major campuses,” said a Clinton campaign official. “It’s going to go back to old-fashioned clipboards on college campuses — the hook of getting students interested in committing to Hillary Clinton is they share her view on her higher ed plan.”
Clinton’s campaign is holding back on the specifics of the plan, which she will unveil in a speech at a New Hampshire high school on Monday. But the campaign official promises it will be “one of the major policy proposals she puts forward” during her presidential run.
The plan itself, along with Clinton’s call to let people refinance their student loans, is a big part of the economic argument she’s making to the millennial voters born in the 1980s and 1990s.
Clinton allies hope that pairing that policy focus with the strongly liberal social positions she’s taken — embracing gay marriage, immigration reform, the Black Lives Matter movement, and calling out Republicans for questioning the science of climate change — will help her “close the deal” with jaded young voters, as one ally put it.
The generation is already the most liberal in the country both socially and economically, according to polls, and are especially unlikely to vote for Republicans because of social issues. But actually getting them to turn out and vote at all is the real issue — and Clinton, 67, a proud grandmother who’s been in politics since before millennials were born, faces a tough challenge in presenting herself as the candidate of the future as Obama did in 2008.
“The key word is old,” said Claremont McKenna College Prof. Jack Pitney. “Young people have grown up with Hillary Clinton as a major figure. The biggest problem is Hillary Clinton is the status quo and that’s hard to change. ”
Her team believes it can be done.
“Millennials are a group that are generally less engaged politically early on, they are very freethinking in their politics, you have to have a long steady conversation with them and that’s what we’re doing,” Clinton pollster Joel Benenson said during a Wednesday conference call with reporters.